Vapor chamber leak?

My friend has been using one of my GTX 570s for about a year now. Lately in planetside2 it's been hitting 90c and 100% fan speed, so I popped off the cooler to clean it and replace the thermal paste today.

When I pulled the heatsink off the gpu, it made a loud TSSSSSH noise, like opening a soda can. Theres also a small dot on the gpu ihs that I can't scrape off, and a small dot on the heatsink surface that I can't scrape off. It almost looks like a tiny hole but I can't tell.

Could the metal really have fused together and made a freakin hole if it has been running 90c for an extended time ?

To be more clear, the small dots I'm referring to are actually more like bumps, not dots. They are raised up like 0.5mm from the rest of the surface on both the GPU and the HSF surface. They are also in the same spot, they were touching each other while it was mounted.

That actually does sound like a popped vapor chamber. I read the thread title and said "No waaaaay" to myself, but there aren't any other explanations for that noise.
At normal room temp vapor chambers and heatpipes have a pretty solid vacuum in them (or, to be very specific, their internal pressure is almost exactly the vapor pressure of water at that temperature. For room temp, that's quite low), poke a hole in it and air rushes in.
It's junk, at that point.

This particular card was fresh-from-RMA when I gave it to him a year ago. There was literally almost no TIM at all on it when I took it apart today.

I've never heard that noise before either and I figured that's what it had to be. Luckily I have a few spare vapor chambers from all the dead 570s I've had of this exact model.

Thanks for the confirmation Bob.

edit: After putting it back together and trying it anyway, the temperatures are still 90c, even though it's fresh TIM, dust-free, and in a cold room. I guess the previous temperature problem was due to zero TIM, and now the problem is the empty vapor chamber. Will have to report back after I put a spare one on.

Got any pics? I'd like to see it.

I'll take a picture of the hole on the old chamber when I swap the new one in.

He's playing planetside with it right now. It's loud but playable.

It just sucks theres gonna be a permanent little bump on the GPU now Hope that doesn't affect the replacement cooler too much.

If it actually lost the vacuum / contaminated the H2O in the chamber, it would probably be running a lot higher than 90c. It's hard to say what's up.
How hot it runs with a no-vapor chamber like that depends a lot on how exactly the vapor chamber is laid out, something I don't know.

If you're feeling brave you can take a tiny tiny screwdriver and scrap the bump off. If you gouge the silicon deeper than the etching on it or crack it or scrape off any of the tiny caps surrounding the die, that may be the end of the GPU though. So be careful about it.

Update for you guys, we finally got around to swapping the chamber out.

My new phone sucks, but the first two pictures you can clearly see the TIM is burned black in one spot.

Third picture I cleaned it off and you can see the 2-3 holes.

Last pictures 2 pictures you can see the plating on the gpu ihs has come off and copper is showing through.

Temps dropped to 70c at 100% load. Mission success