Gadgetory

everyone so you've seen our previous few videos we've been talking about the EVGA vrm heating issues and those have been largely resolved through a two-step process one is a BIOS update which is not really required but it will increase your fan rpm it's still in flux we originally reported that it was a 2200 rpm fan target for load scenarios and now it sounds like it's going to be closer to 2000 so that's still in flux but there will be a fan rpm change it can be done through BIOS there's also a thermal pad mod EVGA is calling this optional I would actually call this the recommended or required approach and then the fan RPMs would be my secondary but before getting to the tutorial of how to install the thermal pads on the EVGA 1080 FTW this content is brought to you by AMD and they're affordable free sync devices including this ultra wide display that's 2560 by 1080 and is available for $400 link in the description below for more information on that so for this mod which is it's really trivial to do you don't have to be intimidated by this if you've never taken a part of card before we've taken apart a lot of these pretty basic process you will need a phillips screwdriver it's just like an a1 a head or something like that so a phillips screwdriver will do just fine EVGA technically recommends a flathead I don't really think that's necessary but if you want one it's helpful for removing the fan headers later on you'll also need the thermal pad kit from EVGA so these are the pads they have a wide and a narrow pad included in the kit so the thermal pads they provide you there's two of them they measure about two millimeters thick at the thickest that would be this one and this one is 57 wide millimeters and this one is 26 millimeters wide so this pad goes on your inductors or your chokes I'll show you where those are and how to install it this one goes on the back side of the card you'll take this back plate off and then it goes right in between these four screws and I'll show you that as well so it's easiest for this mod to start off by this a new card so we're going to peel that pair once that's off they're the easiest way to do this is to start with the base plate and so to do that we need to remove the cooler and the shroud itself so I like to do a posing corner tear you do not have to do that for removal but I suppose it will still put less strain on the car though it's really kind of irrelevant so we'll take the cold plate off and the with the cold plate of course comes the heatsink and with the heatsink will come the shroud which is the front of the card it's four screws very easy so that's done when I lift this up you're going to see that the rest of the card will kind of fall off of it so you just lift up gently and when you're doing this yourself you should see that there's play in here so there's play I'm not going to pull it off and you shouldn't either because it's still connected to cables and those cables are for the fans and for the LEDs in the card very easy to get rid of there's one right here and then I believe the other cable is also on that side of the card so this one just came out on its own when I pulled the card up you don't want to pull at the cables to get these out or at the wires you should generally I just kind of try and get some leverage in there under the actual connector head and pull it up you can also stab it with a flat head which is what EVGA recommends on the other side of this thing so you see I just kind of pulled it out but if you take a flat head if you're really worried about it you can push the flat head against that sort of clip right there in the middle of the header have you push there and then pull up at an angle they'll come out just don't pull by the wires but mine came out pretty easily so there's things taken apart we've got the cooler this that you'll have to clean off we'll do that in a moment the GPU is now exposed to the GPU is the silicon piece underneath that should will be shiny when we clean it covered by thermal paste right now just for vocabulary reasons this agree is the substrate you do not need to clean that they're all pasted off the substrate it doesn't really hurt but you don't need to worry about it if there's a ton on there these are your chokes your inductors this is part of the vrm this is part of what is heating up and causing the articles online to talk about thermal issues with the cards so we need to cover these and create contact from these to the heatsink itself which will go back on this orientation where this side aligns to this so we're gonna have a thermal pad right there but before that I do want to clean off this thermal compound to do this you can take a q-tip or the cotton ball or just a paper towel and put some rubbing alcohol on it 90% or better is preferred I've got 91% here that's fine you could use different percentage if you've got it but that's just basically going to clean this stuff right off get it stuck to the paper towel and then the alcohol itself will evaporate very quickly from the GPU so we don't need to worry about drying it really do the same thing for the heatsink and what we're going to do in a moment is use this thermal compound that EVGA provided us with and you'll get it to with your kit and and that will be what replaces the stuff that just came off so this compound that EVGA provides is actually not too bad it's a 5 watt per meter Kelvin compound which is right there if I watts per meter Kelvin is pretty average so we can certainly use that you won't need to buy anything special you don't have to clean the compound off of the GPU but it will be better for you long run let's go ahead and get this mod started so first of all we only need the thin one this is the 27 26 millimeter wide strip the narrow strip that will go here and I'm going to go ahead and get rid of this now which is cleaning to me and that is concerning enough that I'm going to go ahead and put it on an anti-static bracelet as well just for protection of the electrical components because the static electricity is bad again not a 100% required step but not bad to do so this thin strip you just need to get kind of positioned such that the edge of it is against the edge of the baseplate and you'll be able to see this in a moment more clearly once I move the cardboard and then centered over the the chokes or the inductors if you prefer let's try and Center that a bit better okay and also make sure you peel off the piece of plastic here that's still stuck on my thermal pad so once you've peeled the plastic off your thermal pad we're going to put it right on top of the chokes or the inductors I'm going to try and Center it and it should not exceed the length of the base plate so just kind of cap it right there at the edge of the base plate like I've done you can see we're right at the border of where it can be apply a little bit of force right there because there was an air pocket so we are in good shape now the next step is to reassemble the card before getting to