GTX 970 extreme temperatures despite cooler change

[glaeschenmaggi]

Hey guys,

I have recently had some trouble with my PNY GeForce GTX 970 XLR8 OC. I decided to swap the old blower cooler and install and Arctic Accelero Twin Turbo II. However the results were not as expected - the temperatures are even higher now 😱 Before I had maximum temperatures of 84°C, now they even reach 86°C and more. So the question is, how is this possible?😱 I installed the cooler as given in the instructions... Even improving the airflow in my case and setting the fans of the GPU-cooler to 100% did not influence on the temperatures... There is enough thermal paste on the chip either. Well as you see I am absolutely clueless. Maybe some of you can help me out thanks in advance!

 

[Cioby]

86? Dafuq.
Anyway, are your fans spinning at 100%? Using MSI afterburner or EVGA precision to see or manually set it to 100%
Putting A LOT OF THERMAL PASTE is also wrong. You need to put a bit of it, since it will spread anyway. Did you also change the thermal pads on your GPU?? I had those on my 980ti and I didn't wanna put thermal paste until I found new thermal pads. Those are usually used to cool your VRAM but it might also influence your overall GPU temp.
And even tho Arctic is a nice company, I wouldn't trust their cooler over coolers like the ones from Nvidia, Asus, EVGA, Gigabyte etc.

 

[glaeschenmaggi]

Well I used a decent amount of thermal paste but i would definitely say that I didn't use too much I have set the fans to 100% via MSI Afterburner. I didn't use thermal pads to stick heatsinks on my VRAM and voltage regulators - I used the thermal glue that was included in the box. However I don't think that this should be the problem because my old cooler from PNY didn't even cool the VRAM 😀 I just swapped the cooler because I thought the new one was better to cool my GPU down moreover the old PNY one was quite loud 😀 But I still don't understand why a cooler that is certified for 250 Watts of TDP cannot cool my 970 decently 😀

 

[Cioby]

It's very strange, maybe you have a faulty cooler. The 970 normally is pretty cool.
Tho if you are in a hot country and your air flow isn't good enough, you might have issues. I had this on my 980ti. Changing some coolers (in to out or out to in) actually gave me 5 degrees or more.
Still if everything is just the way it should be, the only thing you can do is open it up and clean the thermal paste and reapply and put less paste. Especially if your cooler came with paste already applied on it, like my CPU cooler did.
https://youtu.be/qDLQ7FjPMf8?t=4m15s

 

[glaeschenmaggi]

Well having a faulty cooler might be possible - you need to know that the cooler was B-stock when I bought it. Because it was labelled as new I got a refund of 33%. Nevertheless I installed the cooler because even B-Ware should work... However having a faulty cooler becomes more and more likely. Usually a gtx 970 should sit around 60°C with that cooler. And I wouldn'T say that we have tropical temperatures in Germany. I used to improve the airflow even more but there was no difference in temperatures 😱 When I touch the cooler while running a GPU stress test it seems like the cooling construction is just spreading the heat well. Anyways I will try to remove the thermal paste again and reapply less then.
Best regards

 

[glaeschenmaggi]

Cioby, I did as you said and dismounted the cooler, cleaned the GPU and reapplied new thermal paste. Well after I did that I played some GTA 5 because it's a very GPU intensive game. And well the temperatures were at 60°C all the time 😱 I really don't know what I've done differently this time but as it seems the cooler works quite fine now. Sometimes hardware is like jinxed 😀 However, I am going to leave this thread open for a little more time and if everything is still fine then I will close it Cioby, thanks for your help, mate !

 

[Cioby]

If you put too much paste, it could be hot, as Linus says in the video I linked. Or if you used the thermal paste it came with, glad it solved your problem 60 is really good, tho it will get up to 70 in a few weeks. Don't panic if it does.