**Upgrading the GPU Thermal Paste: A Journey of Discovery**

I didn't want to make this upgrade too hard on my trusty old GPU, so I tried not to apply too much pressure when removing the thermal paste and cleaning out the old one. I wanted to be gentle with those tiny capacitors that are scattered all over the die, as they're extremely small and can easily break off if handled carelessly. I didn't want to risk having to call a professional to fix them, so I took my time and was careful not to press too hard on any of the sensitive areas.

In the end, I decided to use a new thermal paste that had become my favorite, Noctua NTH2. This stuff is specifically designed for CPUs, but it's also suitable for GPUs. I would recommend avoiding conductive thermal pastes, as they can cause insulation and affect the CPU's performance. Instead, I used a relatively healthy amount of thermal paste to cover every tiny inch of the die. This way, the GPU can stay cool even when running at high temperatures.

I even took the time to check after reassembling the cooler that the coverage was good, and it was so easy to screw everything back together again. The fans were plugged in, and I popped the new cooler into my PC. I started with the original test, the Rocket Lead Test, which is a high-quality 1440p at 170Hz. I wasn't expecting much from this upgrade, but I knew it would be different because of how dry the thermal paste was on there previously.

To my surprise, the results were astounding. The maximum temperature dropped by an incredible 29 degrees Celsius, from 82-83 degrees to a mere 54 degrees Celsius. The clock stability was still maintained at 18.35, and the fan never got above 1380 RPM. This was not just stable; it was absolutely fantastic. I couldn't believe the difference I saw.

Of course, I'm not saying that my GPU won't get hotter in the future. But with this upgrade, I'm confident that I can keep temperatures under control. And for anyone who has an older GPU like mine, this is something you should definitely consider doing at least once a year to maintain optimal performance and prevent overheating.

Before this upgrade, I had no idea how much my GPU was actually running when I played games or used resource-intensive applications. But now that I've taken the time to reassemble my PC and test its performance, I have a better understanding of what's going on inside my computer. This has been an eye-opening experience, and I'm excited to continue experimenting with different upgrades and modifications.

