So, I thought my graphics card was getting too toasty for my comfort; 30 degrees Celsius at idle and around 85 under load. It's an XFX HD 6870, so it's generally small but has a massive heatsink that comes in direct contact with the VRMs and RAM chips. There's about 5 years of smoker's dust on it, since I bought it used. I found some thermal paste on eBay that was supposedly silver-based, so I bought 2 of them. As soon as they shipped, I took apart the graphics card, which was fairly easy (I can tell this was the first time it has been cleaned, due to the warranty stickers still on the screws). I cleaned everything off with pressurized air and wiping. I put the new thermal compound on, and realized that it's a porcelain-based one, and I would've most likely been better off by just keeping the old one. I didn't really think this crappy paste would affect the temperatures that much, so I kept it on. Putting the GPU back on was a breeze. After everything was installed and what not, I turned on the PC, and right off the bat I noticed the graphics card was much louder, like it was already under load. My idle temps were now 45 C. Load temps were unbearable, going upwards of 107 C. I quickly made a much more aggressive fan curve for it, and tried to reduce load on it as much as possible. Then I fired up GPU-Z and noticed it was only running in 4x speeds. I will upload a screenshot.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6c914UGnTXKY0dTejIyWjBmUVE/view?usp=sharing
Does anyone know what might have caused this to run at this speed? Newer, more VRAM demanding titles such as American Truck Simulator and other open world games went from locking at my 75Hz refresh rate to basically unplayable 15 fps.
Thanks in advance!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6c914UGnTXKY0dTejIyWjBmUVE/view?usp=sharing
Does anyone know what might have caused this to run at this speed? Newer, more VRAM demanding titles such as American Truck Simulator and other open world games went from locking at my 75Hz refresh rate to basically unplayable 15 fps.
Thanks in advance!