GDDR modules distribute most of their heat into the PCB itself through the copper traces. It would make the most sense to test backplate coolers by looking at VRAM temp, especially with additional thermal pads bridging backplate and PCB.
Well, the amount of heat dissipated also depends on the thermal differential. When you go VRAM -> PCB -> thermal pads -> small backplate cooler, I suspect much less heat can be transferred than going VRAM -> thermal pads -> massive front cooler. So yeah, in theory more heat may be distributed into the PCB itself, in practice thanks to cooling I suspect more heat will be dissipated through the thermal pads on the front. But would be interesting to validate this.
@@seeibe Yea, unless You have a 3090 which has half of it's VRAM on the back, in that case it just might ""work"". Then again if You have a 3090 I really don't think You should try to cool it by "strapping random scrap metal" onto it with with zip-ties :) Best regards.
I set an old AM3 stock cooler on top of my 2080 TI with some thermal pads in addition to the normal cooling solution and got -6c average gains as shown in CPUID HWMONITOR without even replacing old pads yet. My solution, however, is the exact size of the hotspot on the backplate, not the size of half of the gpu like this thing in the video
Yeah i got RX 6800 XT and i put thermal pads and cut plastic insulation from backplate and i use thermal pads on the side where vrm is :) and temps drops nicely
I think coolers like these are intended for use with cards like the rtx 3090 which have vram chips dissipating heat onto the backplate, but they are basically useless on other cards
@@bleedsblue0023 Same here. Easily my most regrettable purchase. Spent more money than my entire PC is worth and then had to rip the thing apart just to not throttle. I have been tempted to sell it but I worked so hard on it just to make it not throttle. And it still runs hot.
That's exactly was first thought. This is only for 3090. There is even a liquid cooled backplate cooler for 3090. The memory chips on the back were a huge problem for 3090 and they fixed it in 3090 Ti.
@@bleedsblue0023 Well, yeah, a 3080ti can benefit from such a cooler, but people have been reporting drops of mem temp from 100+ degrees to a little above 80 with a 3090.
It would have been fun to see you rig a regular 120mm case fan blowing directly on the back plate, maybe with a 3d printed bracket or even just some rubber spacers and see how that would have worked compared to the Aliexpress versions.
That's what I did to my 3090. Bought a thermal pad and some alumium fins and slapped a 120 slim noctua fan ontop of it. about 10-12c in vram temps drop
Ain't needing a backplate if my gaming PC's depends on the CPU integrated graphics All I need is a $2 shady Aliexpress CPU cooler that comes with a -chinese spyware- software for the cooler ARGB control
When I had a 3090 I did a DIY solution like this with a giant aluminum heatsink and an 80mm fan. It actually helped in my case, because I was thermal throttling due to memory temps, even after replacing thermal pads. At least I was able to keep the memory at about 95C instead of 112C.
Same. I watercooled the GPU and found that backside memory temps were keeping everything throttled so had to add cooling to the back. I got a replacement back plate (so I had a spare) with a pair of RAM waterblocks that I thermal epoxy'ed to the new backplate. The waterblocks on the back really helped cool the memory temps by keeping them 25-30 degrees cooler.
My 3090 has 65c-70c mem temps and I even have the mem overclocked to 3090ti spec. I simply changed the pads to higher quality ones just a teeny bit thicker, put a Asus ROG 120mm fan (that has a amazing balance of airflow and pressure) onto the backplate pulling hot air out straight into my case’s rear exhaust fan. I was able to drop vram temps without even affecting the core temps negatively
Attaching a heatsink to the backside of the PCB where my VRAM was allowed me to OC from +1000 to +1250 for benchmarking. Core temperature was still the same however, and once the heatsink at the back got heat saturated, +1250 would crash also.
@@giaopx Yeah I could, but from the limited testing I did it would just extend the time that I was able to run +1250 OC on VRAM, but it would still become unstable after long enough.
I just rested a server CPU passive heatsink on the back of my 3080ti and got almost 5C off the memory temps. I was going to thermal paste it but ended up putting better thermal strips on it.
Would be interesting to see difference with just a 80mm fan placed on its side on top of the card, blowing along the backplate from power connectors in the direction of the IO plate. I'm pretty sure that would be about as good as the 50 EUR thing or perhaps better.
