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Due to the lack of affordable GPUs i had to pull out an old RX 480 graphics card from an old PC and put it to active use.
Turns out, it severely degraded with age (worked for 3 years straight, then spent a year turned off, then spent some more time on light work), to the point where it would stall under any significant load. When i say “stall”, i mean “video signal stops coming out to the display, the card’s fans get stuck at their current speed, the PC stops responding to my input, and pressing reset is not sufficient to make it work again – it needs a full power cycle”.
Now, i'm somewhat experienced in undervolting and underclocking, so i went ahead and tried that to rein in the problem. No dice. In the end the only way i could make it work was to reduce the power limit by 50%, undervolt to 1100 and underclock to 1100 as well. Only after that was i able to make the GPU pass the stress test in Wattman (or whatever its name is these days – the overclocking thingy in stock AMD GPU user-accessible software), as previously any attempt to run the stress test would result in stalling.
It goes without saying that performance took a steep dive after that.
So i went and bought a syringe of thermal paste (Gelid GC-EXTREME; i was aiming to get Arctic Cooling MX-4, but GC-E is reportedly better and only a bit more expensive, although even that is only true per-syringe – if you divide by the weight it’s actually cheaper per gram) and three thermal pad sheets (Chinese AOK TP500S40, rather cheap) in 0.5mm, 1.0mm and 1.5mm thicknesses (because i had no idea what thickness i would need; by the way, in the end i never got to use the 0.5mm sheet), and some high-wax plasticine (had to visit a toy store for that).
Here are some photos of the graphics card, pre-disassembly:
Back-plate on MSI Radeon RX 480 GAMING X, assembled
Front of the heatsink with fans on MSI Radeon RX 480 GAMING X, assembled
Again, i'll say ahead of time that the correct way to disassemble this card is to remove the 4 screws that hold the GPU heatsink (about 5 full rotations of the screwdriver per each screw, by the way), carefully detach the heatsink (it’s probably somewhat stuck to the GPU), unplug the wires (2 in the corner, one closer to the upper edge; careful, the sockets break easily).
Two wires in the corner
Also one wire at the other end of the card
Then remove the heatsink altogether. Then unscrew the other screws that hold the back-plate, remove it, then unscrew and remove the front-plate. Note that the front-plate has two screws on the side. These also need to be removed before you can detach the front-plate:
Two side screws that hold the front-plate in place
Though i did that in the wrong order (unscrewed and detached the back-plate, then unscrewed and detached the heatsink completely, then unscrewed and removed the front plate), and suffered no ill consequences.
Back-plate, removed (also, the back of the card, exposed)
Front-plate (not covered by the heatsink anymore)
The card with front-plate removed, exposing all the chips
Heatsink, just taken off
The inner side of the front-plate, detached
The factory pasting wasn’t stellar:
Closer view of the GPU and the memory chips
Speaking of the factory stuff. After i removed parts of the thermal pads that weren’t stuck, i discovered that the middle memory chip in the right row had almost no adhesion to the pad that covered it. There’s a bit of material stuck to its lower-right corner, but that’s it. Not sure whether it’s good or bad, given the circumstances.
Anyway, this is how the GPU looked with the old paste removed:
GPU up close, cleaned up
The surface is glossy, but it has the same pitting that ChefJoe noticed on his RX 480 in earlier. Must have something to do with the factory paste, maybe? After cleaning, the heatsink had the same surface defect:
Heatsink, cleaned up (the blurry pink blobs and the big dark rectangle are the reflection of my hands and my phone that took this photo; everything else is part of the heatsink surface)
As for the pads, they come in two colors – blue and grey. The blue ones are softer and still retain much flexibility, but their structural integrity is very low and they can be torn apart with little effort. They also don’t adhere very well, as I was able to scrub the rest of them almost completely off the chips with just my finger, no extra tools needed.
