I Copper Modded An RTX 3070 Ti. Memory Temperature Dropped 45 Degrees! This Is How. (110C to 64C)
Ah yes, 30xx series Nvidia GPUs. Known for being out of stock. Extremely Showy. Extremely hot. While I can't help the overly-flashiness or out-of-stockiness, I can help with the overly-hotness. Join me as I delve into the world of copper modding a poor 3070 Ti - and becoming its temperature savior. Featuring the memory torture test of Ethereum mining! Oh, joy! Of course, this doesn't only apply to 30xx series GPUs. Feel free to try this on some poor AMD RX 580, or some blower GTX 1080. You might just end up with the first blower GTX 1080 that doesn't overheat.
This GPU mod was done for fun. Replicate at your own risk.
Stuff Used In The Video (Affiliate):
Buy This GPU: geni.us/asusrtx3070ti (Amazon)
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* Annoyingly, you will need two sets of these to cover most GPUs!
Kapton Tape: geni.us/thermaltape (Amazon)
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Best GPU Risers: geni.us/risers (Amazon)
My Go-To Bench SSD: geni.us/benchssd (Amazon)
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Questions and Answers:
Q: What size copper shims do I need?
A: If your GPU die and memory chips share the same cold plate, then .2mm less than the size of recommended thermal pads. If your memory die doesn’t share the cold plate (like in this video) then copper plates that are the exact size of your thermal pads will work.
Q: How much greater is the risk of shorting components?
A: If done correctly? Basically zero. Keyword correctly. If the copper plates are able to move easily, that’s an issue.
Q: What about galvanic corrosion?
A: There is no risk of galvanic corrosion, so long as you use a thermal paste with no metal particles in it. Yes, some thermal paste contains metal particulate. Why? Who knows!
Q: What is the flashing light around 13:10?
A: Motherboard status light. Not a short! :P
Q: Why do the SMDs look crooked at 5:43?
A: IDK, that’s the design of the board. They are still attached and mounted diagonally.
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What blows my mind is that they charge a literal arm, leg en kidney for these cards.. and cannot spend 5 dollars worth of R&D to bring memory temps down. Well done what a great result!
That's exactly what I thought.
well they need to sell new cards sooner better than later :)
The problem is with memory chips. GDDR6X are much hotter than expected. Well, testers fucked this up
@@WszystkoZajeteOMG409 testers fucked this up? which "testers"?
@@johnmachter40 Somebody has to test the product before release so they can fix it up.
So let me get this straight. They went out of their way to make a dedicated memory cooling plate, but didn’t make it large enough to cover the entire chip surface and they couldn’t spare 1mm of thickness, for better cooling. Sounds about right for GPUs that were scalped for 2-3x the msrp.
It's not the scalper's fault that Asus makes crappy products.
They've got to sell those coolers. 😏
Ngl you had us in the first half
i would imagine the main reason to be the manufacturing tolerances.
@SteveQ you are right. the actual fit of the heatsink seems to be really bad aswell, not even being ontop of a lot of the surface area of the chips.
This is one of the very best guides on doing anything inside a gpu that I’ve seen. I would feel totally comfortable undertaking what you’ve done here. Great job, and thanks! I was looking at some videos on replacing the pads and they left me feeling really nervous.
For those trying to do this with a single piece GPU cooler, I recommend measuring for the copper shim thickness by using plastic gauge. You'll have to disassemble and reassemble your cooler a few times to get the clearance measurements.
Wouldn't the results still be off? The thermal pads are meant to compress. Copper isn't.
@@enermaxstephens1051he's trying to find the thickness of what the pad is squished and then get shims in that thickness as to keep it the same.
The thickness probably varies in different spots by how much I don't know. I would have tried also to use a single piece of copper for a shim. Might even be possible to drill tiny holes and screw copper shim to the heatsink so it can't move then no worry about the shim moving and shorting something out. @@trmgregor
This is the first video I have seen of yours. It was on my homepage. I watch a decent amount of PC news and creators and I like your style. I commend you for trying something that can be scary and I am impressed with the results! I have never seen anything like this before. Keep doing what you're doing!
Thank you for the feedback!!
not for drinking alcohol... jajaja
Молодец. Хороший результат!
Samr here !! The algorithym caught you !! Now push !! Your channel is real good !! Big love from Québec !!
same same 🔥🔥🔥🙂🙂❤️❤️❤️❤️
Neat idea, but for the others want to try this mod and find out the vram modules and gpu die are sharing the same cold plate you must use thinner copper sheet than your stock thermal pad, because the stock thermal pad will get squished by the cold plate pressure so the thermal pad got little bit thinner. Otherwise, it will hurts the die temperature because the die won't get enough mounting pressure.
I do agree. I will add some QnA in the description for this.