Do the same thing but after removing the backplate. My bet is that no backplate will perform slightly better since the bare PCB has more surface area since you have have all of the SMD perimeters that lose airflow when you slap a backplate on, SMDs sink most of their heat into the PCB and skips the thermal pad resistance.
I don't know about a backplate but for an HDD it works pretty well; mine dropped from 50 C to 40 C moving it from the bottom of the case to a middle bay where it gets the air of the front fan of the case.
@@teardowndan5364 Honestly I'm not sure about removing the backplate from gpu-s which using thermal pads between the board and backplate. The backplate functions as a heat spreader in those cases, without it you'll get bigger surface for sure, but you can get hotspots or even overheating chips (like vrm or memory).
true, those coolers are intended for rtx 3090, especially mining ones. gpu capped at 50% TDP and vram overclocked as high as possible. And they are not that expensive either. like the 2nd one is about 18 Euro in China
That's the definition of Jank. Something I could see Linus and Alex doing, but definetly not something sold to public. Thank you for sharing these kind of (deservely) obscure products.
This would have been a good use-case for the Maxsun MegaGamer which Gamer's Nexus did an episode on two weeks ago. Steve went a bit lyrical about how well it conducted heat to the back-plate, which should provide a "best-case scenario" for this type of cooling.
Definitely a creative way to add a fan for the memory. Wouldn't be my first choice but I'm not going judge.... I'm using a flexible arm DC fan that I got at FRYS 15 years ago bolted to a $500 mobo.
I used to use my 3090 for crypto mining when I was not using it. The back-mounted VRAM was constantly getting way too hot and it would hinder performance a lot and could not reach its normal hash rate. I installed a backplate cooling solution and it worked perfectly. In normal gaming applications though, it would have never gotten hot enough to warrant having a backplate cooler.
This kind of cooling can lead to interesting problems. I built an ITX rig for a friend once where a 200mm top fan blew onto the back of the graphics card. The PC was always crashing when gaming, because the temp sensor of the GFX card was cooled too, and didn't spin up its fans. As a result, the GPU actually overheated, although the back of the card was cold to the touch ^^
Just get a little bit more airflow in the case if you have issues........ Or if you are going to use zip tids anyway, do what I did in my spare computer to cool a part of the motherboard that got hot and rebooted me. Hang a fan with zip ties for directed airflow, it does alot. :)
I did wonder if a 3090 would have been a better card to test with because of the hot gddr6x VRAM being back-mounted. These products seem to be a response to that , and probably useless for anything else tbh. Gave me a good laugh. Surely having your backplate running hot is a good thing!? means it's dissipating heat I'd have thought.
You should test mounting a fan directly on the backplate. I guess that would be more efficient. And you can use zip-ties to get the same professional look.
Free tip when using zip ties to secure things down around square objects. Tennis Balls, Hollow Rubber Balls, and Ping Pong Balls. Cut them in half, in this case it would have been flat line down on backplate, and zip ties over the top, not only toes this allow for serious pressure to be applied, it also EVENLY pushes down into the backplate thanks to natures most stable of shapes. :)
I had a 3090 that I cooled with a backplate addon. It def helped the memory temps. I took a large heatsink and used thermal adhesive to stick it on, combined with some thermal compound. It def helps if you have memory under the backplate.
I swear nvidia either did this as planned obsolescence. Or they just don't care about the fact their cards throttle with the stock coolers, like an intel CPU.
Would be a good idea to put something between zip ties and cooling solution on top of backplate. Should help significantly with mounting pressure and that is important when it comes to heat transfer.
I would say just having a fan from the front blowing air over backplate would be plenty. Also yeah the tie rip stuff is painful...probably why they included thermal glue, and man if that second one was just done more professionally, it would actually be pretty cool imo
It's always a shame when an expensive GPU with a metal backplate doesn't even have thermal pads to make use of it. (looking at you Powercolor Red Devil 7900xtx)
Hey, I recall seeing a company (non-ali express, afaik) that sells a generic GPU backplate water block (looked it up, mp5works). It would be really interesting to see the actual wattage removed by measuring delta T and flow. Also, if there was any improvement by adding additional thermal pads behind the gpu die/vram.
