thatpaulguy
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My Poor Graphics Card

My Poor Graphics Card

Sep 13, 2022

Okay, so it's not nearly as bad as it may seem. I did recently get my favorite GPU back from being in someone else's system for nearly two years and over time it has developed a bit of an issue. A heat issue to be specific. Every time I would try to start a benchmark test or run a game it would immediately fail, most of the time, taking the whole PC with it. I was hoping it would only be something that a good re-paste could handle, but I was nervous about taking the card apart.

Still, I managed to take the RX480 apart, clean it up with some isopropyl alcohol, and get it all assembled again without any left over parts, (there always seems to be at least one). I put it back in the machine I was using for testing, started a basic benchmark test and held my breath. Success. breathe out.

Although it means I didn't get to test the card before and after, I did get a very real sense of the improvement because it simply didn't work before I cleaned and re-pasted it. For any that read this and are not sure what I am talking about, I applied new thermal compound between the processing chip and the heatsink to keep it from overheating and shutting down. It's not extremely difficult to do, but there tend to be a lot of very small screws and parts to keep up with and you have to make sure its cleaned thoroughly without accidently knocking off one or more of the surface mounted devices on the board. It's delicate, but easy enough work if you're careful.

In the end, I have one of my favorite gaming PC parts back and it's working great. I am putting it through my standard run of all benchmarks and games and it's holding up very well, ands even outperforming some newer hardware, which was a bit of a surprise. What does this mean for the majority of people reading this? Not a lot, I imagine, but it was something that did take some effort and made me happy to see that effort pay off. The card works and I get to not only test it out, but will probably use it in a build very soon. It gives me material for at least two or three videos and I can't ask for much more from a piece of equipment that's at least six years old.

Mission accomplished.

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