How to improve cooling inside the reference 5970 case?
The things that heat the most are the VRMs and memory (apart from obviously the cores and the middle-bridge)?
Also
how to messure temperature of elements after our home made cooling upgrade? e.g. perhaps 1 VRM is frying while the just 2 temp sensors are saying all is fine?Thermal camera? Tiny thermal resistors to each important chip (where to find such small ones?)
Foam on VRMFirst, on VRMs there was some white thing, a bit like some harder foam, with a tiny material rectangular grid.
What is this?
It got a bit teared up on opening, but it looks a bit "exploded" like if it was blown a bit before (from temperature?).
Can it be replaced with a: thermal-tape on VRM + copper plate + thermal-tape to it reaches the casing?
How to choose good thermal-tape, what parameters are good enough?
Will a sandwich of tape+copper+tape+copper+tape work also? Because need to get the correct thickness/height to have it reach the casing.
There should be room to cover thoes 5 VRMs on right side (see big image - marked in
violet color)
and similar with the 3 others.
Is it ok to repair the holes in foam by putting Arctic Silver 5 paste there a bit?
Good idea to cover the metal pins and path around VRM with epoxy or silicon paste or other non-conductive isolator to prevent thermal paste dropping on them?
Tape on MemMemory chips (green in the picture) seem to have been connected to top casing with thermal tape.. or is it normal glue-tape?
Will it conduct well after just re-attaching the same thing when closing box, or should it be fully removed,cleaned,replaced?
Anything room to improve default reference card ("Ati brand" it seems)?
Btw what is the big while chip between 2 cores? Same handing of it like the memchips?
So to sum up, our idea is so far:
copper plate from the 5 VRMs to the right as big as fits with thermal tape over/under,
and perhaps new tape to memory cores.
And re-do cores cooling with Arctic Cool 5 paste.