OT - How to attach VGA ramsinks?

cloneman · Post by **cloneman** » Wed Jan 16, 2008 7:18 pm

I'm wondering what all the methods are. I'm guessing the two obvious choices would be arctic silver adhesive and thermal tape.

Are there any other options? Someone suggested putting a small dab of superglue on each corner of the ram chips and AS5 in the middle. Is this a smart thing to do (e.g. does ram heat up on the corners too?)

tehfire · Post by **tehfire** » Wed Jan 16, 2008 9:12 pm

GDDR, especially GDDR3, does not heat up very much at all. The least permenant solution (good if you may want to take the heatsinks off in the future, bad if you want to make sure they stay on into the future) would be thermal tape. The most pure solution (in terms of thermal conductivity and...er...using a substance for what it's intended to be used for) is Arctic Silver adhesive. The cheapest probably would be the superglue and AS5 solution. You won't lose that much conductivity using superglue and AS5 (considering that the top of a RAM chip is plastic, anyways), but it will most definitely be permenant. The AS adhesive will also be permenant.

Not that I'm advocating anyone do this, but I have an 8800GTS 512 with no ramsinks at all and the memory is happily running at 1GHz DDR (2GHz effective)

cloneman · Post by **cloneman** » Wed Jan 16, 2008 10:45 pm

How much superglue would you use? A dab in the corners or a line around the perimeter of the chip?

zorrt · Post by **zorrt** » Wed Jan 16, 2008 10:48 pm

try a dab, you just need enough so that it'll stick on unless you don't plan on taking them off.

WR304 · Post by **WR304** » Thu Jan 17, 2008 2:38 pm

You only need a very small amount of superglue. Try just a small amount on two corners of each ramsink.

If you're gluing the ramsinks on, something that's worth doing as well is having them slightly offcentre on the RAM with an edge overhanging. That way you can get some leverage for removing the ramsink if needed.

Anything more than gentle pressure to remove the ramsinks will rip the memory out of the card. I managed to do that with the ramsinks epoxied onto a 7800GTX a few months ago. It didn't take much force.

jhhoffma · Post by **jhhoffma** » Sun Jan 20, 2008 5:50 pm

Just a small dab of superglue (less than a drop) on two corners is all you need. You can use a cotton swab with acetone (pure, not nail polish remover) to help break down the superglue.