One of my 5970's was running a bit hotter than my other 3 5970's and thought maybe I should repaste and re-apply fresh thermal pads. Well unfortunately, thermal pads arent "1 size fits all" as I had hoped; I was hoping the pressure would squish them to the appropriate thickness.
Anyways, my VRM's are about 10-12C hotter now and my GPU cores are about 5C hotter now. When I look at the card and the backplate and heatsink itself, it bends unnaturally, but still mines fine. I would still feel more comfortable if I got proper thickness pads in there, so I picked up some 1mm and 0.5mm thickness pads from frozencpu with the best thermal properties I could find
LINK. I also have some older, less thermally conductive thermal pads
LINK but dont have much of it left.
So the question is, what thickness pad do I need in each of the zones circled below?
The VRAM in RED
The VRM's on the far right in ORANGE
The VRM's in the middle in YELLOW
The small VRM on top a little to the right in DARK GREEN
The big chip next to the small vrm in LIGHT GREEN
The big chip above the VRM's in the middle in PINK
And the PCI-E bridge chip in LIGHT BLUE
I'm pretty sure the VRAM on the backside uses 0.5mm pads.
Also, PLEASE be ABSOLUTELY sure about the thicknesses. Don't just guess. These thermal pads weren't cheap, and I don't want to lose money because you guessed and wanted some quick cash.