Replacing the Thermal Paste on a GPU

I have an eBay-sourced, flashed, GTX 680 (an EVGA card) in my MacPro5,1. A while ago it started having an issue where certain black pixels would flicker red, sometimes with horizontal red lines of flickering dots starting at those pixels. (If you moved the window with the black areas around, the lines would follow.) As it got worse the longer the machine was on, I suspected it was heat related. The screen would also black out for 1-2 seconds every few minutes. Annoying!

I finally carved out a half hour this morning and disassembled the card, cleaned off all the old thermal paste (first with ArctiClean 1 Thermal Paste Remover, then prepared the surfaces with ArctiClean 2 Thermal Surface Purifier, and applied a dollop of Arctic MX-5. Reassembled everything, crossed my fingers, powered it up and ... Not only did I not kill it, everything’s working perfectly now!

Sweet. I used:

• ArctiClean kit with microfiber cleaning cloth ($9)
• Arctic MX-5 Paste (2G syringe, more than enough for this job; $6)
• Small can of Dust-Off ($9)

I needed a #1 Philips screw driver bit for all the screws I had to remove on the board, but I had that already.

With the continuing GPU / chip shortage driving up prices even in the used market to absurd levels, definitely makes sense to preserve older, working perfectly, cards with this cheap and easy fix.

 

 

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