I'm attempting to keep my poor tower alive long enough to upgrade. I currently have: Antec 900 tower. Gigabyte Ga-M57SLI-S4 Mobo AMD Athalon 64 x2 6400+ BFG GTX-280 2gb corsair xms2 I'm generally going over the whole computer to cool it down. Replaceing the thermal paste with Antec F7 diamond paste. Replacing the 220mm antec fan with a used one that has all it's blades instead of one broken and installed 2 more 120mm fans. Now I'm looking to cool down the GPU. I've read that I can use some of that paste on the main GPU component but have to use pads for the rest. And those pads NEED replacing. I'm looking for advice on what type and thickness to use for that GTX 280. My research suggests I use this. Any advice relateing to replaceing the pads, or even other simple/cheap cooling ideas that can last until I can afford an upgrade would be great.
I tried replacing the GPU cooler with an aftermarket one on my old 8800 GTX, which included replacing the thermal pads on the VRAM, a few years ago when I was trying to do the same thing as you. It did not go very well for me. Is your GPU overheating even after you've dusted it out? If it is, one last thing you could try without physically messing with the card would be setting up a more aggressive, custom fan speed profile in a program like MSI Afterburner.
Yea, between MSI and just plain cleaning the GPU a bit, I brought the temp down to non-crashing lvls. I'd like to get it to safe lvls. Even Safeish.
I used to use the Antec 900. I to had overheating problems turn out it was the case. I has huge fans on it that draw in lots of air but they also draw in every single bit of dust in the room. I was always cleaning the cpu,gpu and power suppler. The case is a dust trap
I smoke. I have 2 cats, a dog, and a 6 year old. That pretty much says that a good regular cleaning of case, fans, and components is going to be required no matter what case I have. I'm happy with the Antec as it runs cooler than any other case I've had. Even if replacing the tower were and option, which is isn't at this time, I would only replace it with a closed watercooling set up. That I'm looking into. On the other hand, my system was build in Oct '07. So it's rather dated. I just need to get it along until I can afford to upgrade.
If you have options for the card slot I'd check that out as well. If you can move it up or down a slot you may be able to give your video card some breathing room. Seems silly but it may be worth double checking that the fans are all pushing air the correct direction. It's pretty easy to get them flipped.
Yea, I've got 2 slots that can hold the vid card. One is way at the bottom directly above my PSU. So my psu sucks air from inside and spits it outside. And my vid card sucks air from inside and spits it out. LOL That's a lose lose unfortunately because I'd love to do a cheap upgrade and buy another GTX-280 and SLI them. The other slot wins by default. I did do a bit of work with the fans and flow though. It helped a bit. I''m generally on the coarse of replacing the thermal pads inside the gpu. I'm just not sure what thickness to get.