I came here to say this exact thing. I have a RTX 3090 that was thermal throttling while mining and I replaced the thermal pads and it no longer throttles but the memory still tops out around 100C so I really want to try this. Only other suggestion I have is that it may be better to use a strip of copper across the vram instead of individual shims.
@@cheerbeerification Don't do that, just use splitted pads. Vram modules can have slight difference in hight due to soldering! That's why flex thermal pad is used. It can have variations in high and with complete copper piece you might not provide good contact with all modules, keep that in mind.
@@cheerbeerification you could probably cut a sheet with the desired thickness so that each row of modules share 1 copper plate instead of each 1 having their own.
@@Kalisparo I was thinking about doing a "hybrid mod" with a very thin (maybe 0.3 mm) high quality thermal pad directly on the VRAM, and then a 1.2mm copper strip on each 4 module cluster, to fill most of the 1.5mm gaps. I figure the thin thermal pad will solve any height difference and conductivity issues, while the copper will still radically reduce thermal resistance.
Subbed. Your video is so informative and most importantly: so chill. I like the style of your video plus these are the content that I enjoy. Keep up the great work! Cheers!
Amazing! I've used copper thermal pads in the past but for IGPUs. Excellent video! Keep up the good work 👌
Man, that's an insane temp drop, kudos to you for sharing. And by the way, production level of the video, how well you are articulated and effortless humorous bits you place in makes me think you need to continue doing this. Seriously, great content, keep it up!
Yes, very well done.
yes?
this video is sponsored by ImDumbKillMeNow repair service. have a nice day
Personally, if your card takes 1.5mm pads on the memory modules, I’d use 1mm copper shims, or 1.25mm would probably be ideal if they make that size, those 1.5mm thermal pads compress when you clamp on the cooler if you haven’t noticed. And I’d definitely use thermal paste on both sides of the copper shims to transfer heat and prevent them from moving. I used to cool my CPU with a TEC (thermal electric cooler/Peltier) and I used a 40x40mm copper plate with thermal paste on both sides back in the day. The tape is a great idea. If you use conformal coating or nail polish, they’ll deny any warranty claims. Leave as little evidence as possible. If your card is out of warranty, the coating is actually a better idea, or both to be safe. If you’re going to do this be extraordinarily careful when reassembling the cooler. Too much pressure one way or another or on one component or another and you could instantly overheat your GPU or even crack the die or damage some other critical component. This is not something for novices to be doing, if you’re not confident, get help.
What were you cooling with a Peltier? Since they are absolutely a horrible solution for CPU cooling.
@@zedorda1337 then go do it
@@zedorda1337 4790K with a 400 watt TEC
@@zedorda1337 also, yeah, it wasn’t great, it was sub zero at idle, around 35F under load, but no more over clocking over head room, it was more of an experiment that was short lived. I also set up a series of TECs to create a chiller for a GPU loop. But again, not worth the effort of installing all the insulation and constantly monitoring temperatures and for condensation. That was a cool setup though, I sandwiched 4 or 5 100 watt TECs, this was years ago, between two cold plates and liquid cooled the hot side, I also liquid cooled the hot side of the CPU TEC. So the cold side acted as a chiller for the liquid cooling the GPUs. But again, the GPUs were cooler, but not enough to provide better over clocks vs a quality custom loop. Back then power limits weren’t an issue. We could bypass them with a custom BIOS. People talk about the crazy power draw of 3000 series cards, but I was pulling 425 watts from a 700 series Titan, two actually, 450w from got GTX 980’s, 1080 TI’s I actually ran stock because they were good out of the box, 2080 TI’s I ran a 380w BIOS. My 3090 is 500w.
what about UV glue?
Great idea!! I have the exact same Asus RTX 3070 Ti TUF card and have been having trouble with the memory temps. An external fan on the backplate helped bring it out of the danger zone, but it's still not enough. It's good to know the memory heat sink on this card is completely separate than the main GPU heat sink so spacing issues due to thickness of the copper shims will not really be an issue. I really want to do this but sucks to void the warranty. Good job, thanks!
I think the cause of the issue with this particular card is the fact that the memory heatsink only contacts about half of the memory die. If there was full coverage and they used thinner, better thermal pads, it probably wouldn't have had issues. Great video
Also that it's directly under the airflow of the hot air from the GPU cooler.
Fully agree. You can clearly see the sticky thermal pads were pretty much mispositioned in the first place
Instructions unclear. Got drunk on the alcohol. Started beef with NVIDIA on Twitter. ...
Brilliant. Your video is in my youtube home and your thumbnail really nailed it dude. I think I finally found what to do with my high temp GPU. Impressive idea !
