Gadgetory

one of the most common reasons that video cards fail doesn't usually have anything to do with electronics it has a lot to do with the temperatures at which some of these cards run out as you can see here we have a GTX 580 that's running at 81 degrees Celsius and I think that's a little bit too hot and I'm going to show you guys how you can extend the life of your video cards whether you're overheating or not before we get into the more advanced techniques of how to cool off your graphics card start simple blow up a dust on the dirt that's guaranteed to be in your case it doesn't matter if your water cool to air cooled dust and debris are going to build up inside the graphics card it's going to block airflow and it's going to really reduce the amount of cooling capacity available to your card if blowing out all of the dust or in your case and your graphics card didn't reduce the temperatures you might have a more severe problem when it comes to your thermal paste now you can change the thermal paste yourself but there are some materials are going to need going into this you're going to need alcohol pads or wipes you're going to need thermal paste of your choice and you're going to need thermal pads you can generally find these supplies at your local computer store or somewhere online the first step in removing your graphics card is to unplug the PCI Express cables most graphics cards have to some have one but you're going to have at least one plug no matter what depending on whether or not you have a dual or a single slot graphics card you're going to have at least one retaining screw attaching your graphics card to the case find the screw and unscrew it now nevermind all of the screw and blow comments in this video I swear to god we're going to keep it clean while the graphics cards out of the case you might as well blow it again this is where things are going to start to get a little more tedious and you've got to pull out your fine motor functions you're going to want to unscrew all of the screws on the back of the graphics card to remove your cooler now this is where you have to put all your muscles aside and use finesse you want to gently remove the cooler from the graphics card it may be stuck pretty good based on how thick the thermal grease or the pads are do not pry it off wiggle it gently and for the love of God please don't forget to unplug your fan connector I've seen so many of these cables get ripped because people pull their graphics card cooler away and tear the cable and just as I suspected this graphics card is suffering from dried cracked thermal paste the thermal paste has hardened over time which has really reduced the amount of temperature that it's able to transfer due to the correct corrosive state of the thermal paste so the culprit in this overheating graphics card is dry compound that is no longer doing its job which is not getting the heat to the heatsink and out of the graphics card and over time this is going to lead to inevitable death of this graphics card now if you're lucky you might be able to skip this step the reason why I recommend you have thermal pads just in case is in the case of this card when I remove the cooler many of the thermal pads torn and they were not able to be reused and the thermal pads are how you cool the VRMs and the memory chips on your graphics card now you remember that alcohol I was referring to earlier that wasn't just for drinking because of the fact that you're tearing apart your graphics card and you're scared to death it's to get all that nasty thermal compound removed from the heat sink in the GPU now with all things computer there's definitely going to be an opinion involved in this step the method you see me using here of applying this thermal paste is what's recommended by ek and installing their water blocks now just like when you remove the cooler and you didn't want to forget to unplug the power connector for your fan you want to be sure to reinstall the power connector in this particular graphics card when the cooler is installed you can't access that fan connector so you're going to want to make sure you get it on there first now the next thing you want to do is you want to make sure that all the screw holes are aligned now this isn't anything dirty people keep your minds out of the gutter it's important to note that the number of screws and the number of retaining brackets and things are going to be different per graphics card when reinstalling the cooler you want to make sure that you install the four screws directly surrounding the GPU first and you want to tighten these down in a star pattern now be sure not to over tighten these screws because you don't want to crush your GPU heat spreader and you don't want to strip out the threads now reinstall your graphics card into your case by using the reverse method of however you took it out you're going to plug in your power connectors you're going to plug in your video cable boot your system and you're going to observe the awesomeness that you are because you save time and money fixing your overheating graphics card on your own and in the case of this GTX 580 by EVGA we reduced our graphics temperatures from 81 degrees Celsius to 74 degrees Celsius and I want to note that the graphics card was running 81 degrees Celsius at 75% fan speed and 74 degrees Celsius at 50% fan speed so there you are guys J's - since showing you just how easy it is to fix your own overheating graphics card with just a little bit of time and a little bit of money don't forget I do have a vlog channel link to it is down below follow me on Twitter Facebook all of that fun social media stuff and let me know what kind of videos you want me to bring you in the future