As always, I hope this video has been helpful for you. If you have any questions or want to share your own experiences with GPU care, please leave them in the comments below. What's your best practice when it comes to maintaining your GPU? Do you change your thermal paste regularly? What kind of paste do you use? Share your thoughts and let's continue the conversation!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: entoday i want to talk about why you should be changing the thermal paste on your gpu this video is brought to you by my personal pocketbook so if you'd like to help me out like subscribe and check out my patreon page so i can make more videos like this one all right so this is a problem i did not expect to deal with right now this is something that i thought be far flung in the future it's just something that was in the back of my mind i knew it was a thing that people did but anytime i saw a video on the matter the differences were very small but the problem arose when i was playing rocket league no surprise there and i started to get more stuttering i started to get audio cutouts and these uh just frame dips in general and i thought this had to do with my xbox controller because that's a problem i had recently so after much fiddling with that it didn't help but what did help was lowering these settings so that led me to think that it had to do with the gpu so when i went ahead to hw info and checked out there it was pretty obvious that when i was playing on high quality settings in rocket league my gpu was getting up to 81 83 degrees celsius and i could see the clock dipping down so it was thermal throttling throttling throttling so i had to figure out how to fix that it's rocket league it's not that demanding my gpu shouldn't be throttling even though i'm playing on a 1440p screen at 170 hertz i didn't think that this was should be that taxing so anyways i went ahead and actually did some testing to see what the results were like so first off was playing rocket league at the highest settings 170 hertz at 1440p and the results i got back was a temp between 81 and max of 83 the clock at 1835 most of the time but the longer i played the more it dipped and it got as low as 1695 with the stock fan curve maxing at 2300 just about 2300 rpm next i did a high quality again this time i decided to max out the fan at a hundred percent so the results came back at 77 degrees with a max of 81. so a bit lower there and only one clock dip so the thermal throttling throttling was very minimal and it just came down a slight bit one time to 1721 with a fan stuck at about 3 600 rpm so this is a solution in a bit like it's mostly working there was only that single dip i presume the longer i played the more the whole case would heat up and it become a problem later on but the biggest problem with that having the fans so turned up is that it was loud if you listen here this is with the fan at 100 this is the gpu fan at 100 with the side panel on and the side panel off versus the normal stock fan curve with the side panel on and the side panel off it's quite a difference and it's not something i wanted to live with on a regular basis just to play rocket league it was a bit ridiculous so again one more test here is with rocket league turning down the settings to quality instead of high quality and right there we can already see that it's much better with a temp around 72 to 75 as the max clock stable at 1835 and a fan running between 242120 rpm just about there so the fan noise not as bad there and the game was playable and i had no hiccups which is great but again it's rocket league why do i have to suffer it's not a really demanding game and it shouldn't require me to turn down those settings considering i have a 1070. and the last test i wanted to do before i replaced the thermal paste was simply with a to 64 just stressing the gpu just that and what you can see there is that it is throttling it's maxing out at 82 degrees much like it was with the other tests and throttling down about 100 megahertz so with those baseline tests i was ready to apply the new thermal paste so what i did was just simply remove it from my computer get it on a desk in a safe working space and started removing the screws i only had six on mine you might have more or less but mine had six and four around the die and had two farther down the card now you might be mindful about this there's one of the screws that has a little sticker over top a white sticker with a red circle and that is kind of a warranty safe type of thing where if you were to break that sticker that will typically void your warranty with most aib card makers i believe evga doesn't void your warranty as long as you're not you know doing anything unusual exotic with the card but just keep that in mind if you're gonna be doing this it may be avoiding your warranty i wasn't really worried about this this card i have is at least three and a half years old almost four years old since i've had it so it was time to actually do this and the one thing i was surprised by was there wasn't actually much dust in there i think that has to do with the fact that the settings within the asus software has it set default to silent fan so the fan typically wasn't running unless i was actually using it for gaming or other workflow stuff and once i removed the cooler from the pcb it was very obvious right away that the thermal paste was very very dry and when i actually scraped it from the cooler itself it just cracked and fell into little bits so to clean this off i used 99 isopropyl alcohol a pile of cotton swabs and much more than i expected so if you're going to be doing this be ready with the cotton swabs and i used a coffee filter you can use other lintless things people have mentioned to me about not using you know other cotton type products i haven't had any issues but of course the less dust the better coffee filters are a good way to go there's probably nothing better to use there but anyways i cleaned off the cooler and the dye and this took about 15 minutes just to clean the die and if you can see here i didn't do a perfect job it's not perfectly clean but i got the bulk of it away there's a bit of residue left around the die but i didn't think this was a big problem and the main reason i didn't go too hard here to make it absolutely perfect it mainly has to do with those capacitors i didn't want to affect the capacitors or break any of them off because they're very small and it's not too hard to actually break those off so if you're going to be doing this just take care around those and don't press too hard because you don't want to have to break one of those and have some professional fix this for you once it was clean enough for me i ended up choosing my new favorite thermal paste noctua nth2 and you can pretty much use any thermal paste that used for cpus i would suggest staying away from any conductive ones though i used a relatively healthy amount and that's because you want to cover the entire die this isn't like an ihs like you would see on