Rate my liquid metal job...

[delshay]

no i never said that

No don't put LM on thermal paste/pads. .DANGER high risk to kill the card.

Tell me, what do you have on the inductors?. is it thermal paste or thermal pads. ..From your last posting it looks like you put "just thermal paste" on the inductors only. Can you confirm what you have done here.

 

[Morgoth]

No don't put LM on thermal paste/pads. .DANGER high risk to kill the card.

Tell me, what do you have on the inductors?. is it thermal paste or thermal pads. ..From your last posting it looks like you put "just thermal paste" can you confirm what you have done here.

this is how its now

 

[delshay]

this is how its now

& what do you have on the "coldplate" for the inductors? ..do you have thermal paste in this area too or do you have thermal pads?

 

[Morgoth]

coldplate is clean

 

[delshay]

coldplate is clean

I now know whats wrong. Where you went wrong from the start & you have not 100% completed the installation correctly.

I'm going to explain what you do have.

(1) You have excellent contact with the GPU die.

(2) You have excellent contact with the FETS.

(3) You have extremely poor contact from inductors to coldplate. Cooling inductors is not always mandatory it depends on the GFX card. Because our cards are so small it's recommended to have cooling on inductors for wider transfer of heat.

Short story is, the thermal pads you first fitted were too thick. You simply did not have the mounting force to squeeze them low enough so that the GPU & the FETS pads made proper contact. If you tried to use those pads, the PCB would have looked warped.


I need to post more details but I need to do something. But another short story, thermal paste is very rarely used on inductors. Generally it's never used ...Give me time to get back to this thread, need to go.

 

[Morgoth]

no need it working and its fine

 

[delshay]

no need it working and its fine

I'm back & I'm going to explain anyway.

Whenever there is differences in height between multiple "same soldered-in component" thermal pads are always used. This is because there are very slight differences in height when manufactured. Then you have the added soldered to the PCB which will further skew the height between the same component. It's very small but it exist. That's the reason why thermal pads are always used.

You can not ever get a perfect contact across all inductors with thermal paste. It simply does not work. Then again you can get way with it as the most important components are now properly cooled.

 

[Morgoth]

i realy dont get what the issue is.. even why i used the "ORGINALE" thermal pads it was quite a stack they added with the package...
so i used it as it was told in the manual.. heyy even the diagram wast even a vega 56 nano.... i dont have the book any more but thats what my memory tells me.. i did every thing as it told me.. it was NEVER perfect... so i did some searching around came with DIFFEREND idea's one says use more thermal paste. one says use back bracket... one says screw it in a certain order... reading the internet just more complains and idea's... none of them arcording to the manual it came with....

and since i dont have 0.5mm thermal pads and im not planing to wait a week or 2 on new pads.. i rather just yolo it with paste and see how that ends up...

 

[delshay]

There are ways to getting around using thicker pads if it's too thick. One way is to cut the pad a little smaller.

..I have a new experiment which has been running for the best part of 4 months. which is way too long, I need to check on it when I have time. Thermal pad is in the vice & is manually compressed between two IHS.

 

[80251]

Thermal putty would obviate the need for worrying about thermal pad thickness right?

 

[Mussels]

Thermal putty would obviate the need for worrying about thermal pad thickness right?

I was trying to find the brand that was popular to suggest it, but kept forgetting the damn name of the stuff


It's literally that halfway point betweem thermal paste and thermal pads, so it seems ideal for this

 

[80251]

@Mussels
T-Global TG-PP-10 is the only thermal putty I'm aware of that's for sale to the consumer, although there must be others, because the new Xbox uses thermal putty instead of thermal pads.

 

[Mussels]

@Mussels
T-Global TG-PP-10 is the only thermal putty I'm aware of that's for sale to the consumer, although there must be others, because the new Xbox uses thermal putty instead of thermal pads.

That'll be it, great thread with details over here
TG-PP10 thermal putty: any application gotchas to look out for? | Overclock.net

This post has a good summary of how it would apply to this thread: Better performance than thermal pads, only weakness is situations where you need pressure
For example, if thermal pads helped align or balance a heatsink in a laptop
Lifespan may be an issue, theres a lot of discussion on that in the threads (and some alternate brands)

Make little balls, heatsink squishes them to fit.
I ordered copper shims this morning, I might get putty too...

Edit: Fantastic images and guide here
ASUS Strix 3090 Thermal Pad replacement. Gelid Extreme vs TG-PP10 - strix3090 post - Imgur