Disassembly
The ASUS Dual can be disassembled quite easily with a small Phillips screwdriver. The first step was to remove the screws from the backplate, which also hold the cover around the fans.
This revealed small dust pockets and some animal hair, definitely nothing wild for an aged graphics card!
Seven screws and a controlled effort to separate the cooler later, we could directly see why there was a hotspot problem here.
Up close, we can see that the factory-applied paste has dried out completely.
You can see it even better on the cooler bottom. In places, there was no paste left at all between the silicon and the heatsink, and the heat even burned the DIE’s inscription into the coating.
Cleaning
First I cleaned with compressed air. For this purpose I had bought an air-duster some time ago, which is not quite as aggressive as a compressor and also has no condensation problems.
However, some deposits require mechanical action. A soft cosmetic brush is excellent for this. Be careful with microfiber cloths – they like to build up static charge, which can cause damage to sensitive electrical components.
Once the cooler, covers, fans and the PCB have been cleaned of dust and dirt, it’s time for the GPU. First, carefully use a cloth to remove the remains of the dried paste from the DIE.
And then very carefully the remains around the DIE. It is better to leave small residues than to tear off even one of the tiny SMD components! If it looks like the picture below, it’s perfectly fine. I like to use a small plastic cosmetic spatula for the edge.
Since the thermal pads were all still soft and undamaged, I thought it was unnecessary to replace them, so I was ready to apply fresh thermal paste.
By the way, Igor recently tested again how to best apply thermal paste, and I followed his instructions again. Everything is fresh and ready for the extended test!
Temperature check
I put the card back in and started Furmark again. Result after:
As a reminder, once again the values with the dried out paste:
Result: GPU minus 14K, hotspot minus 31K, fan speed halved, plus 200MHz chip clock, plus 180MHz VRAM clock. Of course, you can’t really compare that after one and a half minutes, which is why I let Furmark run for another 20 minutes.
The measure lowered the hotspot by about 20K, which means that both GPU and VRAM no longer need to be throttled. However, Furmark is also an extreme example and constantly fully utilizes the graphics card’s power limit. This is not the case in games and the card clocks quite a bit higher.
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