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Thermal Epoxy Paste

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irish80122

Member
Joined
Apr 6, 2003
Location
Centennial, CO
I am working on setting up my watercooling system (as all of the OMG posts show) and I have some questions with doing so because it is my first time doing this.

The first question comes with my north bridge. I have a 8rda3+ motherboard which uses a thermal epoxy to hold the heatsink onto the chip. How do I break this bond without damaging the motherboard?

Also, I have bought a waterblock for my gf4 which is a MSI GF4 4200 card. It comes with a huge heatsink on it, and I am wondering if I should remove it to cool it more or not. It runs consistantly around 47C and I don't overclock it nor am I a big gamer, though I do sometimes. Should I just sell that waterblock in classifieds, or is it still worth doing it? I have everything set to go ahead and cool it, and I would like to, but I am not sure how much I will be removing because again the heatsink is huge. Here is what it looks like......
http://images10.newegg.com/productimage/14-127-070-06.JPG
http://images10.newegg.com/productimage/14-127-070-05.JPG

Thanks again for all of your help, I really need it!
 
Looks similar, so I may as well go for it. how did you break the epoxy though, or did you not have it? I have read about a blowdryer trick, I have heard of putting your board in the freezer (with a bag of course) but I don't know which one works and how easy or hard it is to pop it off after that
 
*Edit* Nevermind the motherboard, the heatsink popped off with little pressure without freezing. I still need advice on the graphics card however.
 
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He said it's pointless to watercool a video card if you're not going to overclcok it. The only thing you would gain is you would lose the fan noise. I wouldn't bother.
 
The edit was after my reply, but thanks for pointing that out anyway. I may do it to lose the fan noise, plus I may overclock in the future, I am just not the biggest gamer right now. What are the advantages of overclocking the card, I know this is off topic but it may help me decide if I want to put it on or not. I am assuming it is like OCing a CPU, but what are the stability risks and all? Thanks.
 
Very true, I love your avitar (sp) by the way! With that large heatsink that seems to cover the memory and everything, A would I damage anything by removing it if I am careful, and B would it hurt performance possibly to do that since it appears something is on the memory. Thanks.
 
Azeroth that is one crazy heatsink you put on that, even the ram sinks are gigantic.
 
You should be able to get it off pretty easily using the blowdryer trick. Nothing should be damaged in the process. If you do replace your HS with the waterblock, you will be able to overclock your video card GPU and RAM to higher frequencies. Just like in the CPU/system RAM basis of overclocking, it increases the performance of your video card. That means more FPS in games, everything runs much smoother. Games that this would especially be beneficial on are the newer games, of course, like Unreal Tournament 2003, Battlefield 1942, Half Life 2, Doom III, and any other graphic-intensive games.
 
i'm also want to water cool my gpu as the fan on the gpu is the loudest thing in my case atm. how much of an temp increase will adding the gpu block to a setup?
 
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