Some of the pads stuck to the inner side of the front-plate (the grey ones especially). You can also see the oily residue (black staining) on the textolite and the front-plate, which was also present on ChefJoe's card. I’ve tried to clean that off, but with mixed success:
Front-plate, cleaned up
The grey pads are less flexible than the blue ones, or maybe just thinner. They are also somewhat more brittle. Meanwhile, the small blue strip stuck to the front-plate was very well-preserved – i was able to cleanly peel it off without tearing it apart, and it even kept some of its rubbery flexibility, stretching a bit and regaining its shape once the pressure was gone.
Anyway, i carefully measured all of the pads that i took off. Here’s the picture with the results:
Pad thickness, illustrated
Blue pads on the memory chips are 1mm thick, barely deformed. All other blue pads are 1.5mm thick, squeezed down to 1.1-1.2mm in some places. Grey pads are 1.0mm and 1.5mm thick (two different pads). The 1.0mm one is squeezed to 0.7mm in some places, and the 1.5mm one is compressed to 1.1mm.
To verify my measurements, i stuck small pieces of plasticine to the places where thermal pads should be (after cleaning them, naturally; the places, not the plasticine, obviously! Who cleans plasticine, anyway?), then re-assembled the card by screwing the front- and the back-plate back in. Then, after disassembling it again, i carefully peeled off the now-squished pieces of plasticine and measured their thickness. The results were the same as for the compressed parts of the pads, more or less. Obviously, i had to clean these spots again, since plasticine does leave some residue. If you do this, don’t try it on the GPU itself, because plasticine adheres to its glossy surface a bit too well, and because the gap between the heatsink and the GPU is very small – you won’t be able to peel off anything measurable, and it’s useless anyway, since there’s no connection between the heasink and the front-plate where all the pads go. That is to say, if you pick a wrong pad thickness, that should not, in theory, prevent the heatsink from properly adhering to the GPU.
I initially thought that i’d cut the pad sheet into small rectangles, one per each element. But then decided that extra padding wouldn’t hurt the other components, and just cut the pad into strips. In total i needed (in millimeters):
12x14 (8 separate pads; though 2 of these can be half-sized, since the front-plate doesn’t cover the chips completely; OEM used two strips and two small half-sized single-element pads, but since there are no other elements around memory chips i thought that using strips would be a waste here) of 1.0mm thickness, for the memory chips. 70x11 strip of 1.0mm thickness at the tail end of the card. 62x8 strip of 1.5mm thickness next to it. Small 7.2x7.2 pad of 1.5mm thickness for a chip in the corner. 35x12 strip of 1.5mm thickness for elements closer to the DP and HDMI sockets.Replacement pads in place
A couple of pads on the memory chips (right vertical row) are slightly larger than necessary – that’s where the leftovers went. In the end I spent my 1.0mm-thick 50x50mm pad sheet completely, spent about one half of the 1.5mm-thick 50x50mm pad sheet, and the 0.5mm-thick 50x50mm pad sheet went completely unused.
I’ve mentioned earlier that factory pads were easy to tear. Well, these green AOK pads weren’t really much better. You can see that they are a bit torn in some places, where i had to press them down with a small flat screwdriver while peeling off their protective plastic covering. No idea how well they measure in terms of thermal conductivity. I certainly wouldn’t trust the claims made by the manufacturer.
After that i just put the front- and back-plates back again and screwed them in.
Front- and back-plates re-assembled
Then cleaned the GPU and the heatsink one last time, let them dry for a couple of minutes, put the paste on the GPU (no photo of the GPU with a layer of paste – Gelid supplied a syringe with a spreader tip, which is a novelty for me; in my opinion, i didn’t spread the paste all that well, which is why i'm not showing you the result) and put the heatsink back. Job’s done.
The result was better than i had hoped. Previously the GPU would idle (note that since i'm monitoring this in Wattman on a 4K display, “idling” is not the right term – the load on the GPU is very much real, albeit light, in this scenario) at almost 60 degrees and was completely incapable of passing the stress test without a reduction in power limit.
Now the card idles at 43 degrees (“true idling”, where no windows other than the desktop and the taskbar are drawn on the screen, is more like 30-something degrees), and peaks at 64 degrees during stress-testing. Yes, even when stress-testing on factory settings with no downclocking or power-limiting.
