News Modder Reduces GDDR6X Temps by 46C With Copper Cooling

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Titan
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Shouldn't come as much of a surprise when so many GPUs have 3+mm thick squishy thermal pads. Reduce the pad thickness to something more reasonable like 0.5mm total (ex.: 0.5mm pad from shim to HSF plate to accommodate mounting compression, paste on chip side) and you get a substantial cooling increase.
 

King_V

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Well, I guess if they can't be troubled to be more careful with thermal pad thickness, then hoping for them to maybe incorporate copper into their cooling for the VRAM is really asking a lot.
 

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Titan
Moderator
Well, I guess if they can't be troubled to be more careful with thermal pad thickness, then hoping for them to maybe incorporate copper into their cooling for the VRAM is really asking a lot.
As the DRAM dies are encapsulated in plastic or epoxy which usually have horrible thermal conductivity and only dissipate about 2W each, replacing most of the thermal pad thickness by nearly any metal would still be a significant improvement. GPU manufacturers could just make the GPU aluminum plate large enough to cover the VRAM and a deeper pocket for the GPU die's vapor chamber, no extra parts or assembly needed unlike the shim work-around, though this would require a few extra seconds of machining and maybe a dime worth of extra aluminum for the bigger base block instead of pennies for the shim which would require its own separate manufacturing steps.
 

wifiburger

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Feb 21, 2016
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Have bunch of these mem copper shims that I have yet to install on my 3090.

You can get pretty close to those copper shims if you use high performance thermal putty due to PCB warp.

My rtx3090 with modified EK block uses 0.5mm thermal pads for all the front.
The rear, uses 1mm pads, that I could use 0.5mm copper shims but too lazy now.

Have a low profile heatsink with thermal tape + 80mm noctua on the backside, I don't think i see more than ~55c for gaming.
 

escksu

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Aug 8, 2019
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Shouldn't come as much of a surprise when so many GPUs have 3+mm thick squishy thermal pads. Reduce the pad thickness to something more reasonable like 0.5mm total (ex.: 0.5mm pad from shim to HSF plate to accommodate mounting compression, paste on chip side) and you get a substantial cooling increase.

Not really possible, It will make the card way too expensive to produce.

The reason behind the thick pads are due to the variation in height of the ram on the circuit board and the heatsink.

When machines place the ram on circuit board and subsequent heating, there will always be minor variations. The heatsinks are most cast aluminum and assembled then machined.

If you have extremely tiny tolerance, it will slow production down and going to be very expensive.
 

InvalidError

Titan
Moderator
Not really possible, It will make the card way too expensive to produce.

The reason behind the thick pads are due to the variation in height of the ram on the circuit board and the heatsink.
While there may be variations, they are typically in the order of 0.1mm even between manufacturers, not multiple millimeters. Designing the HSF to use 0.2-0.5mm thick pads instead of 3-6mm ones doesn't require much additional effort.
 
Mar 17, 2022
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There’s a small business that started producing copper plates tailored to different GPUs for cooling VRAM, to include the notorious back VRAM on RTX 3090s. Similar results, more accessible, and more models forthcoming.