this will be a quick heatsink removal guide for the gtx 580 now there's a
reason that i have an empty package for a screwdriver sitting next to it and
that's that i actually had to run out and buy a screwdriver in order to get
the heat sink off so i had to get a torx
number six oh no a t6 it's not yesterday i don't use number for torques
apparently so i had to go get a t6 bit
precision screwdriver because the majority
of the screws on the back of this video card actually do use a torx which looks
like a star if you're not familiar with it hopefully i can get the camera to
focus on the GPU there so you can see that
so i've gone ahead and loaded the correct bit into my screwdriver already
so i will put that there and then that is how i will remove all the screws from
the back so you don't have to remove the screws on the shroud like here you only
have to remove all the little screws on the back including the phillips head
ones here and that is how we will remove it so
bear with me in a moment so if you just want to replace the stock
thermal compound with something else this is about as far as you go so you
can see here the gf-110 GPU is right there and then
that's its corresponding cooling plate on the other side so i actually want to
take the cooler apart which means i'm going to have to delve in a little bit
further so i'm going to have to start undoing some of these other screws in
here because i want to have a look at the vapor chamber cooler that is
responsible for keeping the gtx 580 so cool
at idle as well as under load now something to be aware of is if you are
replacing your stock thermal compound i guess that we could call this like a thermal compound removal guide too so
you know two birds with one stone you should use like um
something lint free to wipe all of the thermal compound off of both surfaces
use some 99 isopropyl or rubbing alcohol
to remove everything put on your new thermal compound bearing in mind you
should apply quite a bit more to a GPU than you would to a CPU because it's a
very large area it's got a big heat spreader on it you want to make sure
it's covered and then you put it back on now do not
replace the pads on the RAM or any of
the vrm because they are not thin they are not intended
so you can no you're not really going to be able to see that are you
you can kind of see they actually have some some depth to them the reason for
that is there are manufacturing tolerances when they're affixing all of
these components to the pcb so they're not always going to be at exactly the
same height you need a little little bit of variance in terms of where they make
contact so that is why they do use a thicker pad for those parts
so completely disassembling the cooler from that point was actually the
simplest step all i had to do was remove
uh how many are there seven screws so there's one on the corner here one here
one here one here and then there's three more on the bottom of the this is the
plastic shroud that goes over top and it's actually hard to tell when you're
looking at the plastic shroud over the metal base that they're made of
different materials because the the finish on them is so close NVIDIA's done
a terrific job of making the card aesthetically appealing but this is
actually a metal heat spreader here on the base and the metal heat spreader is what's
responsible for doing the cooling of the RAM as well as the vrm so you can see
it's going to get a fair bit of incidental airflow from the fan itself
which you can clearly see here all right
and uh so yeah that does all of that now the vapor chamber this
is where the magic happens um now with the gtx 580 i don't know if
you'll you know what let me go get my 580 and then
so there's my 480 for contrast you can kind of see inside where it's got a
similar fin arrangement and then it's got these five massive heat pipes that
are carrying heat away from where the GPU is located right there
to the aluminum fins so the vapor chamber is actually a fairly similar
technology to a heat pipe in that you're
basically using a gaseous liquidy
substance inside sometimes it's water sometimes it's something else and you've
got it at a very very low pressure in there which allows it to
basically boil at a with very little heat input and
then it will evaporate away and then it'll find a cooler part of the
vapor chamber or in this case a heat pipe so it'll go away from the hot GPU
come up to the cooler aluminum fins which are being cooled by the fan then
it'll turn back into a liquid and it'll be wicked away by the inside of the heat
pipe back down to the GPU so the vapor chamber works similarly except that it's
kind of like a big huge flat
thin heat pipe so it takes all the heat from the GPU right here
and disperses it very evenly over this big surface area so then NVIDIA throws
some aluminum fins on there and boom you've got a very
potent cooler now vapor chambers are at this time more expensive than
implementing heat pipes but it is
from what we can see a more elegant solution overall so there is the vapor
chamber design so i'm going to throw this guy back together and thank you for
checking out my video on the disassembly and i guess thermal compound replacement
on the gtx 580.