Stress-testing
After that i undervolted it to 1100. The card’s very quiet now, and no stalling at all. If the graph in Wattman is to be believed, the clock rate hovers around 1303Mhz (although power draw occasionally dips for some reason) – that is, the performance (such as it is for a GPU that is now, like, 5 years old?) remains stable. As i have said, it tops at 64 degrees, quickly drops to 50 once the load is off, and hovers around 43 degrees when only slightly loaded.
I should note that since the thermal pads are only used to conduct heat between the front-plate and the auxiliary chips, and since the front-plate is completely independent of the GPU heatsink, it’s possible (and i would recommend it) to just re-paste the GPU without removing the front- and back-plate and without touching the thermal pads. My replacement pads weren’t, in my opinion, radically better (to the naked eye, at least) than the factory pads, and re-padding might have been completely unnecessary in my case (i guess we’ll never know).
I’ll put a reminder on my calendar to edit this post a year or so later to tell you how my re-pasting job holds up long-term.
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Posted this a few days ago, but it didn't pass automatic spam filtering or something like that. Moderators advised me to re-post this. Hopefully, now it'll show up normally.
ID: hl4cfc8 -
Wow this is pretty amazing! The amount of thinking and planning before execution shows. Wish you get a GPU when prices come down!
ID: hl4upooActually, i was mostly flying blind on this one. I mean, i did know that i'd need thermal pads and paste, but i didn't know how thick the pads should be (i googled it up repeatedly, and never found anything definitive). That's why i'm posting this - hopefully, other people wouldn't have to figure the pad thickness the way i had to. That thing with plasticine was also something i've never done before. I'm not even sure that the guy who gave that advice had tried it himself. And this is also my first time disassembling and re-pasting a graphics card.
ID: hl86m39I used cheap $2 pads from aliexpress. Its super easy and card works great. You dont need to go with perfect pads for old VRAM
My RX480 still works mines great
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Nice job! i replace the thermal paste of my old 290x yesterday, it drops from 85C° to around 66C° fullload, maybe i should change thermal pads too, they looked quite old, but i dont have information about thickness, do you know any website to look it up?
ID: hl5i0npNope, i don't know. I had to google that info, and still failed to find a precise answer. If you can afford to wait, open up the card, measure the thickness with a caliper (and also calculate the area you need to cover), then order exactly what you need. If you can't wait, order all kinds of thermal pads in advance, like i did.
I have no idea which numbers to look at (and where to look at them - clearly, Wattman doesn't tell me every piece of sensor data that the card reports) to determine whether re-padding is even necessary. Maybe someone else knows - try asking around.
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The MSI RX470/480/570/580 Gaming X cards are probably the best dual fan models in terms of build quality and thermal performance. The cooler design simply is unmatched in every possible way. I regret not getting the 8GB model before the 2nd mining craze.
But the Armor cards are entirely different story though.
ID: hl6ahanI'd post a spirited defence of my RX 570 Armor (possibly Armor II) OC, but the only real gaming load I've put it under is Doom Eternal, and I get playable framerates, even if the fans do spin up, they're not deafening.
Maybe for super Heavy games, like yer CDPR boys, It'd buckle under the pressure. Maybe I'll investigate yet. But not today.
ID: hl7wb8uIn my first read of your comment I thought you were saying the armor cards were the best for thermal performance and audibly laughed. The rx 580 8gb armor was one of my first cards and would shoot right up to 80° under load. Repasting dropped that by a good 10-15°.
ID: hl7zutoYes the Armor cards(the original white ones) are notorious with its mediocre thermal performance despite the fact the PCB is the same as Gaming X variant. But miners absolutely loved the heck out of them because these were the cheapest available.
I always wondered if swapping the coolers will make any difference.
Hopefully we can see these 8GB cards retire after all the mining craze died down so I can get one for testing. I totally believe there are RX480 8GB cards mined 24/7 nonstop for 5 straight years, poor cards.
