so NVIDIA brought it to my attention that there is actually a way easier way
to replace the thermal compound on the GTX 580 and uh if I had sort of well
thought about it or been a little bit cleverer I probably would have figured
this out but all you have to do is take out the
screws okay that hold in the plastic shroud here and take those oh there you
go you can actually access the card that
easily and then if you want to replace the thermal
compound okay please note that these are all Philips head screws that I have
removed so far and more Phillips head screws on the back so you do not need a
Torx screwdriver which I ran out and bought specifically so that I could
completely take the card apart you do not need a Torx screwdriver in order to
disassemble this card and replace the thermal compound I mean if you wanted to
take off the uh the unisync that covers the vrm and the RAM then I mean there's
nothing preventing you from doing that if you have a torque screwdriver but
NVIDIA also brought to my attention that there are a number of concerns that I
should be warning you guys about if you do remove those components so hold on
let me just get this last screw out first and then we'll go ahead and flip
the card back over there you look at that so it's that easy to remove it and
now you see you have total access to the GPU but we've left the metal unisync on
so the reason for leaving the metal unisync on is remember the ther thermal
pads that I pointed out on all of the RAM as well as on the vrms well the
thermal pads when the card is originally assembled at the factory get compressed
so what that means is that they start out thick and they end up as thin as
they get when you put on the unisync and you put in all the screws from the back
now when you remove that and put it back
again sometimes you can run into a situation where it's not making proper
contact or even any contact at all especially on the voltage regulation
module so that even though you might not notice
the problem right away can seriously diminish the life time of the
product so uh that was the reason that NVIDIA had asked me to show you guys
this alternate guide which is by the way much easier much faster and if you don't
own a own a torque screwdriver much easier uh for replacing the thermal
compound that that was it uh this would also be pretty good if
you wanted to water cool your card and you just wanted to use a GPU only block
because uh you can actually see here that with a little bit of modification
to the hold down plate you could probably get like an
MCW uh I think 80 is the current model an MCW 80 or a similar GPU only block on
there and then you'd probably have some incidental air flow from the fan which
should be enough to keep things sort of cool enough in the other parts of the
card and yeah you could actually water cool your card fairly in expensively
without buying a full cover block because NVIDIA has this integrated heat
spreader built onto the entire C so thanks for that NVIDIA