a cpu this is the bare die you want every tiny piece of that thing covered now you don't have to use as much as they might have used originally because if you look at it they used a lot some people say that's going to cause some kind of insulation naturally heat it up i don't know if that's necessarily true i haven't tested that myself but from what we've seen with cpus and how they react to excess thermal paste is that they don't really get much hotter so use enough don't go insane but you want to at least it's probably better to have too much than too little in this case i even went ahead and checked after i replaced the cooler to see that the coverage was good and it was so reassembly was easy enough i just screwed it back together and make sure that the fans were plugged in so i popped it back into my pc and i started with the original test and that was the rocket lead test high quality 1440p 170 hertz i wasn't expecting a lot from this i i knew it would be different of course because of how dry the thermal paste was on there previously i was expecting between 5 and 10 degrees difference from what it was now to what it was before i reapplied thermal paste but saying i was blown away by the results is probably an understatement because originally i was getting 82 to 83 degrees maximum well in this case my new max was 54 degrees celsius that's a 29 degree difference i could not believe the difference i still can't believe it the clock was stable at 18 35 and the fan never got above 1380 rpm absolutely fantastic results like this is this is insane i was like unbelievably surprised and it's not to say that my gpu isn't going to get hotter today i was playing a different game hold fast nations at war and i was seeing my cpu max out at 60 degrees celsius but within this other test a 54 that's crazy and even at idle before with the fans on i'd be at like 54 55 degrees idle now with the fan on my idol is about 40 degrees that's a difference of 14 degrees 15 degrees this is a huge difference and just for reference one more test i did again was ada64s gpu stress test with the max at 55 degrees and of course the clock was stable so right there again is proof for me that this is absolutely working and this is absolutely something you should be doing if you have an older gpu now i'm not sure where the line is and where it changes and it depends from manufacturer to manufacturing depending on what kind of thermal paste they use but i should have probably done this at least a year ago at least a year and a half ago in fact this is something that you should at least take into account when you're building a new computer you should be taking baseline benchmarking of your pc and save that in a safe place so you can reference it in the future because for me even a year ago i'm pretty sure my gpu is hitting these temperatures i don't know what they were originally because i didn't really check or i didn't really remember what they were so if i had i might have seen these differences over time and would have intervened earlier before i started having these problems and considering this the first time i've actually taken apart a gpu i have to say it's a lot easier than i expected and it wasn't as scary as i thought it might have been i was worried about breaking things didn't have any issues whatsoever i encourage you to definitely try this out and tinker if you have any questions please leave them in the comments below and i want to know if you guys have any best practices when it comes to gpu care do you change your gpu paste and what paste would you use but anyways as always i hope this video has been helpful for you my name is nick this has been tech illiterate thank you for watching what are you doing buddy oh kittytoday i want to talk about why you should be changing the thermal paste on your gpu this video is brought to you by my personal pocketbook so if you'd like to help me out like subscribe and check out my patreon page so i can make more videos like this one all right so this is a problem i did not expect to deal with right now this is something that i thought be far flung in the future it's just something that was in the back of my mind i knew it was a thing that people did but anytime i saw a video on the matter the differences were very small but the problem arose when i was playing rocket league no surprise there and i started to get more stuttering i started to get audio cutouts and these uh just frame dips in general and i thought this had to do with my xbox controller because that's a problem i had recently so after much fiddling with that it didn't help but what did help was lowering these settings so that led me to think that it had to do with the gpu so when i went ahead to hw info and checked out there it was pretty obvious that when i was playing on high quality settings in rocket league my gpu was getting up to 81 83 degrees celsius and i could see the clock dipping down so it was thermal throttling throttling throttling so i had to figure out how to fix that it's rocket league it's not that demanding my gpu shouldn't be throttling even though i'm playing on a 1440p screen at 170 hertz i didn't think that this was should be that taxing so anyways i went ahead and actually did some testing to see what the results were like so first off was playing rocket league at the highest settings 170 hertz at 1440p and the results i got back was a temp between 81 and max of 83 the clock at 1835 most of the time but the longer i played the more it dipped and it got as low as 1695 with the stock fan curve maxing at 2300 just about 2300 rpm next i did a high quality again this time i decided to max out the fan at a hundred percent so the results came back at 77 degrees with a max of 81. so a bit lower there and only one clock dip so the thermal throttling throttling was very minimal and it just came down a slight bit one time to 1721 with a fan stuck at about 3 600 rpm so this is a solution in a bit like it's mostly working there was only that single dip i presume the longer i played the more the whole case would heat up and it become a problem later on but the biggest problem with that having the fans so turned up is that it was loud if you listen here this is with the fan at 100 this is the gpu fan at 100 with the side panel on and the side panel off versus the normal stock fan curve with the side panel on and the side panel off it's quite a difference and it's not something i wanted to live with on a regular basis just to play rocket league it was a bit ridiculous so again one more test here is with rocket league turning down the settings to quality instead of high quality and right there we can already see that it's much better with a temp around 72 to 75 as the max clock stable at 1835 and a fan running between 242120 rpm just about there so the fan noise not as bad there and the game was playable and i had no hiccups which is great but again it's rocket league why do i have to suffer it's not a really demanding game and it shouldn't require me to turn down those settings considering