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Just a note, AMD stress test is not a good stress test. I had a card that would pass AMD stress test but fail Heaven, valley or furmark in like 5 min. Maybe someone could explain why.
Amazing post. Well done and thank you.
Cheers
ID: hl5h4arYes, the impression i got from googling this up is that people don't like to rely on this stress-test for their overclocking and undervolting.
Nevertheless, it's built into the stock AMD software, it's easily accessible, and it did trigger the problems in my GPU. Yes, i should probably run something heavier to check that my undervolting was actually viable under more realistic heavy load. But passing the Wattman stress-test is still a good thing to check after adjusting any values. If your card doesn't pass even this test, then it probably wouldn't pass anything else.
ID: hl6epwvFor Polaris my recomendation that beats Heaven in time to find issues and cycling UV/OC sessions is A2016 by Altair on Pouet.net ;
PowerVirus load with heavy Async Compute is Zetsubo by Prismbeings;
P.S. Hydrokinetics by Prismbeings on Pouet.net, give nice UV/OC tweaking sessions for NV cards;
ID: hl8mvs5it's built into the stock AMD software, it's easily accessible
passing the Wattman stress-test is still a good thing to check after adjusting any values
Agree. It is a fast first step to check if "stable"
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I'm using MX5, awesome paste, but in general for GPUs use less dense stuff. Also be careful with thermal pads thickness, if you use 1.0 where you should place 0.5, the heatsink contact will be worse, resulting in terrible temps. Then if you want to improve temps, you can add pads on the backplate, behind the VRAM and core, will get you a few degrees less.
Anyway, if your card have an 8pin + dual bios you can flash a 580 bios to get more performance, the RX580 Gaming X is exactly the same with higher TDP and voltage, same heatsink too. Mine, XFX GTR BE, hav a custom 580 bios I made since 2017, rock solid
ID: hl4jkm8in general for GPUs use less dense stuff.
Why?
Also be careful with thermal pads thickness, if you use 1.0 where you should place 0.5, the heatsink contact will be worse, resulting in terrible temps.
Hence all the careful measuring i did. Also, i think i've mentioned already that it seems to me that the heatsink (the big honking aluminum thing with heatpipes) only cools the GPU. It doesn't touch the front-plate, to which the thermal pads conduct the heat from all other elements. At least, i don't see any places where they can connect.
Also, this particular card does not use 0.5mm pads anywhere. You probably meant 1.5 and 1.0, not 1.0 and 0.5.
Then if you want to improve temps, you can add pads on the backplate, behind the VRAM and core, will get you a few degrees less.
How does that work? Specifically, which pieces on the back of the card heat up? Or do you mean to say that the textolite itself conducts heat well enough to need cooling?
Anyway, if your card have an 8pin + dual bios you can flash a 580 bios to get more performance
The difference between RX 480 and RX 580 is 2-5 FPS in practical applications (2 FPS in 2160p, 5 FPS in 1080p). I'm not entirely sure it is worth re-flashing it for such an increase in performance. I can probably get most of those gains simply by overclocking the card with its native firmware.
Also, i remember reading somewhere (forgot where) that just flashing RX 580 firmware as-is is inadvisable, because some things don't quite match up. Sorry, i can't remember any specifics. You can probably google that up pretty easily.
ID: hl4mf6mGPU dies doesn't have an heat spreader like CPU, so less dense pase can spread easily without tinkering too much, also some paste, like kyronaut, have the tendency to dry up quickly, happened to me.
Yeah dw, I was just giving you a tip, there should be also a difference between pads, I think if you ask online, like on overclock.net, people will tell you which pads is better to buy and so on.
Basically the metal backplate is covered by some "tape", you can remove a bit of it in determinated positions, like behind the VRAM chips, near the GPU core or behind the VRMs, so the heat have another way to escape and sink into the metal. Will help to cool the card but just a few degrees. High end cards usually have this stock.
Depends, my 480 had higher idle clocks so a bit more of power consumption while doing nothing, also had a few random black screen that the 580 bios fixed. About compatibility, as long both card have the same part and output, should work without issues.
