- Joined
- Sep 20, 2001
- Location
- Bakersfield, CA
I picked up this card for a very good price as it was the card alone with no box or accessories and ended up being a miner. This card is particularly desirable not only for being Kingpin card for a beast-level VRM, but it has triple bioses (one for LN2), and dual 8-pin PCIE rear connectors for a 380W power limit.
Giving the card a thorough inspection, it was missing many of the factory screws, the thermal pads were pretty nasty, and the heatsink was half clogged with dirt, dust and hair. So, a complete disassembly was required. Interestingly, the heatsink bolts to a secondary set of aluminum plates that cover the VRM and memory. So you have a thermal pad - plate - pad - heatsink series of interfaces. The VRM section also has it's own set of heatpipes to distribute heat around the primary heatsink. I purchased a variety pack of new thermal pads off of Amazon. I removed the fans from the heatsink and cleaned them individually. Then, I had to brush off the heatsink, then I scrubbed it wish a soft bristle brush with warm soapy water, and then gave it a several hour soak in vinegar to try to perk up the copper plating. After that, a careful application of fresh thermal pads and paste for the GPU itself, and then reassemble it as best I could. Since I was missing some screws, I tried to scrounge in my stash for anything that would work. The end result is a card that still misses a few, but none that would loosen the contact of any of the thermal cooling components. Being an ICX card, it has something like 10 thermal sensors on it. So, an hour test of the Unigine Heaven benchmark yielded the hottest ram chip running at 72C, and all of the other components (GPU and VRM) leveling out at a nice 65C at a 300W load. Clocks leveled out at around 1975MHz, so I hope to get the factory guaranteed minimum OC of 2025MHz.
It's currently installed in my Win7 4790K rig and seems to be a great match for it. Although, with the wife wanting to play Hogwarts Legacy, I might have to let her have it in place of her 1660 Super GDDR6. Oh the sacrifices....
Giving the card a thorough inspection, it was missing many of the factory screws, the thermal pads were pretty nasty, and the heatsink was half clogged with dirt, dust and hair. So, a complete disassembly was required. Interestingly, the heatsink bolts to a secondary set of aluminum plates that cover the VRM and memory. So you have a thermal pad - plate - pad - heatsink series of interfaces. The VRM section also has it's own set of heatpipes to distribute heat around the primary heatsink. I purchased a variety pack of new thermal pads off of Amazon. I removed the fans from the heatsink and cleaned them individually. Then, I had to brush off the heatsink, then I scrubbed it wish a soft bristle brush with warm soapy water, and then gave it a several hour soak in vinegar to try to perk up the copper plating. After that, a careful application of fresh thermal pads and paste for the GPU itself, and then reassemble it as best I could. Since I was missing some screws, I tried to scrounge in my stash for anything that would work. The end result is a card that still misses a few, but none that would loosen the contact of any of the thermal cooling components. Being an ICX card, it has something like 10 thermal sensors on it. So, an hour test of the Unigine Heaven benchmark yielded the hottest ram chip running at 72C, and all of the other components (GPU and VRM) leveling out at a nice 65C at a 300W load. Clocks leveled out at around 1975MHz, so I hope to get the factory guaranteed minimum OC of 2025MHz.
It's currently installed in my Win7 4790K rig and seems to be a great match for it. Although, with the wife wanting to play Hogwarts Legacy, I might have to let her have it in place of her 1660 Super GDDR6. Oh the sacrifices....
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