Why, why is the package crooked again?
Of course, we have to disassemble the recently installed water block and its backplate to get to the circuit board. No sooner said than done the disassembly of the Alphacool Eisblock is done very quickly with the total of 9 screws and the included thermal pads do not immediately start to crumble, so they can be reused.
After removing the block from the board, it can be seen from the imprint of the thermal paste that the GPU and package is slightly bent along the longitudinal axis, i.e. from display outputs to V-cutout and especially the lower third of the GPU near the PCI-Express slot had relatively weak contact to the cooler. Igor had already discussed this problem in detail last year.
Specifically, this means for the Eisblock that the included screws and washers do not generate an even contact pressure across the entire GPU. But how can Alphacool guarantee that, when the new GPUs from Nvidia deviate up to 0.5 mm from a straight surface, differently unit to unit. So in case of doubt, cooler manufacturers and users get the short end of the stick due to these high tolerances in manufacturing and the GPU thus runs hotter.
The fix: custom tuning of the mount depending on the expression of the bend of an individual GPU. So what did I do? I added two more washers of 0.2 mm to the two spring-loaded screws around the GPU on the PCI-Express slot side, so that the contact pressure is increased there and the package is bent back a bit more towards a flat surface. Might sound brutal, but it works well and is the only viable workaround until Nvidia gets their tolerances under control.
The result can also be seen directly after another 10 minute run of the 3D Mark Port Royal. Whereas we had a delta between the water and GPU temperatures of 19 °C before, it’s now only 14 °C, a whopping 5 Kelvin less. The GPU hotspot temperature is even lower by an average of 8 Kelvin and is now only 12 °C away from the GPU temperature, whereas it was 15 °C before. Even the memory temperature is affected by the slightly changed mounting, because the whole PCB is now flatter and therefore the memory chips around the GPU lie better on the water block.
Depending on how crooked or not a particular graphics card is from the factory, the cooling deficit is more or less expressed – silicon lottery in a different way. In fairness, I wanted to add this insight to the Alphacool GPX-N 3090 Eisblock installation story. But enough of the digression and back to the actual topic of today’s article. By the way, all following tests were carried out with this optimized assembly of the water block.
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