radeon5970 temperature 85C - repair?

[Batouzo]

Hello, one of our radeon cards in cluster seems to overheat.
It has 87C and 79C temp of cores, while another card in same board (as well ventilated atc) has 75C.

Even when extra cooled, other cards drop even to 65C, and this damaged still has 85C!

What can be wrong?

We think of opening the card and e.g. again applying thermal paste, this should be easy? Something to watch out for when doing that on reference r5970? (don't want to break it).

[RedLine888]

applying thermal grease is very easy!
It helped me to reach 3-5 lower temp on my 5870 cards.
I used AC MX-4.
Here you go:
http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/How-To-Correctly-Apply-Thermal-Grease/274

[malevolent]

85 degrees isn't high for a high-end graphics card, especially if it's a dual-gpu one. So your card is fine, it ain't damaged :>

But you can try taking off the cooler, reapply some good thermal paste (eg. STG-2, AS, NT-H1), but don't forget to clean the old one with alcohol or distilled water, and take out the dust if there's any between the radiator's fins.