Question RX 480 idling at 70 c - what do I do?

[bahra]

I just installed a new CPU, Motherboard, Cooler and RAM. I reinstalled windows 10, then updated BIOS and OC'd the CPU.

As I was checking the CPU core temps to examine the stability of my OC, I noticed my RX 480 was at 71 degrees celcius.

It was not under any load and clocking very low. I updated windows, used DDU and did a clean install of the newest RX 480 driver. The GPU started at 66 degrees and climbed again just on the desktop, to 70 degrees again. The CPU was idling at about 35 degrees.

I started CS:GO and ran the benchmark map (just to compare with my previous setup) and scored much higher than before which was expected of course. My CPU warmed up a bit but my GPU stayed at 70 degrees. I started a game and the game lasted about 40 minutes, my GPU was cooling down during the game. At the end of the game the GPU was at 60 degrees and the CPU at 50, but when I closed the game the temperature started climbing again and was soon at 70 degrees again.

I'm lost, I'm afraid to ruin my GPU if I don't fix this soon (I'm writing from my laptop). To me it looks like it's not a cooling issue, at least not mainly a cooling issue. It was under higher load during the game and it was cooling down (I was monitoring load and temp with GPU-Z on another monitor).

Specs:
i5-6600k @4.5 GHz
Z170 pro gaming
H60 liquid cooling
Vengeance RGB pro 16GB 3200 MHz

 

[bahra]

It seems to be under control now. I turned the fan speed up a bunch, it was pretty low as it turned out. Not sure exactly why it behaved like it did, but it's much colder now. Here's my settings so far:

 

[tennis2]

Typically they target 70-75C by regulating fan speeds.

Still, doesn't seem normal that your GPU would be at 70C while idle. My RX480 sits around 50C with the fans off when idle.

 

[bahra]

Update: I took apart the graphics card and roughly cleaned everything. It didn't seem extremely dusty/dirty so I figured it wouldn't solve the problem. Therefor I chose to take apart the whole card, the cooling paste had dried up and there was barely anything left on the chip (it had flowed over onto the other components) so I removed it and cleaned the chip and the heatsink, I applied new paste and put then I put it back into the pc.

It helped a lot. Here's how it looks now at relatively low fan speed, it's not idling but It's not under heavy load either. Much happier with the temperature now, and the card is still old.

 

[tennis2]

Repasting my GPU took it from 85C @ 2400rpm fans to 73C @ 1000-1100rpm fans with the same undervolt.