Loving your new channel bro!! 👏🏼 Well done on such great work. ✌🏼 keep it up ☺️
In the future you can try non conductive pads like aluminum nitride, only half as thermally conductive as copper but its an electric insulator and still 200 ish times more thermally conductive as the sillicon pads most gpu's use
Interesting… I need to do more research into this. I have never heard of using Aluminum Nitride!
I am very intrigued. I found some aluminum nitride plates on aliexpress. I'm thinking I can triple stack some 0.6mm ones since the recommended pads for my 3080 are 2mm.
@@Waffls i looked for 1mm, 1.5 was too thick and too expensive. i ordered 20 pieces just in case.
@@dandyworks Great video sir! Have you come to any conclusion about the aluminum nitride?
@@dandyworks regardless, you proved the GPU's are built cheap. No way the manufactures don't know about this, Kudos for sharing this info
Thank you so much fren I use these mainly pm my pis I didn't realize that this could be used on gpus. Makes sense though! Imma try this on my 2060 ;)
BEN BEN BEN AYOOOOOO
2060 it's not too hot to try this
Very clever mod, with surprising results no less. Thanks for sharing your findings, keep it up!
I'd have used thinner copper pads. Thermal Pads have some "give" as you tighten the heat sink down, they get compressed. Copper is a metal, while it's ductile, it's not compressible due to it's hardness. Edit 1: Just saw you filed the excess. Neat!
it also expands when heated. so it gets tighter. compressing the chips
Good point@@fulgerion
Incredible video. Proves you don't have to be Linus tech tips or gamer nexus to make some incredible footage, and mods! Great video, and brilliant. Never once have I seen another try such a thing.
Anyone can do anything.
@@jjglistens5312 that was literally his point lmfao
Bravo! I always wondered if this kind of mod were possible. These are some S tier results, far bigger drop than making sure you have a metal backplate thermally connected to the back of the PCB.
Your video was so well documented and easy to understand. also adding the links to amazon in the description was great too.
This was a really well made video, first one I've seen, but very entertaining and fun to watch even if I never plan to copper mod lol!
Honestly i loved the quality, the editing, the bit of humor that you had, genuinely VERY enjoyable to watch and also very informative, those results are INSANE too, really good job !!!! I have an asus rog 3060 ti, im not sure if the memory gets as hot but if it does, ill check when i get home, i might aswell do this kind of mod myself :D
Great result! People offering advice on changes you should make are missing the point! YOU HAD A 40C DROP IN TEMPS! DONT TOUCH ANYTHING AND BACK AWAY SLOWLY! Great job. Take care.
I think you're missing the point bud. The idea is good but the execution could be better. 10s of scrolling shows a litany of improvements to this mod that warrants revision, especially 1:1 height for thermal pad to copper shim.
This man is an engineer
Wow, that's an insane mod, you reached what the manufacturers didn't dare to try! But you showed, whit a lot of patience and knowledge nearly everything is possible 🤯 Keep up the great work 🙏🏻 Greetings from germany ☺️
What an effective method of cooling modifications. First time seeing and hearing of this. Great job!
awesome video. havent seen the copper plates for cooling before, Im a bit shocked that the stock cooler couldnt do its job.. kinda sad lol subscribed
Cheers for the job done properly! I did this copper shim mod a year ago for all of my GPUs, both AMD and Nvidia.It's very time consuming to mod a heck lot of cards, i ran into many issues trying to keep the shim in place as they can slip off at high temp, but the result is on another level compare to even the most expensive thermal pad on the market.
See my reply above about using KPX or Kryonaut paste, because they both have really good adhesive properties.
Great video there mate, I did a fantastic mod on a 1080ti a few years back where I installed Noctua 3000rpm fans to the stock cooler and saw my temps go from 87c or thereabouts, all the way to low 60's. I could not believe how much of a difference and my thermal throttling was not a factor anymore. This copper mod looks the goods though, good work and thanks for the upload of your work.
You are such a great presenter. Really man, hats off to you. Very interesting results with the copper shim. I have ordered one, as the result of your video. Cheers man!
I Gelid pad modded my 3080 FE and got decent improvements, but the G6X still runs hot into the 80s or 90s when mining hard. I feel like this with copper or alu might be the next step to take, inspired with fresh enthusiasm by your success! Enjoyed the vid, well put together, liked and subbed 👍👍
Did you try it?
@@peterhindes56 I was going to consider buying a 40 series card so I could begin experimenting more with the 30 series, but then the 40 series came out... And no way I can afford a 40 series card! So I've not tried further mods yet.
Wow, what a great experiment Dan! I'm not a miner whatsoever, but this will help a lot for rendering long duration video or motion video. Keep doing what you're doing 👍
Dang dude, 45c reduction! That’s nuts! I should do this across my 30 series rig and see how performance improves! Keep it up, man! Content is great!
