Back in 2024 I bought the fastest, most expensive card I ever had (~500EUR), it started crashing last summer and memory was idling at 70*C. It got better during the winter, but recently (before my motherboard died) it got worse.
Never had to replace thermopads before (even on 10 year-old cards they usually were fine), so I'd appreciate any tips.
I'm currently assembling a new workstation, thanks to friends ( @BluRaf, @TadeusTaD, @Remiberry, Dragoon Aethis (is gone) (npub10hk…28x2) ) I was able to afford an LGA1700 DDR4 motherboard (there's no way I'm buying DDR5 in current market conditions even if it costs a fair bit of performance) and i9-14900K which will also be ~50% faster than Erying with ES i9-11980HK that... disintegrated.
Over the past 2 weeks I tested all components from my (dead) workstation, with following results:
- Heatsink: Bent in shipping (thanks LaPoste), will use a publicly-accessible vice in OBI to strengthen it. It should be able to handle this CPU.
- Seasonic 620W: Works perfectly, dusted it off and swapped a new fan in
- 32GB of DDR4 I bought back in 2023: Works without XMP enabled, but instability at 3200MHz might be caused by either bad board design or heatwave.
- SSDs/HDDs: Perfectly fine, I got all of my data uncorrupted.
- GPU (Sapphire RX7800XT Pulse): Overheats even at idle (bad fan profile), fan control doesn't work (even though it was supposed to). Opened it up to find completely dry thermal paste and thermopads crumbling if touched.
Measuring current pads (obviously squished) with calipers gave me following results:
- Backplate -> PCB (above VRAM): 3mm
- VRAM -> heatsink: 1.8mm
- VRM: 2mm
Should I just order the same thickness, or do they have to be slightly thicker (since heatsink should compress them)?
Thanks!
