So I wasn’t sure if getting on VR was worth doing so, as I’m still trying to help
my ‘sick’ graphics card by it not rendering in 1080p. But I hoped it wouldn’t do too much to it; Jero was going to come on VRChat and I wanted to see him. Now I’m just going to skip the ‘confusing drama’ of him not saying anything on Discord when he got on VR and focus on finally being able to see him when Spoon was on.
I talked to him about what I’ve been doing with my graphics card, how I’ve been closely monitoring the temps everytime I’m gaming, and feel glad I finally have an actual thermal threshold I can believe in.
Jero though, feels I shouldn’t need to worry. That even taking apart the card, cleaning the dust off and replacing the paste, isn’t going to make much of a difference with the
temp: “a 5-15c difference at the most” he said. But in my mind.. “as long as it gets below 80c, I’ll be happy”.
But he feels I’m over-panicking, and asked me “have you stress tested your card on the games you play, with HWMonitor, and noticed the clock speed going down? If it is, then it’s thermal throttling”. I said “no” but started to feel ‘..yeah, I should do that’. But then I countered it by saying “I’m actually worried about doing that, due to how long this has been happening and how old the card is.. scared I caused permanent damage to the
card.” He shook his head no, doubting it, and also going by my own reports that I haven’t seen any visual artifacting to prove damage has been done to the card.
He also says the thermal paste can handle temperatures up to 140c, to not worry about the paste drying out on the GPU chip due to the card’s age, even adding that he had a card that worked fine for 7 years.
And he really advises me to do that stress test to help calm my fears. So I will, which is why I’m back in 1080p. No more stretched out windows.
—
Much later, in LS Media (without Jero there as he fell asleep in VR (again)), I was
with Muum and I told him about my issue. He seems to be on my side for this, even going as far as saying “too many things could happen if you take apart the fan and heatsink. You would be better off just getting a new graphics card than to risk damaging your current one.”
Granted, though.. he’s never seen nor heard the GPU chip having thermal paste (never saw a single video about it). He assumed the manufacturer made it impossible to take off the fans, that only the CPU gets paste on it.
.
In closing, what I might do tomorrow (depending on how I feel) is dedust my computer again, then take out the graphics card and give it (and the intake fans) a proper
dedusting, then put it back in. Anything I could do to knock off (at least) 5-10c.
Though I’ll do that after the stress test from playing Planet Crafter on Ultra graphics settings (depending on the results). I want to see if Jero’s right that I have nothing to worry about.
As for now, I’m going to bed. Strange thing though.. when I got off VR, is the exact moment that Jero also got off VR (and went to bed). Kind of creepy in a cool way.