Turn 50% power and temp limit like 11:55 and you also get 45c reduction without mod.
@@GennPen that's his fan
DO NOT DO THIS it’s completely idiotic there are a lot better methods that are very safe and effective unless you wanna put your family at risk with your 24 7 rig
@@HoloScope its not fan. its power and temp limit for GPU.
@@GennPen oh ok
Amazing video... Huge help! You answered every question before I asked it 👍 My 3090 is ruining 100C so I'm doing this.
awesome job man, keep up the good work!
An alternative to tape is Thermal Grizzly Shield, it's basically nail polish, but designed to shield stuff from liquid metal. Unsure if other similar products exist and I haven't used it myself but there you go.
nail polish. its nail polish.
Or just use enamel varnish of any kind... such as nail polish
You could also use Plasti Dip, which has insulating properties and can be removed without leaving any residue if no primer has been used. I use the stuff to seal microcontroller boards and electronics for models intended for outdoor use.
Nail polish, hasn't failed me in 5 years 🤷
Good job DJ, there are multiple ways to protect the SMDs around the GPU die and mem components. Take care
I did something similar to 4 RX 570s that I water cooled. I used a thermal adhesive to keep the copper in place though. But, I knew I was never going to take them off. Nice walkthrough, and congrats on your success.
U water cooled 570s 🤣🤣🤣
Bruh that gpu is fine with no coolers
Nice work young man. Thanks for the help Peace
One thing that I have recently learned is that some thermal pastes (specifically KPX) has a "cure" time of several heat and cool down cycles and when it is "cured", it makes a pretty dern good adhesive which would definitely help keep the copper from moving. Kryonaut also has some really good adhesive properties.
Yes, and there are also thermal adhesives made specifically for these types of applications.
@@General_Griffin Yes, but thermal adhesives are so strong that they will remove the memory chip from the board before they will let go of it; so make ABSOLUTELY sure that you want what you're doing to be permanent.
@@Calango741 I wasn't aware it could be *that* strong, thanks for the information.
@@General_Griffin Yeah, I bought an NVMe SSD once that had a heatsink thermal pasted onto it and I ended up destroying it just trying to get the heatsink off.
That sounds like a neat idea for GDDR6X. Though, just to nuance something you said, the casing of the memory chips is insulated from the silicon inside thanks to its diffusion barrier, so the thermal paste and pads are for proper contact and not insulation. Of course you don't want your copper pads to slip and short something on the card, so taking measures against that is wise :)
Also, the thermal issues may not be due to the heatsink itself, but rather due to ASUS' asinine choice of going with a thick thermal interface, which is a very bad choice as it reduces the efficacy of heat transfer.
@@lennard9331 Thick is good, if it is not too thick. The problem is that the installation pressure or thermal pads are not thick enough for many cards and then the pads are nothing but insulators.
@@NVMDSTEvil naww if it's too thick u can also bend the pcb and like the 1st comment said if the pads are too thick they also highly affect thermal transfer efficiency so u want the thinnest thermal pads possible that will still make contact with the components and the heatsink simultaneously...
@@ronjones3977 No, the thinnest possible pad that still maintains contact will not attain the correct compression factor to enable thermal transfer. The correct amount of compression of the pad must happen or the pad is nothing but an insulator.
@@NVMDSTEvil only the slightest of pressure is needed to achieve the thermal transfer if you go too thick I've definitely seen negative thermal affects probably from squishing the die but regardless you go too thick you WILL BEND THE PCB which after years of heat cycles could definitely affect longevity...
learned a lot, loved your work. thanks buddy
My guy, the video was fantastic, with some amazing information!
Absolutely fantastic content!! Amazing results! As a mechanical engineer, your solution is top notch. Simple, cost effective, efficient and obviously works well. Props!
hi is using copper safe for gpus instead of thermal pads?
@@AmeerQ99 as long as you take precautions as shown in the video as well as taking size into consideration, then yes it can be. It's definitely more work than just using proper sized pads. I mentioned size because the physical size of shims can cause contact issues for other parts. It's one of those things you'll want to measure 2 or 3 times to be sure.
That is one amazing memory temp. I used copper shim for my 3080 TUF OC non LHR previously and it only get as low as 86C when mining. It baffles me that GPU manufacturer didn't use copper instead of pads. I guess they choose the easy way and the hell with the temp :)
because when selling something for 1000 dollars, spending an extra couple of bucks to make sure it works it just TOO much money ;)
Wow, well done !!! Simple and brilliant :)
Great idea, and great video. Keep them coming.
Well done, sir. That's a massive improvement - one the manufacturer should have achieved without you having to do it.
