Right, this feels really weird. Feels like I either got to get my graphics card “up to the vet” or “to the doctor”, and hearing “before your visit, set your resolution back to 1024×768 to put less stress on it.”
And all I can feel from this is.. well, you know that old toy Stretch Armstrong? Instead of stretching the arms.. the entire toy looks like it’s stretched. It looks really bad, and I can’t believe I’ve handled this for many years. But, it’s the only thing I can do to prevent further damage to the card due to overheat. I don’t feel the card is
damaged, but I just want to make sure there’s no more risk of this.
It’s now Day 2 since I made a thread about this in the Microsoft Community discord server. Day 1, at night happened unexpectingly. I was editing the OP, covering any troubleshooting steps people might ask me (and my response to them) and suddenly this person with Japanese lettering started responding to me as I was halfway done with my editing.
After asking if my PC is a laptop or desktop (I said “desktop”), they asked me a very strange question (that made me question if I should wait for other help); “are there fans on the graphics card?”
Why is your computer illiterate ass trying to help me, if you never learned graphics cards have (at least) 1 intake fan!? But if it’s not that, then you clearly didn’t read the part in my OP when I said ‘the fans are screaming at me’. And they continued to ignore the OP when asking “do they spin at all during load”?
Yeeesss… READ THE FUCKING OP FFS!!! Why would I be saying the fans are screaming at me if the fans weren’t spinning on load?! After that, the conversation got a bit better.
They believe the issue is either the paste is going out, or the fans aren’t properly seated. Great.. the very thing I feared I might have to do. So I told them “at that case I might as well get a new card. Do you have any recommendations?” They did not, only going by how they do upgrades. So I felt “alright, I guess I’m going to be buying a new card then.” I know there’s a channel for this, to get recommendations. Figured I’ll just go to bed and ask the next day.
—
The next day came, and I didn’t expect the thread to still be active. But I did forget to say it’s ‘Solved’. Because someone else was trying to help me. They were asking if the
fans “were spinning close to max speed”. Since I wasn’t using MSI Afterburner at the time I didn’t know this, so I brought it up and then did a test with Planet Crafter, in 1080p, with the fans at 100% speed… and the temp was not good. It was around 84-86c. Wow. So even with the fans at their maximum speed, it isn’t getting the temp below 80c. ..That’s, bad. I think this proves I got an internal issue with the card.
…Great. Just great. And so I told them the story of me and that POS FX 9590, how I couldn’t get the paste off and it was going under the heat spreader. But this person felt I still had a shot at doing it, and sent me this video;
That’s definitely my card. And, it doesn’t seem that difficult as I thought. I don’t really have to worry about pulling it off and accidentally yanking the plug the fans are connected to. The plug is on the upper right side of the card. That’s good for me.
The guy in the video mentioned how dusty everything was of their card. Immediately a lightbulb turned on as being a highly possible culprit to the heat. It can’t breathe with all of that dust, and hardware needs to breathe to be cool.
And as for the paste removal (the biggest bane of my existence), I found it interesting he used a razor blade on the heatsink, then he used QTips (coated in Isopropyl Alcohol of course) to clean the rest. Also doing this to (carefully) remove the paste from the GPU chip itself, and removed the paste that went past the chip with more QTips.
QTips, huh? Very interesting. I was told to use a cloth (or paper towels) before. Probably why I fucked up so bad before. Then of course he added a pea-sized dot on the chip (then spread it out evenly on the dye), reattached the fans/heatsink (on the second attempt), and carefully put it back into place.
The person that sent me the video said “please try this, unless you really want to get a backup card first”. And that made me feel a tiny bit confident that I could undo my fuckup of the past and do this. Because this seems.. honestly a bit easier than to replace the paste on a CPU. There’s no risk of the paste going under the chip when cleaning the old paste off. But I’m sure my nervous hands are going to fuck it up so god damn bad. …I hope not. I can’t afford fuckups.
I’ll find out next week, once the items I ordered on Amazon arrive. I ordered new paste, a razor blade scraper (to remove the paste from the heatsink), and some QTips.
For now, I ‘volunteered’ (without being told this) by lowering my resolution (and monitor the temp when gaming). Now I finally know what temps are ‘safe’ and what isn’t. Once I’m done and notice the idle temp is much lower than 54c (and the on load temp stays
below 80c), I’ll set it back to 1920×1080.
Hopefully after doing this, it might give me the courage to finally give my mother a faster computer (my old hardware), to re-paste my FX 4350, and the 750 Ti.
Two good things came out of this at the end;
1. Nothing’s wrong with the case’s airflow.
2. The CPU idle/on load temp are OK.
I still might aim to get a NVIDIA card in the future. Dunno what right now.
EDIT: To the ones that are asking me “why don’t you open up your card and clean it off, then put it back together with the same paste that’s on there,” and believe me I really wish I could, to see if de-dusting it from the inside would help the card without needing new paste.
…But, this is not recommended in the slightest. With the card being this old, there’s a risk the paste has dried out, and putting it back together without applying new paste would make it worse. This is what I was told anyway. So I’ll need to wait until I get the equipment first.