ID: hl72nuqFor GPU direct-die applications you can use whatever paste you’d like as long as you spread it fully across the entire die (aka don’t use a dot/line/cross like you would on a CPU).
Due to the nature of the GPU die itself, lacking a heatspreader, paste not spreading equally across the entire die will lead to inadequate cooling on some parts of the chip — that is bad and can cause a plethora of issues (especially if the thermal sensors in the GPU aren’t located at that uncovered part of the die, your temperatures may look normal but you’ll be overheating and most likely crash or experience other weird effects). The reason you can get away with that on a CPU is that the heatspreader on those will compensate for any ‘missed spots’. Not the case with any direct die applications.
Depending on how often you plan to repaste your GPU, denser (thicker) thermal pastes are often better in the long term. As pastes age, they experience the ‘pump out’ effect whereby overtime they get ‘squeezed out’ between the die and cold plate which is what causes a rise in temperatures over time (this is the main reason, most pastes don’t ‘dry out’ in the typical way you’d interpret that term). The denser the paste the longer it will take to pump out.
I’ve used quite a few pastes on my GPU like Noctua NT-H1, Kryonaut, MX-4, MX-2 and currently GC Extreme. The two that offer the most consistent performance over time are MX-2 and GC Extreme as they’re the thickest. With other pastes I start noticing a rise in temperature due to pump out in as little as a couple weeks (NT-H1 and MX-4 were the worst offenders here) whereas the others remained consistent for over 3 months (or in GC Extreme’s case, 6+ months).
So if you don’t want to repaste your GPU that often, something that is more viscous is better because over time you’ll notice better temperatures than more runny pastes (even though they initially will have better thermal performance, they degrade pretty quickly to the extent where they’ll be outperformed by others after a few weeks).
Pro Tip: Heat up your GC Extreme in a bucket of warm water beforehand, it will soften the paste making it easier to apply. Use the applicator to spread it evenly across the GPU die. That’s currently what I’m using on my 5700XT and it has been consistent for over 6 months now with temperatures being the same as day 1.
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Great write up!
It's always worth replacing the factory thermal paste, my 2070 definitely started running better once I did.
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This is a full on guide, when it comes to detail and thoroughness, wow. Very nice.
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Great job on this! I have the exact same card. I repasted mine with some Artic Silver 5 a few years ago when it was still quite new. From what I remember, it dropped temps a few degrees. What's awesome is that MSi even gave me the go-ahead to re-paste the GPU without voiding warranty.
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Repasted an RX580 that I pulled out the drawer. Was holding 86degrees on Warframe menu.
After never got over 65when in heavy missions.
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I have the same GPU and it served me well until it randomly died while playing dirt rally 2.0 in December 2019. The warranty just expired 2 months ago (at that time). I just got the black screen when my PC turned on and that's it. I have a 5700xt now, but my broken 480 still sits on the shelf.
ID: hl4tnz9I bought a new PC in 2019, with an RX 5700 on board (in October, what luck! The prices skyrocketed soon after that). It died recently. I suspect that the PSU was the culprit. My PC suddenly shut down while i was working. Unfazed, i turned it on again, and it started, but one second later it sputtered and died for good.
The PSU wouldn't start up, and when i bought a new one (luckily, PSUs prices are still reasonable), it turned out that the motherboard also didn't work. The warranty hadn't expired yet on those, so i gave them to the vendor for repairs. They repaired the PSU (which i wouldn't use ever again, because i have a new one already, and because i'm not willing to let this piece of crap power my quite expensive system that it can, it seems, turn into expensive paperweight), and eventually refunded me the motherboard, so i was able to buy a new one. And THEN i found out that my RX 5700, which i had no reason to test until that point, was also fried - it wouldn't start at all, even the fans weren't running. Sent it for repairs too. Meanwhile i'm making do with my old RX 480, hence the re-pasting efforts.
I think the lesson we should learn from this is that you shouldn't skimp on PSU (the one that died had a 2-year warranty; the new one that i recently bought, only a bit more expensive and a bit less powerful, has a 5-year warranty).