Been dealing with this issue for a while on my 3090, even the the point were I have some K5 pro on my vrms and memory modules. Definitely going to try this in combination with that instead of thermal paste to see how well it works out. Will try and remember to post an update once I have them on as my memory modules also get pinned around 110 degrees
I’m dealing with the same issue with my evga 3090ftw3 ultra
Update ? :P
@@mrx-jz8us I’m wondering that as well
@@mrx-jz8us the copper shims I ordered just came in a few days ago, they got loose during shipping and were all jumbled together so I need to sort them by size but once I get that done I’ll be cleaning off some of the K5 Pro off and replacing it with the proper sized copper. Probably won’t have time to do all that until my next days off though
@@mrx-jz8us So after installing the shims I got about a 10 degree drop in temperatures on my memory chips so it now only peeks at 100 degrees but regularly stays at around 98 degrees under NiceHash QuickMiner 's High performance setting. I've included a graph of 30min before, red line, and 30 min after, green line in the Imgur link below. My card is water cooled and due to not having enough of the same sized copper shims for each side I'm using 0.3mm sized shims on the side with the die and 0.2mm sized shims on the side with the backplate. I'm using the K5 pro on either side of the shims for my thermal paste and I'm using EKWB Quantum Vector FE for my cooler. For the before temps I had the card running in the background for several hours on the medium performance setting before running on high for long enough to confirm that my memory temps still reached 110 and for after temps I let the card run for around 2 hours to make sure that my loop reached temperature equilibrium before grabbing the last 30min of temp data Also something interesting to note is that I was too lazy to reapply my thermal paste to the GPU die itself which while doesn't harm performance, did increase hot spot temps by 2 degrees and increased overall GPU temps by about 1 degree. So nothing major with my use case but still something interesting to keep in mind imgur.com/9aVVxXR
great video i love experimenting like this well done. subed
Nice video, really. I like this stuff. Thx for video.
Looking at the thermal pad after disassembling the heatsink, I noticed that it only covered half of the memory chips. This was probably the cause of the high temperatures. Searching the internet, I came to the conclusion in these Tuf models, only the Tuf 3070/Ti models have this problem. In the Tuf 3070/ti (GA104), they used a modular heatsink, made for the tuf 3080/ti, 3090 (GA-102, considerably larger chip) models, leaving the memory chips on the Tuf 3070/ti boards partially uncovered. In this tuf 3070 model, the chips were soldered in the wrong place or they used a wrong heatsink.
other half is on the memry chips
That's also what I've spotted. Probably, repositioning the thermopads to cover full VRAM dice would be enough. The main radiator would take care of some cooling. Would it work as good? Probably not, but definitely less risky :)
@@danielsatko- But anyway, at 10:40 radiator has incomplete coverage over the chips. Even with the best thermal pads that won't suffice.
We are at the point where hardware manufacturers have figured out *planned obsolescence* and the only way to prevent this is to vote with your wallet. Refuse to buy deliberately poorly designed products and spread the word about them. Do your research before buying. Lookup for review videos with complete disassembly for models you want to buy and see if there are any design problems with them. If no such videos exist this is the reason to avoid the product and look for another model from another brand. Design issues could be numerous, Ex. when heatsink has small external frame that covers memory chips, but ineffective, or when memory chips are covered partially, or only some chips are covered. Heat tubes have to be soldered to the heatsink and the main thermal pad has to be made from thick copper, not steel. There are also could be many points of failure on PCB itself, Ex. low quality components, no fuses, weird placement of hot-components not cooled by the heatsink, etc.
it seems like this is only on the Ti since the non Ti does NOT have the modular heatsink for the VRAM
I used to work in a facility acquired by a very large company that specialized in TIM (Thermal Interface Material) Production. These thermal pads were used in all electronics from headlights, underwater pool lighting, electric vehicles, cell phones, etc. We were never officially told what each part was for but after becoming familiar with the general idea of each product we could come up with our own unverified conclusions. Those copper plates were something that I got to punch out on some of the presses & the thermal pads used on the GPU memory look familiar. Obviously our liquid division would essentially create the cooling thermal paste which I believe is now mainly what is used on larger electronic boards over actual punched parts. We used Kapton tape for splices when cutting down master rolls or when running thermal material through the punch presses where kapton itself was the center most material & then coated in something else. Kapton tape was getting expensive & so our team leads would come around making sure people weren't grabbing multiple rolls of kapton tape & piling them up at the work stations. It is awesome to see how well the copper plates cooled down the GPU! Incredible results! Now I know what those copper shims were being used for. Awesome video!!
It doesn't "cold down", it transfers more efficiently the heat.