I added a 100x40x20mm aluminum heat sink on the back of an Nvidia T1000, with 3mm thermal pad. The air flow is sealed with tape and a 40x40x28mm fan. Result is 10°C reduction in temps under load. What prompted me to do this was noticing the thermals creeping up as time passed and measured 75°C on the back of the card. All while maintaining the single slot tiny cooler on the other side. It's also a way to get heat away from the single slot DP plate where there's nowhere for the heat to exhaust. Things just were getting more and more heat soaked.
@@dreyga2 Nope, heat is transferred to the backplate. That's the point, all you need is a fan to take the heat away. Sometimes it's there to help prevent the most extreme GPU sag and be more protected from dust and static.
Makes the whole gaming experience fast and smooth , if a hitch or stutter occurs it now self scans and comes up with a fix test or a replacement with its own catalog of software stencils
I have put a 100mm fan on the backplate of my 3090 and it dropped Vram temperature during mining. It was thermal trotteling before and I was able to stabilise it. So it does help. For this reason I just left the fan there even after I stopped mining. Just a simple fan pulling away the air from the back plate helps a ton, and the fan is not even set at a high RPM
back in the days I used to just point a fan directly at the back of the card and that fixed the heat issue if any, in most cases there is just not a whole lot of airflow towards the back of a gpu in the first place so just adding some airflow pretty much solves the problem
If youre placing VRMs on the back then yes you need a better cooling solution other than the thin metal plate. I tore down my 3090, repad/pasted everything and put additional aluminum heat sinks on the back plate. It dropped my temps by over 25*C.
Heat from the core, VRMs, etc is in the PCB..: Getting it out (into the air eventually) using cheap thermal pads is a waste of time and money. Just point fans at the hotter areas of the bare PCB. ie: Go directly from PCB to air, skipping the delta T losses of pads and backplates etc. This got me up to the top frequency of one memory strap up on a R9 280X. Hypothosis: Heat from the core and VRMs etc was seeping INTO the RAM modules via their BGAs etc. Ameliorating such allowed the RAM OC quickly, cheaply and effectively and slightly cooled the core aswell.
I wonder if just having a Fan put near the back plate would have as much affect as those solution as the backplate is already a flat radiator, just add some airflow to help the performance should be enough. As you said, the water cooling is what will help with cooling and performance.
Yes it would, I got a 3090 & while the memory junction (the hottest module) never really got to dangerous temps there has been a few times I seen it top out around 98/99C (thermal throttling is supposed to start at 110C on GDDR6X modules). Which is a bit too close to the limit for my liking. I put a 120mm Noctua fan with some bumpers to hold it up off the backplate a little on it & have never seen above 92 on my mem junction temp since.
I love stupid cooling "if you have any standards..." During the GPU Apocalypse daughter wanted a PC so she's running an old GTX980 with an AMD copper slug CPU COOLER strapped on. Sometimes standards got to drop LMAO. It's still running now, lifesaver at the the time.
Recently I took apart an old PNY GTS 460 that was collecting dust. I realized the heatsink they used is just an old Intel CPU cooler that looks like it had the sides chopped off with an angle grinder so it fit under the shroud.
Damn, this is like a comedy episode. You obviously didn't do anything wrong or bad. I really salute you for buying and checking out these so called products. I know not everyone is as handy, but I would rather go and buy the copper sheets myself and do something with. Regarding the second product, I would so much rather have it unpainted than that shitty "paint job", it hurts even calling it a "paint job", heck, even a toddler would do it better. In my opinion copper is really awesome looking and I could really imagine having a complete water loop with only copper and brass parts. It would look sick as hell!
The second one reminds me about the series of passive VGA mosfet heatsinks from Thermalright for Radeon 3xxx/4xxx/5xxx series. Those were almost like pieces of art, I still have a bunch of them around just for their aesthetics.
I just took a chance on one of them RX580's off Aliexpress, with coupons etc came in at £45ish which I am going to be happy all day long if it runs OK and I know I have to thoroughly clean the thing up and new thermal pasta of course. I was tempted for a few pounds more grabbing a 590 but looking through the seller feedbacks it wasn't positive whereas the one I got my 580 from had all but one positives and the one not positive was a missing edge conn trace and the company sent him a replacement. I am working on building a killer water circuit for mine at the mo, my case is the enormous HAF XM which has room for top and rear rads and was thinking of going 2 rad, with the rear rad sitting between the GPU and CPU blocks and the top rad for max thermal exchanges. My last water build I used the Antec Skeleton which I had painted toxic green with red spatters, a twin circuit rig with one circuit for the gpu/ram/bridges etc and another for the CPU...
