Manli GeForce RTX 4080 Gallardo
Now we come to the real-world application with this particular graphics card. The application may have been full-surface at first, but after just a few months there is nothing left to see. The inferior paste has dissolved into its components. Or rather: the actual matrix of the paste no longer exists and the silicone has evaporated (so-called bleeding). We remember my article and the hyperventilating card, whose GPU looked like this after disassembly:
The fact that the card can’t work like this is certainly beyond discussion. It’s simply not possible. That’s exactly why I bought this card again and measured it before disassembling it to analyze the thermal paste in the original, of course. Only then did I scrape off everything I could get for the TIM5 for the laboratory analysis. And, as you know, it was easily enough. Such cheap junk doesn’t belong on any graphics card, not even on an extra cheap one. It’s just that we’re already in the upper price segment here. This makes the accusation all the more serious. The bottom line is that you can neither accept nor understand something like this, but you can at least fix it. And that’s exactly where I start with the PTM7950.
Cleaning and applying the pad
Now it gets a bit tricky. I disassembled the new card in front of the camera and documented every single step. Of course, this also included “collecting” the original paste, the consistency of which I have to describe as extremely thin and which also pulled strings like crazy. This sight alone is enough to give me an idea of what to expect. After all, if you develop such a low-viscosity paste with such a low filling of (expensive) heat-conducting particles, then you have to find some way of ensuring that it performs properly to begin with (even if only for a brief moment). I have already discussed and documented what happened after 6 months.
This nasty and cheap paste must of course first be removed as completely as possible. Cotton buds, fleece and of course isopropanol as well as a lot of feeling are the best companions to avoid damaging the surrounding SMD components and to get everything clean.
I prepared the pad very generously and then placed it in the freezer for around 15 minutes. What you really need as accessories, however, is a spatula and possibly even sharp fingernails to help separate the foil from the pad. This is where the industry needs to find simpler solutions. The PTM7950 is also supposed to be available as a “paste” in tubes, but I have not yet been able to test this. The only option here is manual application.
We can see that it is still very easy to remove what is overhanging. In fact, it should be, so that the PCM hardens on the surrounding components later.
Measurement results and a little surprise
Let’s now compare four different results! The red curve is the firefly after 6 months, which is already quite borderline and above all loud. The yellow curve shows the first burn-in of the PTM7950 very clearly. After around 8 to 9 minutes, however, this value also levels off at the 66 to 67 °C of the other runs. This includes the 10th run of the PTM7950 (green curve) and the original paste (blue curve) in the factory state during initial operation. Of course, I quickly ran the torture test before I scraped off the paste for the lab.
Now we come to the hotspot! After 6 months, the Gallardo was already at 103 °C instead of 79 °C when it was delivered to the customer. That’s a whopping 34 degrees more! Here, too, we see the burn-in of the pad on the first run and the almost constant performance on all subsequent runs. So there’s no need to mourn the specially designed original paste.
The measured values clearly speak in favor of the pad and its longevity, so there’s no need to argue. AMD has proven that it works, and various converted RX 6800 XT and RX 6900 XT with many operating hours under their belts have not yet experienced any measurable degradation. So you can leave it at that.
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