I have a 3090, my buddy had a 3080. We were both having random black screen crashes. I pulled mine apart and repasted it and put brand new pads on and my issues went away. He got a 3090 and sold his 3080, and the guy who bought it messaged him about memory overheating issues. The guy who bought it opened it and said the pads were dry and cracked. He repadded it and it is fine now. If you are having heat issues with these cards, definitely repaste and put some brand new thermal pads on it. Under heavy load my memory temps go to mid 90s now, instead of 100+
Love it dude! next level is getting a full water block for your card.
That's a huge improvement, especially considering the low cost of materials and the work involved. The only thing I would possibly do differently is use thermal glue on one side of the shims, so the shims can't move, and thermal paste on the other, so it can still be disassembled.
How hard is thermal glue to remove
@@iamdmc It's actual glue so not the best idea if you plan on selling, RMA or waterblocks. The point of all this is it's reversible.
@@iamdmc Thermal glue is usually a sold as a two-part epoxy, so it's not going anywhere without a lot of work. I would NEVER use it on both sides, because you'd be screwed if you had to disassembled it again. I was considering doing it to my RTX 3080 FE, which has the same VRAM issue that he's having in the video, but I'm leaving it alone in case of failure so I can RMA it easier. After my warranty is up or if I can get another graphics card, I'll be modding the VRAM on it though.
Great video, thank you, subscibed :). Is the Kapton tape really necessary? I can't see any way short of a big impact that the copper plate can come in contact with any of the solder terminals and short out. Perhaps a conductive material could find it's way in there over time and bridge the gap, but then this can happen with the heatsink itself. mmmmmm?
Congrats man. I'm subbing. Hope to see more good content from you :D
these type of videos get less painful as the prices drop, sweet mod man. I wish my RTX 2060 super had memory temps, it just doesn't have the sensors or something.
Haven't seen an actual copper heat sink in years. Looks like they need to make a comeback!
I say they need to just for the aesthetics. The EVGA Kingpin 1080 Ti was gorgeous.
@@dandyworks i have it on me aorus 1080 ti extreme waterforce its have coper cold plate on memory and gpu
Copper is 5x the price of aluminum, by weight. It's also 4x more dense than aluminum. Shipping costs would be higher for both consumers and producers, and it could potentially cause mounting pressure issues, but probably not. Imagine a Copper edition DH-15 and it cost $400 instead of $100. That's mainly why there's the compromise of using copper heat pipes and aluminum fins, if your entire heat sink was copper the heat pipes wouldn't be necessary.
Word of warning, this only works "well" if you have a secondary heatsink for the memory. Otherwise you'll have to find ways to fill in the gaps if you have a large single heatsink, pretty much exactly. As in you have to measure the exact spacing without thermal pads and then get copper shims that thickness or stack various copper shims to that thickness. This is pretty finicky and is basically trial and error unless someone already did it for you in a convenient video/reddit post. Otherwise, if you don't get it just right, you'll have a burning gpu and good memory temps or good gpu temps and burning memory. Luckily, the copper shims aren't very expensive so you can get a bunch of them for experimentation, plus they're basically infinitely reusable. LTT did a video about an extremely thick foam/paste composite material that mostly fixes this problem. It's very messy, an absolute pain to cleanup, and isn't really cheap. But it does work reasonably well. Otherwise, outstanding video. I more often than not find proper thermal pads are good enough.
I was thinking about that, tempted to do this mod to my Vega 56s (HBM memory drops performance when it gets over 80C) but it’s a single heatsink for the whole thing
@@tjarsun You wouldn't want to use that on an exposed die like your gpu core or HBM, good way to shatter the die, for memory that has a proper package like GDDR# then this can be useful
if you know the thickness of your memory thermal pads this could still work in theory, you'd just need either very very specific thicknesses of shim or you'd have to start at a thickness you an get and sand it down to the thickness you need
Y’all over hear tryna burn your house down 😂🤣
@@AphillyatedYT we feel most alive when rapidly hurtling towards death :P
holy s*** dude, that is an amazing diff in temps. I didnt even think I was having heat issues, but Im sure going to look into this haha. Excellent video, sir.
Great educational content - thanks man!
I did something very similar to this on my cards but instead of using full copper pads, I used them like an IHS. I bought 0.5mm copper shims and sandwiched them between the memory and the exisiting thermal pads. My theory was it would allow more thermal pad to do its job which was correct and went from 108 to 75. Shimming like this reminds me of the Samsung controllers with the metal cap moulded as part of the case with the die bonded to it. I forsee that in the world of vram very soon
This is better because many cards have different sized gaps between memory and heatsink; some cards have different sizes on the same card! So one memory bank gap on the card will be 1.3mm and another gap will be 1.5 mm! Also getting a tub of thermal putty from digikey is best when you need to do this to a bunch of cards, as it much more economical, in addition to allowing you to have it mold to heatsink and shim.
do we need to put thermalpaste/putty between copper shim and memory, using your method?