this step I would suggest taking a few photos of the card for your own reference of the cooler for your own reference and for warranty purposes if something goes wrong here EVGA will assist you they've kind of already said that in there and their replacement upgrades warranty policy so that's all done now we need to put some thermal paste on and take the stuff they gave you we just need a dot here in the middle now let me just stay here for a second that YouTube's favorite thing to do is to criticize thermal paste application for a GPU it's not quite as sensitive as a CPU where you have an IHS and you've got your cold plate and that's you don't want too much they're all pasted in there this thing one we're not worrying about a conductive thermal compound that's going to short anything so getting this on the substrates not going to hurt your card secondly it's a GPU so there's no IHS it's just we're basically exposed straight to the cold plate so don't worry too much about this right if you read the comment it's going to be like that's way too much that's way too little don't worry about it just copy pretty closely to what I'm doing so we're going to put on a dot it's going to be about the size of a grain of rice maybe a little bit tinier and I'm going to go a little extra so that should really be enough the the coat plate will spread the rest of it on its own we don't need a ton but it doesn't hurt to have a little bit more than that either this is just YouTube's favorite thing to criticize for some reason so so we've got enough compound on there now we need to reattach this cooler part so it's the same steps in Reverse these plugs go into their headers on the board and I have to move this a little bit out of the way the camera but should be able to do it okay so first one plugs in again make sure you've got all of the plastic off of that thermal pad before you put this back together is one strip of plastic on each side and then it should be bare like kind of adhesive material so you can see I've got the connectors reconnected so we are ready to assemble the card I don't know finish putting this together and now we just need to flip it over to the backside where we can get access to the screws there's four screw holes line it up and kind of put the card rest it there I'm just going to move this board until it matches okay so that is about where we want to be so for these you just turn until it's stopped so you don't need to apply crazy amount of course they are spring tension so turn it until it stops it has stopped so I'm going to stop turning it you see we've got our card back together and now the next step is to do the rear side so for this side we have to take apart the back plate take the back plate off the card the screws holding it in there's just these ones outline and metal hold it in so one two three four five six seven eight nine ten thirteen screws total that we have to take out you don't have to take out the i/o a panel protector thin one I'm just going to turn this over and dump them all out at the end two three four so at this point depending on which card you have there are rubber bumpers on these things like one here one here one here these we can leave alone on this FTW card this model was sent to me by EVGA for this tutorial it looks like they may have already removed some of these pieces so I don't have to but for their from their instructions there's a an indication for the FTW model that you'd have to remove some of the rubber bumpers right here so three of them total and then for the non FTW model there's one which will be right here and to give you an idea if you have a non FTW card you will have a rubber bumper right here but kind of between the E and the V if you have an FTW card then you'll have two strips here and then one around the e area of the card of the back plate so that's where you would have to remove on an FTW these two plus this one I'm not FTW have to remove one that's right around here so that's that's the step we don't have to do it's been already completed it looks like so now we're ready to apply this thing this is the second one of these this wider one goes to the back of the vrm the vrm we can look at it here this is all in this section and EVGA is almost kind of over compensated with this thing but I mean more power to them I guess they kind of had a problem to begin the first place so we've got our MOSFETs and inductors are right here and capacitor banks all that so this thing same process get your plastic off of there on one side at least again it is static cleaning which is not ideal but it's not going to hurt anything probably so now we can place this pad dead center of the the vrm and between the four screw points I showed you earlier which are going to be one two three four so you're going between those and you want to cover these parts primarily so don't worry if you get that on your pads because that is plastic that will peel off so we're going to go ahead and cover it just like this if you're happy with it we can start pushing it down on the card I'm reasonably happy with it you're going to want this to be within the confines of the back plate which is outlined on the card and white so if you're within the white outline then you're in good shape it's going to stretch a little bit that's fine just reposition it at this point the rest of the pressure will be applied by the back plate we can now put that back on back plate should have four thermal pads right here that's the back side of the GPU you can see it lines up here these four points on the GPU and so now just drop that on there line up the screw holes and you have modded your card to have thermal pad so at this point it's just screwing back in this fourteen or however many screws it was that I said earlier so that is how to mod at your to X 1080 FTW with thermal pads you don't have to get the kit from EVGA it is free but if they get backed up or they don't have them in your country or whatever you can buy your own pad with the measurements I gave you earlier so that was something like 2 millimeters thick and something like 57 wide and a 26 wide for the measurements of the pad so you could buy those yourself and you could even buy a wider kit on Amazon or wherever else I'll link some of the description below it's an affiliate link if you want help us out but you can buy some from Amazon and then just cut them to size that works perfectly fine you just cut them with scissors so that is how you do the cut mod pretty easy that will basically solve all your problems if you're really ultra concerned evj will help you out with a replacement or you could also download the V BIOS update which sets a more aggressive fan speed but you do sacrifice some noise in favor of that so that's all as always patreon link in the post rubidium few want to help set directing for this type of content that will be the best way to help us otherwise subscribe for more right down there links the description below for more information I'll see you all next time