i have a 1070. and the last test i wanted to do before i replaced the thermal paste was simply with a to 64 just stressing the gpu just that and what you can see there is that it is throttling it's maxing out at 82 degrees much like it was with the other tests and throttling down about 100 megahertz so with those baseline tests i was ready to apply the new thermal paste so what i did was just simply remove it from my computer get it on a desk in a safe working space and started removing the screws i only had six on mine you might have more or less but mine had six and four around the die and had two farther down the card now you might be mindful about this there's one of the screws that has a little sticker over top a white sticker with a red circle and that is kind of a warranty safe type of thing where if you were to break that sticker that will typically void your warranty with most aib card makers i believe evga doesn't void your warranty as long as you're not you know doing anything unusual exotic with the card but just keep that in mind if you're gonna be doing this it may be avoiding your warranty i wasn't really worried about this this card i have is at least three and a half years old almost four years old since i've had it so it was time to actually do this and the one thing i was surprised by was there wasn't actually much dust in there i think that has to do with the fact that the settings within the asus software has it set default to silent fan so the fan typically wasn't running unless i was actually using it for gaming or other workflow stuff and once i removed the cooler from the pcb it was very obvious right away that the thermal paste was very very dry and when i actually scraped it from the cooler itself it just cracked and fell into little bits so to clean this off i used 99 isopropyl alcohol a pile of cotton swabs and much more than i expected so if you're going to be doing this be ready with the cotton swabs and i used a coffee filter you can use other lintless things people have mentioned to me about not using you know other cotton type products i haven't had any issues but of course the less dust the better coffee filters are a good way to go there's probably nothing better to use there but anyways i cleaned off the cooler and the dye and this took about 15 minutes just to clean the die and if you can see here i didn't do a perfect job it's not perfectly clean but i got the bulk of it away there's a bit of residue left around the die but i didn't think this was a big problem and the main reason i didn't go too hard here to make it absolutely perfect it mainly has to do with those capacitors i didn't want to affect the capacitors or break any of them off because they're very small and it's not too hard to actually break those off so if you're going to be doing this just take care around those and don't press too hard because you don't want to have to break one of those and have some professional fix this for you once it was clean enough for me i ended up choosing my new favorite thermal paste noctua nth2 and you can pretty much use any thermal paste that used for cpus i would suggest staying away from any conductive ones though i used a relatively healthy amount and that's because you want to cover the entire die this isn't like an ihs like you would see on a cpu this is the bare die you want every tiny piece of that thing covered now you don't have to use as much as they might have used originally because if you look at it they used a lot some people say that's going to cause some kind of insulation naturally heat it up i don't know if that's necessarily true i haven't tested that myself but from what we've seen with cpus and how they react to excess thermal paste is that they don't really get much hotter so use enough don't go insane but you want to at least it's probably better to have too much than too little in this case i even went ahead and checked after i replaced the cooler to see that the coverage was good and it was so reassembly was easy enough i just screwed it back together and make sure that the fans were plugged in so i popped it back into my pc and i started with the original test and that was the rocket lead test high quality 1440p 170 hertz i wasn't expecting a lot from this i i knew it would be different of course because of how dry the thermal paste was on there previously i was expecting between 5 and 10 degrees difference from what it was now to what it was before i reapplied thermal paste but saying i was blown away by the results is probably an understatement because originally i was getting 82 to 83 degrees maximum well in this case my new max was 54 degrees celsius that's a 29 degree difference i could not believe the difference i still can't believe it the clock was stable at 18 35 and the fan never got above 1380 rpm absolutely fantastic results like this is this is insane i was like unbelievably surprised and it's not to say that my gpu isn't going to get hotter today i was playing a different game hold fast nations at war and i was seeing my cpu max out at 60 degrees celsius but within this other test a 54 that's crazy and even at idle before with the fans on i'd be at like 54 55 degrees idle now with the fan on my idol is about 40 degrees that's a difference of 14 degrees 15 degrees this is a huge difference and just for reference one more test i did again was ada64s gpu stress test with the max at 55 degrees and of course the clock was stable so right there again is proof for me that this is absolutely working and this is absolutely something you should be doing if you have an older gpu now i'm not sure where the line is and where it changes and it depends from manufacturer to manufacturing depending on what kind of thermal paste they use but i should have probably done this at least a year ago at least a year and a half ago in fact this is something that you should at least take into account when you're building a new computer you should be taking baseline benchmarking of your pc and save that in a safe place so you can reference it in the future because for me even a year ago i'm pretty sure my gpu is hitting these temperatures i don't know what they were originally because i didn't really check or i didn't really remember what they were so if i had i might have seen these differences over time and would have intervened earlier before i started having these problems and considering this the first time i've actually taken apart a gpu i have to say it's a lot easier than i expected and it wasn't as scary as i thought it might have been i was worried about breaking things didn't have any issues whatsoever i encourage you to definitely try this out and tinker if you have any questions please leave them in the comments below and i want to know if you guys have any best practices when it comes to gpu care do you change your gpu paste and what paste would you use but anyways as always i hope this video has been helpful for you my name is nick this has been tech illiterate thank you for watching what are you doing buddy oh kitty\n"