- Apr 21, 2012
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So my 3 year old Powercolor HD7850 has been making much more noise than usual during gaming. While playing Fallout 4, the gfx card would have these "episodes" where the fan speed goes super high for about 10 seconds then slowing down to normal again. This would happen every 15-20 minutes during gameplay. It never did this kind of thing before so I was worried that the thermal paste might have dried up.
I removed the gfx card and cleaned up the old thermal paste with lint-free cloth and pure water. I can't get isopropyl or rubbing alcohol in my country, but pure water did the trick just fine. Then I applied some Cooler Master High Performance thermal paste. I had one lying around, and the benchmarks online show that it's a pretty decent compound that matches MX-4 in performance.
Then I re-installed the card and ran a 2 minute Furmark test. The result was much worse than before. So was the in-game performance. It's around 5-10 degrees hotter at idle. At load, it quickly goes over 90 degrees, causing throttling and high fan speed.
Obviously, something was wrong. I suspected having applied too much paste, so I cleaned the paste again and applied a smaller amount. Temps decreased a bit, but it's still much worse than its original performance.
At this point, I have no idea what I'm doing wrong. I considered getting a better thermal paste, but I doubt it will make a big difference. The cooler seems to sit on the gpu nicely. So what could have gone wrong here?? Any help is appreciated...
I removed the gfx card and cleaned up the old thermal paste with lint-free cloth and pure water. I can't get isopropyl or rubbing alcohol in my country, but pure water did the trick just fine. Then I applied some Cooler Master High Performance thermal paste. I had one lying around, and the benchmarks online show that it's a pretty decent compound that matches MX-4 in performance.
Then I re-installed the card and ran a 2 minute Furmark test. The result was much worse than before. So was the in-game performance. It's around 5-10 degrees hotter at idle. At load, it quickly goes over 90 degrees, causing throttling and high fan speed.
Obviously, something was wrong. I suspected having applied too much paste, so I cleaned the paste again and applied a smaller amount. Temps decreased a bit, but it's still much worse than its original performance.
At this point, I have no idea what I'm doing wrong. I considered getting a better thermal paste, but I doubt it will make a big difference. The cooler seems to sit on the gpu nicely. So what could have gone wrong here?? Any help is appreciated...
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