Radeon RX 580 Thermal Paste Change

As a conclusion of 2020, I decided I finally need to update my home PC, with a shiny new Ryzen 7 3700x. However, it seems I picked, the wrong moment as far as buying a video card is concerned.

Video card prices are insane and things are not getting much better going into the first few months of 2021. A screenshot of price grabbing site in Bulgaria on 7th March is showing RX 580 8GB selling for the astronomical 1099 BGN (~505 EUR). We can thank the crypto mining craze for that situation.

Buying a second-hand video card seems a totally valid choice as long as you can live, with having a 4GB video memory. By the end of 2020 and beginning of 2021 Ethereum DAG increased over 4GB, which makes all 4GB video cards no more suitable for Ethereum mining, so actually, the second-hand market is full of used RX 570/580 video cards pushed out of the mining business.

I was able to find second-hand Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 580 4GB SKU#11265-09 for 170 BGN (~85EUR) in very good condition and original firmware.

For this money, the card is a steal, however, as with everything second-hand, there is a caveat!

As soon as you start stress testing with FurMark, the fans would go crazy and you will observe some serious temperature spikes.

There are three things to notice here:

• Temperature spikes to 75C almost instantly
• The fans go to max revolution ~3000 RPM
• The GPU starts throttling after about a minute to ~1157 MHz

These are sure signs, the cooling solution does not work right at all, since the card comes with quite a massive heat sink and should at least be able to handle the heat for a while.

So armed with:

• Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut
• some thermal pads of various sizes (0.5, 1, 1.5 mm) from Arctic Cooling
• and Philips screwdriver

I decided to replace the thermal paste and see what happens.

Below are some photos of the disassemble procedure.

As expected the thermal paste has completely dried out.

Do not use any sharp tools to clean up the dried out thermal paste from the GPU core. Isopropyl alcohol, cotton buds, and persistency is the best approach.

I tried to replace the RAM thermal pads with Arctic 1.5 mm thermal pads, however, this did not work! It seems the arctic pads are not of exactly the same thickness and prevented the heatsink from making good contact, with GPU. So I left the original thermal pads and just replaced the dried-out thermal paste.

After assembling everything and testing again the result was impressive:

• The thermal spike is gone and we see a gradual temperature rise
• The card is no longer thermo-throttling
• The fans spin at a conservative 50% (~1700 RPM) and are inaudible

What I did as an additional test, was to configure the fans to 2000 RPM manually from Radeon Drivers and run a ETC crypto mining for a day. The card frequency was at steady 1366 Mhz and not above 65C during 24h operation.

This video card was not the first one to go through this procedure. I have Radeon RХ 570 Pulse ITX 4GB, that behaved exactly the same way. The result was pretty much the same after the thermal paste change. I strongly reccomend to search in YouTube as there are many tutorials on doing this procedure, but in general i find the whole procedure pretty easy.