8800GTX foam??

[swordfish1030]

I have 2 nvidia 8800gtx video cards from my old Dell xps720. I was cleaning them today and when I removed the cooler and the fan I noticed that there is white foam
pad ( looks like styrofoam ) between the cooler heatsink and the memory chips. The GPU has the typical thermal paste, but the memory chips have the foam.

Should I remove the foam and put thermal paste on these memory chips and thus the heat sink? Or is the foam thermal conductive??

Anyone know for sure.. please don't guess because i would rather not remove it and have it end up killing the cards..

Thank you..

 

[hundredislandsboy]

That's not foam. They're thermal pads and they work like thermal paste. The reason they use "foam" is due to the gap between the heatsink and the memory chips. If you remove them, you void the warranty if you still have one.

 

[swordfish1030]

That is what I thought.. Thank you.

 

[Kari]

those are thermal pads, and yes they are there to conduct heat from the chips to the sink.

I'm not sure if the chips will make contact with the sink with only a thin layer of paste, or if there will be a little cap in between. If it looks like it will make a contact then you can replace the pads with paste...

edit lol should have refreshed before sending...

 

[nforce4max]

If you left as they were you should be fine and they are very important.

 

[hundredislandsboy]

Be sure to monitor your GPU temps and fan speeds while gaming. When I had my old 8800 GTS 512 I found that they ran on the hot side 80 C and higher unless I manually set my fan to 90% while gaming.