derBauer EN : I've mounted custom thermal pads on the back of my KFA2 GTX 1080 EXOC 8GB, prior off course cutting out the plastic non-conductive cover from underneath the back plate to fit the thermal pads for the backside of the memory chips, backside of the GPU die itself and the backside of the VRM-s....and in my testing the GPU core temp fell 7-8°C, the VRM-s around 10°C and memory chips around 7°C. This model of mine actually has a good and very usable aluminium backplate that has a sign "caution hot" but is out of the box completely un-utilized. There are a few models out there since the GTX 900 series and R9 200 series that I've had the chance of modifying and helped with the temperatures quite a bit.
Instead of a custom water block, just get a Morpheus 8069. I was sceptical at first, especially after I unboxed it and saw, that it was smaller than the stock cooler, but after I installed it, I was blown away. The coretemp dropped by 18°C and it got a lot quieter.
@@eternalbeing3339 The price has dropped. At least in Germany und unless you already have a waterloop, it's not just the waterblock. You also need tubes, a pump, reservoir, fittings and a radiator. So all in all, you are looking at about double the price of the Morpheus.
I think that thing was meant for the 3090 people in the cripto mining sphere were complaining about how the back memory chips had next to no way to dissipate the heat so people started adding things like that to bring down the temp even if it was only 5 or 6 degrees.
got good results using an old GPU heatsink attached to my watercooled card to reduce the memory temp for OCing. Backplate had thermal pads to the PCB and got quite hot.
kryonaut is the solution btw back in the days i've added ~92mm fan on an 9800 GT which had no backplate, simply placed the fan on top of it without any zipties but with 4 rubber thingies instead of screws and it actually saved the card from overheating on auto fan speed (it stopped doing purple screen which would lead to shutdown of the pc, such thing happened after the card reached mid 70c) , later on i learned how to manually raise up fan speed so tiny fan was no longer needed as the card was running at 100% fan speed all the time to avoid reaching 70c, even was able to flash the card to more than 9800 GTX+ performance thanks to extra volts so extra fans on top of the card can help, but perhaps only if without backplate
I did my own thing to my 3070ti. Got a couple aluminum heat sinks off digikey. Instead of zip ties I masked off about 3mm around the edges with tape, applied thermal paste, removed the tape, and then applied 2 part epoxy around the edges. Stuck them on, put some weights on it and let the epoxy cure. Then flipped it over, drilled the holes for mounting. Stuck on two noctua 90mm fans and she was good to go. Got 15c on GPU and Hotspot. It looks kinda jank, not as jank as these things for sure but it works really well.
i could only see this working if it was a backplate replacement, taking an aluminum sheet , changing it for copper and adding fans should reduce board temps but it seems the transfer between materials with a backplate still in place isn't much better. 5-8 degrees C at best and only the outside most layer, not the PCB necessarily. slight worry to over compress the pads and short out components with copper plates though.
Those things are what needed for gigabyte gaming oc Vega cards, which has notorious issue of crashing because of VRM overheat, due to half of the VRM placed on the back of the PCB... There's heatpipe and thermal pads on the back but its just not enough... I put heatsinks with thermal tape on my gaming oc Vega 56 and it works, no more crashing...
I have a Nitro + V64 and i have it water cooled with an aftermarket 240 AIO and since i have removed the backplate, i have x2 12cm fans from the side which, like with the AIO fans, these two ramp up based on the Hotspot's temperature and blow air from the side on almost the entire card directly. So they cool the VRMs and the back side of the card. This has reduced the back side of the card's PCB by almost 19C overall (18.9 to be exact) since there isn't anything to impede heat from getting blown away, like a thermal pad would have done, i checked with a thermal sensor and with an IR thermometer and the hottest component with no UV and max OC it was was on a component which was at 66 when the card boosted up to 1810MHz (stock max is 1630MHz for this one) sucking up to 392 Watts (power limit set to 50%, GPU core clock set at 1715MHz manually) and the even with water cooling that specific time the Hotspot reached 98C iirc. Before i did this to the card (had the stock Nitro air cooler), the card wouldn't hit anything above 1715MHz without crashing and oddly enough with the Hotspot at 92C (mind you, same system, settings and drivers). Without this kind of cooling the card would've cooked itself doing this probably. This OC was just for testing i now have the card back to stock clocks and UV but the setup is the same and the card is barely heating up(in the summer i almost reach 80C on the Hotspot when i am maxing out the card in some triple A game). In the beginning i had tried with these 2 fans above it on the back but sucking the air upwards away from the card instead of blowing it down to it (i've helft around 0.5cm space with rubber risers on the fans' corners), and it reduced the Hotspot temp by around 7C iirc and GPU by 13C. This simple way is amazing if your backplate is setup up correctly from the start in order to get good results (good thermal pads and contact or even remove it entirely) otherwise adding thermal buffering layers which bottleneck heat transfer which isn't gonna give you a good enough result. It's also nice like this because you don't have your stock air cooler blowing like, 70% of the heat coming from card back to its PCB.