@@matniYeah, I just stuck a gob of paste between the memory and the shim. The original thermal pads were used between the shims and the heatsink
Haha you are a pioneer of this work. Another website was talking about what you did and so I landed here! I´d love to do it on mine now too, but I dunno nothing about actual sizes of my card. Congrats to all of you who did this and succeeded.
You are a fantastic teacher and very thought out presenter. Cheers!
Great idea, definitely will try after getting this card.
Thanks i've done it on my 3070ti: from the start i mined eth@lhr75 with vram oc +2000 and core locked at 1500@830mv (average 62MH with T-rex) -stock card was about 106°C/108°C@100% fan with this minning profile -repad card was about 96°C/98°C@90% fan with this minning profile -copper mod is about 88°C/90°C@70% fan with this minning profile (the card is realy silent without overheating) Great catch here ^^
the pads you removed were only half on those chips! outrageous! the manufactuer should be ashamed. Hey. nice job, dude! i bet a proper repad would have been in order even if you had not preformed this procedure.. the 30 series were so hit and miss as far as quality... 3070's are particlarly bad with temps🤒 ... and i might try it.. haven't needed to.. yet.?.?....
Yeah, believe me I was surprised to see the pad placement myself. I had a little bit of a “wtf” go through my head when I saw the memory modules simply weren’t completely covered with the pads in the first place!
no wonder his temps were so high pre-mod
@Rhae yeah but not the recent stuff on Nvidia's side, the TUF is actually one of the better models to purchase. This was poor quality control which can happen to anyone and gpu mining just makes it worse
@bASIC Miner thats why he probably reached 110C. mine 3080 OC from ASUS TUF doesnt goes above 80C in VRAM temp.
@@Wolf89b the thermal pads if you look at it when he takes the cooler off, nearly a third or more of the vram is exposed on multiple chips. Its poor quality control rather than a bad design
Yea nice video man first time seeing one your vids... I like!
I have two of these exact GPUs in 2 PCs. I serendipitously solved the overheating issue by installing a side panel fan blowing directly through the memory fin stack. In one of the cases, the side panel has mounting holes for a 120mm fan. I added a magnetic mesh filter. On the other case with an acrylic side panel, I cut hole for the fan and installed a mesh filter over that, too. I didn't have to take apart or mod anything to the GPUs. They both run at 57 degC playing Halo Infinite, and around 35 degC doing anything else. Good video, though.
Hey just to let you know, you shouldn’t use alcohol on the memory modules because they are cased in plastic and isopropyl eats plastic that why the modules get more cloudy the more you put on, I know this because I did it myself, never again though
Dude, keep this up my guy. Never thought of copper plates for the memory. Trying to keep my 3070ti's under 100C. Do another video like this for keeping mem temps low but the GPU's can be vertical. Find a way to keep those plates in place. or something else that can be used. Most have GPU's vertical.
Use thermal glue instead of thermal paste. Problem solved. They won't move an inch....
damnn dude thats like an amazing difference! great job!
enjoyed the video. Very interesting, informative and entertaining. Said to myself I would try this but I'd probably break my card lol. I bet there was alot of satisfaction when the temps successfully reduced and by alot. I'm impressed
For chips/laptop GPU/CPU's without heatspreaders i recommend high viscosity (Difficult to spread but with some experience it will get easier) and not runny thermal paste like MX to prevent or delay the runoff or pump-out effect for better long-term stability. Easy to spread pastes give great temperatures at the first weeks or month's but the temperature can suddenly creep up. SYY-157, Thermagic ZF-EX, FuzeIce Plus, Shin-etsu 7921-5 are good pastes for this.
Update GD-2 paste also works well for direct-die chips. and SYY-157's 2022 formula has changed to regular desktop cpu paste. I recommend to use thermal putty instead of paste between the copper shims (1.0mm this case with Upsiren U6 Pro)
Incredible result, great job! Insane that we pay these ridiculous prices and still need to go through these extreme measures to get some proper cooling on GDDR6X cards. How the F did so many manufacturers miss such an obvious and simple problem/solution?!
Because of the risks associated it would greatly increase manufacturing costs to mass produce. Then you'll complain about the high prices. And most consumers will never even know that memory is getting hot because the product will perform to spec for its warranty period regardless.
@@BlueMax109 A manufacturer should easily be able to design something simular into the original cooler design. This is not rocketscience.
@@pacaro4644 They can. But it will cost you more.
@@BlueMax109 Not as much as I'm spending to watercool my 3080, which gets 120c memory junction without overclocks @ 100 fanspeed. Not kidding. A little piece of copper could have fixed that.