As for your old 480, i'd consider repairing it, if i were you. At least, if the repair service doesn't cost too much. You'd be able to sell it at a profit, or at least have a working backup if things go south.
ID: hl52v1bI don't think my psu was the culprit, it was a zalman 700w psu which was good rated. Had the power hungry r9 280x before that and it was fine. Replaced it only this year because I wanted a modular psu and nicer cables (the old ones where rainbow colored).
How can I repair it? It just shows black screen when it's in the computer (motherboard has the vga error light on) and I took it apart and looked everywhere, nothing was blown or looked broken.
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Excellent write up, good pictures. Enjoyed reading.
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I have the exact same problem on my MSI GX 480. I tried re pasting many times but the problem always came back. Maybe I should try changing the thermal pads also
ID: hl5bnm4Memory run relatively cold on those cards so it is probably ain’t it. Down clock the mem at something like 1700mhz, if the same problems occur it ain’t the mem temps.
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See this thread for similar issues
I personally had the same issue with my rx 580 8gb msi, had to repaste or it would stop working under certain loads with no video signal. -
Good Job OP, and thanks for the write up, this can easily be linked to other people as a guide.
I recently revived a GTX 770 which has the exact same cooler as yours and now it runs games at full clock...
without making that noise which I absolutely didn't knew msi twin frozrs were capable of.
It's when you stop using them it gets problematic as the thermal paste turns into useless crust. -
Holy shot dude that's a lot of writing. Btw I have sapphire rx470. It should be similar. Recently repasted it. Just cleaned gpu die, put paste on vrms, Vrams, and die itself and left the old pads there (they will do the job) and actually the temps are WAY lower, no more power throttling to 127W, but nice smooth 180W (OCed) 1431MHz@+100mV and runs just above 80°C. Didn't have problem like pc crashing before. Just high temps and low power limit.
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I've repasted my work laptop, my home PC CPU, but I am way too scared given market conditions to touch my current GPU. I don't want a $5 project to turn into $1500...
ID: hl8jfn6Yep, it's scary to do things you've never done before, especially if a mistake is going to cost you... a lot. For me, the next scary thing is going to be re-pasting my 10-years-old laptop (never took a laptop completely apart in my life).
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I have this exact same card and ever since getting it it seemed unstable, would have lots of graphical glitches and errors under load. Green screens and checkerboards, etc. I thought the card's memory dying, but Radeon chill masked the worst of it until I bought a high refresh screen and suddenly the GPU was always dying on me. After repasting it with cheap phanteks paste it is like new now. Even better then new. I think the factory paste job must have been terrible. Didn't touch the thermal pads though.
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That a quality post there, nude shots from each angle, perfection. Good job mate
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I recently re-padded my RX 580, haven’t had any problems since. Tho mine and most likely yours doesn’t have a sensor for gpu memory temperature so can’t see what difference it made in that regard, but the gpu is definitely more stable now. My 580 also had the black screen crash with fans at full speed, not responding, and need a full power cycle. Cheers for our gpus to last us many more years :3
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same gpu, same problem 😀 my gpu was literally exploding and whole pc crashing under any load. i opened it, changed absolutely everything and now it works like fucking new. never done it before
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re-past (sp correction)
ID: hl829k0Eh?
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Heh. My rx580 is still going strong. I haven't done any disassembly like i did my 7970
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I've repasted a few 400 and 500 series gpus in the past. Some even needing new pads which I had at the time. I remember MSI, XFX and PNY having some bad practices of making a copper looking heatsink but then you see the block is aluminum or in a few cases painted black to hide the color. MSI though will give you a good heatsink and cooling fans but then give you low quality pads and paste. I assume because getting an rma is harder when you open the card up and they see you remove or damage the "warranty" sticker.
Keep in mind if you reach this point and want the warranty rma an they tell you they can't due to the sticker just tell them they can't enforce that by law if you live in the united states.
引用元:https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/qwq5g6/repasting_and_repadding_msi_radeon_rx_480_gaming_x/
Post approved. Thanks for the detailed write-up!