Watercooled my 6900xt redevil with kraken adapter 360 aio. Added thermal pads to back plate also m.2 heatsink to the Hotspot. Interesting video thank you!
On that first cooler, might have worked better if you ran the zip-ties just over the base of the cooler and the 1st fin and added a middle zip-tie. On the second solution, it looks like the fan is mounted in the wrong direction so it's fighting against the front fans instead of pulling fresh air over the heatsink.
You need to put the zip tie in the last space just abov the sheet that makes contact with the thermal pad and then backplate, not that it will change something but just for looks
How about the more passive solutions? Like simple, big heatsinks ? Would probably get enough airflow from the case fans anyway, while having a lot more surface area than the backplate I'm seeing some for like 9€ and its also not as ugly
I don't think I would have considered buying one of those backplate coolers in the first place. I tend to focus on more effective case airflow to make sure my GPU doesn't overheat and that has worked well for me so far.
I added thermal pads the back of my memory modules so the backplate would serve as a heat sink and it shaved 18 celcius off my Gigabit RTX 3080 Vision while mining. That's the secret to getting the card really hot because just normal use would not require this kind of surgery
The thermal pads are the reason it's so inefficient, I thought you yourself have pointed before out that the pads require approx 50% compression to effectively conduct, whereas thermal grease is much more forgiving. I installed a far jankier solution on my card with thermal grease and knocked 20C off of my 3090 VRAM temps
The 2 GPUZ readings of under load condition had a slight difference in GPU boost clock, the 2nd one is higher than the 1st run, which could result in higher temperature, so I do think to some extend, this thingy increased the thermal headroom for OC for a bit.
I like how he already has what I assume is his conclusion of the video in the title in of the video but in the beginning of the video he seems like he's giving is a serious chance lol
this kind of "solution" worked for GPU crypto mining where the memory modules got really hot while the main die remained (relatively) cool. This helps cooling the memory and helped me (not with these but my own janky solution) achieve higher hash rates with less stability issues when mining on my gaming rig.
Yes … keep it up , to stabilize the over all multi direction of heat extraction to assist in how the gpu operated in general , more then just more heat extraction a different nano pull anomaly was achieved
10:00 I like hearing what sayings or colloquialisms people pick up who aren't native to speaking English. Hearing him correctly use "shit-ton" in a sentence cracks me up.
Lol that first backplate cooler reminded me of those og zalmam coolers that had fins similar to razor blades. So much curses whenever a client bought those coolers lol.
In my opinion, this is like a "fuel saver" for cars. If a major manufacturer didn't include a cheap gadget that would improve their product, it does not work.
I did a diy solution on a 3070 FE once. Added another thermal pad on the backside of the core then stuck a Ryzen stock cooler on the backplate held on with just thermal paste. Saw about a 3C reduction in the core
But why are you going with the worst case scenario of usage just to disregard these? Not that i would ever buy these , but if i had them on hand that's what i would additionally test out of curiosity : a)Memory temps on full back plate b)Gpus with cutout behind the chip maybe c)gpu's without backplate and while we are at it d)Proper , well-thought mounting
Hey Roman, would you please take a look at the 7900xtx red Devil water block from EKWB? I got mine and am seeing some weird thermals after multiple remounts.
Im pretty sure this was designed for a 3090 in mind not an AMD gpu. Because the 3090 got very on on its backplate because the Vram was there. Also my 3090 has so much sag now that it just get hot for everything so I had to change the mount to vertical to keep the pressure off the board.
I appreciate your testing this stuff from Ali Express, so that a bunch of us do not make the mistake of sending our hard earned money away, and getting "recycled" e-waste in return.