@@pacaro4644 yes. It could. And then they have to magnify the cost of manufacturing that times millions of units. With an increase in assembly complexity costing more per unit on top of the copper content itself. While increasing the chance of catastrophic failure because its electrically conductive. All leading to higher cost per unit for the consumer at a time of record prices when 99 percent of their customers don't ever even look at the memory temperature.
This is the kind of modding and tinkering i love. In my journeys of delidding and running bare die (not to be confused with relidding where the IHS is reapplied), i used clear nail polish to insulate the capacitors. Prob a bit cheaper than the tape. Also a tiny bead on each IC is sufficient, no need to spread.
Monster mod! Great job man!!
Alright. I´ve done this. About 8 Months ago. Without all the Tape and it works fine. Just make sure the GPUs are vertical and not upright! ot the chimneys can fall out to the sides. The Thickness of the Chimneys doesn´t actually matter at all on the TUF card, as the subcooler bends really easily and you can fit pretty much anything in there. A little bigger will actually improve your thermal mass and hence the cooling is a slight tick better. What you´ll need to adress and it´s the same thing I had to do now is. LESS and I mean WAY LESS Thermal compound. Definetly NOT a generous amount. Only enough to spread the entire surface, but nothing more. The Heat from GDDR6X did dry out my Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut after about 7 months. And thats a fkn expensive paste. With a cheaper one this will definetly be quicker. All it needs to the harden and not transfer shit anymore is a small rig crash or a real nice coldfront for a day. Suddenly my memory was back at 110°C again with the same chimneys and setup. Redid the whole thing now with less paste and thicker chimneys. Means less chance to dry out and if it does it is a quicker replacement. Else great video and good explaination keep up the good work.
Thank you for your insight! I will be doing a follow up video in the future where I disassemble and look at how the card is holding up. As for the thermal compound, I think you are right, I should probably use less the next time I do disassemble and reassemble.
I hope u will be big youtuber soon to do crazy expansive shit 😂
y'know... I wouldn't mind doing some expansive things! I just need some new, crazy ideas...
Such a cool video !! Well done !!
Great vid. I just picked up this card for 340 bucks to put in my recording machine and I am now going to do this mod. I really like the idea of that memory heatsink but I did hear about it not being great.
Often the pad thickness is incorrect from factory and just changing them to the correct thickness will yield a similar result.
Only a few things should be taken into consideration here: Do not use so much paste. Do not use anything to "spread the paste". The "470" chips need to also be cooled, don't just cover everything you see with tape, be tactful. Only a volume slightly bigger than a rice seed should suffice. Thermal paste is made to spread out equally on its own and fill the gaps between the contact surfaces by applying pressure when you connect them. Thermal applicators lower the paste efficiency as it causes tiny air bubbles to form in it, arguably reducing paste durability as well. Same as spreading the paste, do not readjust the contact elements, it disrupts the filling between surfaces, pulling in air where it shouldn't be. Following these you should see around 5 to 10 more degrees of cooling and increased stability and... ...oh no ...he's mining coins... why do I keep falling for these...
even arctic states that you should spread it, not too thin mind you but especially on bigger surfaces like GPU dies you should, also MX4 isnt even conductive so he doesnt need the tape
Damm, I also have a 3070Ti TUF and I run it in VR for about 14 hours a day (which is VRAM dependant), and also 3D content. Literally, when I saw the card was a TUF, I got so excited, as this video is pretty much a straight-to-the-point tutorial for my card Amazing video, insta subbed
Absolutely, amazing take on tackling the heat. Simply, the copper has about 50x better thermal conductivity rate, than any of the best thermal pastes. Let alone 1.5mm thick pads....
Dude you're the guy to bridge the gap between Miners and gamers, awesome work man🔥
Very fun project 😀 loved it
Take my sub and run to the future, production quality is really high not once did i feel like i wasted my time cant wait to see more
Well done. Interesting to know the dinamics in 3-6 months
thank u bro, that's a really effective treatment for graphic cards with the heating disorder. will try for sure.
Very good work! For the risk of short I think that, instead of single piece for chip, a single piece of cooper that cover all 8 chip it can go anywhere and short something. The con is that is more difficult to cut in the shape.
Just an after thought. Could you like glue them together? like use a super glue and stick them on the sides. The heat would be pushed upwards anyways.
i'm very impressed of the results of mod , like your whole channel , i hope you will be rewarded of you fantastic videos ! ( sorry if i haven't the best english i'm french and 14 so its no very easy )
Very good modding, brilliant idea😃
Hey DJ, great job on the video. Can’t wait to see your channel growth. Your link to the copper shims are for 20mm. Are they slightly oversized? Would you happen to know the size of the memory chips? Are they 15mm or 20mm. Thanks in advance 🙏
Informative video, thanks for the post.
Good job bro !!! You gave us a very good example !!! Congratulations !!!
Just amazing! Thanks ^^