Cooling the backside of a GPU?

Hey I was just wondering,

In an ATX case the backside of the GPU is facing up (part with all the silicon and sodder marks).

Any way this back part is hot like the rest of the card, and I was wondering if there would be any way to cool it. So you would have cooling on both sides of the card.

There is one major problem though, you cant put metal heatsinks on it because you could (would) short out the card.

Any thoughts.

stick this pointed at the back side

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspag [...] 6203596895

...but why would want to ?

Install an aftermarket cooler? Would break the warranty though, if you have one.

I think that there really isn't a big benefit from cooling the underside (or topside, depending on where you are looking at), since usually most of the heat would be much more attracted to the big hunk of metal attached to the other side.

Anyway I think the trouble is the small transistors/resistors/thingies are sticking up and it is really hard to cool a non-flat surface. Unless of course if you create a heatsink that has etches to account for those and fit exactly on the backside of your gpu.

Your ignorance is showing. Obviously you've never bothered to feel the backside of a high powered GPU card under load. They get very hot even though most of the heat goes to the heatsink on the other side. The board could be designed to clear an area from the backside in order to attach a heatsink. It might require an additional circuitry layer in the manufacturing process which would increase the cost somewhat. From a purely engineering viewpoint it would be worth the extra cost but the major benefit would be to increase the lifespan of a product which is technologically obsolete before it's even available on the open market. There have been a few attempts at this, I still own one and it's been running fine for many years. I'd be surprised to see any in the future.

or you can point it at the front side like every person in world but I'm sure we lack the intelligence of a F-ing idiot like you who thinks cooling the backside is more important then the front side. Go take your stupid opinions and shove them up your ignorant azz loser!

i need my coffee this morning

Gotta love those slack-ass quiet fan-speed settings in the BIOS for high-performance video cards... LOL. It's honestly one of my biggest pet-peeves when it comes to computer hardware nowadays.

tkgclimb, trust me when I tell ya we hear what you're saying. The problem is, no one designs their cards that way. I'm sure if AMD/ATI or nVIDIA ever design a double-sided GPU, they'll do it. But the backside (topside?) heatsink would have to be super-slim to allow clearance for the above card slot. Yeah, I know, most motherboards don't have a slot above the primary VGA slot, but more and more companies are designing SLI and Crossfire boards which have a PCIe-X1 slot above 'em.

In the now, maybe you can figure out a way to apply an electrically non-conductive thermal interface material that despite being applied thick enough to support a heatsink, wouldn't trap a ton of heat. The problem is, you'd need a layer that would be far thicker than the thickness at which today's TIMs are designed to be used. That goes for thermal tape, too. That said, you could try it, but it could turn out to be a total waste of a good tube of high-quality TIM. Another problem that arises is, how do you affix a heatsink to such a configuration? Do you use a thermal adhesive, configure your own mounting hardware, or just zip-tie it?

Have fun with that

I said nothing about intelligence, however you put yours in serious question by not knowing the difference between intelligence and ignorance. Neither did I say I would cool the back of any board rather than the front. All I said was that the area under a powerful GPU does get hot and that the fact that you don't know it demonstrates your ignorance of the issue. I look forward to hearing you help me make my case with more misquotes and name calling instead of sticking with the issues.

Well considering that the metal you'd need to cover up is also a layer of solder points, I'm not certain that would work. Once you add another layer, you still have to move the solder points to that layer to actually solder them. In essence, all you'd be doing is making the PCB thicker at that point.

In all honestly, I think it would take a total redesign of how GPUs are mounted on PCBs to make this work without any risk of shorting any contacts or without having to apply a TIM layer so thick it works adversely. GPUs would need to either be designed to include a backside heatspreader, or designed much like a double-sided memory chip. If they did that, I think backside cooling would become commonplace.

I honestly think it's time the major players (whomever they might be...) in PC design got together and came up with an all-new standard for motherboard and component layouts, as well as case design. ATX is old, and ITX basically just removed the slots. There has to be a better way...

Well covering it up would just be the simplest way, but if you put some thought and work into it covering it up wouldn't be that hard, they could smooth out the sodder points a bit and make the thin silicon piece have nochtes to fit where they couldn't smooth it out anymore.

I wonder how they make a CPU heatspreader, if they could just make one of those that went on the backside of the GPU it would work.

Also they don't have to make a spot for cooing the whole thing but just where the GPU core is and the memory, the rest could still be all ridgy and have metal points.

does it get hot, sure

is the best way to cool it from underneath

absolutely not; the fact that you fail to understand proves my point, you sir are a complete and utter idiot. Good day, I'm done embarrassing you any further, if you wish to continue I suggest you find a second grader so you can match intelligence!

What about a triple slot card ehh,

PS how to you close a thread?

So you can't close a discussion thread, uhh,
A triple slot card though big might come in handy for someone who doesn't want to do sli or crsfr, and just wants one power full card or only as one pci-e slot. But otherwise it is a big card, I think the slim or big *optional* backside heatsink is the way to go.

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/for [...] eview.html

one google search and away you go.