Gamers Rejoice: Here’s A Fix For ASUS Strix Vega 64 Thermal Issues

Every year, we demand our computers to be ever faster, capable of delivering progressively more eye-watering graphics and doing it all as reliably as ever. Unfortunately, sometimes, new designs miss the mark. [Cloakedbug] was having issues with voltage regulator temperatures on an ASUS Strix VEGA 64 — one of the latest RADEON graphics cards on the market — and decided to investigate.

Right away, issues were apparent; one of the main thermal pads was making poor contact with the FETs it was intended to carry heat for, and was poorly sized to boot. In a show of poor quality, the pad wasn’t nicely sized for the aluminium plate it was attached to, and was applied in a rather haphazard manner. Suspecting this was perhaps one of the root causes of the card running hot, the decision was made to replace the pad with something more suitable.

Specifying a thicker pad that was properly sized to the heatsink plate was the order of the day, and a couple of other smaller heatsink pads were also replaced, all with Thermal Grizzly Minus Pad 8. [Cloakedbug] reports a temperature drop of over 30 degrees C under load on the VR SOC bank, down from 115 C initially. It sounds like this will go a long way to keeping the card happy and healthy over time. Looking around the web, there’s definitely a few reports of thermal issues out there, so this could be a useful fix if you’re having trouble with the same card at home.

In the end, it’s a simple, tidy fix to an expensive piece of hardware that really should have shipped with this sorted from the factory. We’ve seen a fair few thermal fixes over the years here, like this one involving a thermal camera as a diagnosis tool.

[Thanks to Keith O for the tip!]

Diamond Thermal Paste: Update

thermal_paste_test_rig

The need to conduct laboratory-style experiments runs deep in some people. [Freddyman] built an apparatus to test out several commercial and homemade thermal pastes, including the DIY diamond thermal grease we reported on last month. He setup each experiment in the middle of an air conditioned room, ran the heat sink fan for 30 minutes to equalize the temperature, then turned on the DIY heat generator that the paste and heat sink were connected to. He’s got a lot of data from tests he ran with the eight thermal conductors; air (using no paste), Arctic Silver 5, Ceramique, Dow thermal fluid, pure silicone oil, silicone and diamond slurry, Dow fluid with diamonds, and the Inventgeek.com remake.

One of the big problems with DIY paste is the air bubbles that are introduced into the slurry as you mix in the diamonds. All of the homemade pastes except one were put in a vacuum chamber in an attempt to remove tiny bubbles. The one that wasn’t put in the vacuum performed the worst of all the thermal conductors. In all cases, the commercially available products performed quite well while the DIY solutions delivered mixed results.