GDDR modules distribute most of their heat into the PCB itself through the copper traces. It would make the most sense to test backplate coolers by looking at VRAM temp, especially with additional thermal pads bridging backplate and PCB.
Thanks for telling, I have some old heat sinks and thermal pads that I'll attach at the back of PCB now.
Well, the amount of heat dissipated also depends on the thermal differential. When you go VRAM -> PCB -> thermal pads -> small backplate cooler, I suspect much less heat can be transferred than going VRAM -> thermal pads -> massive front cooler. So yeah, in theory more heat may be distributed into the PCB itself, in practice thanks to cooling I suspect more heat will be dissipated through the thermal pads on the front. But would be interesting to validate this.
@@seeibe Yea, unless You have a 3090 which has half of it's VRAM on the back, in that case it just might ""work"".
Then again if You have a 3090 I really don't think You should try to cool it by "strapping random scrap metal" onto it with with zip-ties :)
Best regards.
I set an old AM3 stock cooler on top of my 2080 TI with some thermal pads in addition to the normal cooling solution and got -6c average gains as shown in CPUID HWMONITOR without even replacing old pads yet. My solution, however, is the exact size of the hotspot on the backplate, not the size of half of the gpu like this thing in the video
Yeah i got RX 6800 XT and i put thermal pads and cut plastic insulation from backplate and i use thermal pads on the side where vrm is :) and temps drops nicely
I think coolers like these are intended for use with cards like the rtx 3090 which have vram chips dissipating heat onto the backplate, but they are basically useless on other cards
I did this for my 3080ti. Kritical thermal pads and added some heat sinks on top of the memory. Got my gaming mem temp down 5 to 10C.
I used one on my 3090 and got far improved temps
@@bleedsblue0023 Same here.
Easily my most regrettable purchase. Spent more money than my entire PC is worth and then had to rip the thing apart just to not throttle.
I have been tempted to sell it but I worked so hard on it just to make it not throttle. And it still runs hot.
That's exactly was first thought. This is only for 3090. There is even a liquid cooled backplate cooler for 3090. The memory chips on the back were a huge problem for 3090 and they fixed it in 3090 Ti.
@@bleedsblue0023 Well, yeah, a 3080ti can benefit from such a cooler, but people have been reporting drops of mem temp from 100+ degrees to a little above 80 with a 3090.
It would have been fun to see you rig a regular 120mm case fan blowing directly on the back plate, maybe with a 3d printed bracket or even just some rubber spacers and see how that would have worked compared to the Aliexpress versions.
This is my system, and it's a massive improvement for me (over 10C drop)
@@solenoidnull9542 I don't for a second believe you dropped 10 degrees Celsius
That's what I did to my 3090. Bought a thermal pad and some alumium fins and slapped a 120 slim noctua fan ontop of it. about 10-12c in vram temps drop
Yeah, just adding extra airflow right on the backplate can make a big difference. It's all about moving cool air over it to get the heat out
@@solenoidnull9542 Yep, I did the same, and now my gpu stays below 60c under full load.
Don't worry! I don't have a powerful GPU enough to need a backplate 😅
Ain't needing a backplate if my gaming PC's depends on the CPU integrated graphics
All I need is a $2 shady Aliexpress CPU cooler that comes with a -chinese spyware- software for the cooler ARGB control
Backplate is 99% for the looks, also the card runs cooler without any backplate at all.
Don't worry i Don't have a gpu 🤣
Relatable
😂😂😂😂
When I had a 3090 I did a DIY solution like this with a giant aluminum heatsink and an 80mm fan. It actually helped in my case, because I was thermal throttling due to memory temps, even after replacing thermal pads. At least I was able to keep the memory at about 95C instead of 112C.
Yeah I did the same with pk3 95 to 75-80 and mine was on water 3090 backplate temps were no joke but mining was the reason lol
@@B0BBYGAMER Not only minig, try to use it for IA training and render, memory will hit the same 110c :(
Yeah I wish he would have tested with the 3080/3090 because the backplate really helps the mem temps on those cards.
Same. I watercooled the GPU and found that backside memory temps were keeping everything throttled so had to add cooling to the back. I got a replacement back plate (so I had a spare) with a pair of RAM waterblocks that I thermal epoxy'ed to the new backplate. The waterblocks on the back really helped cool the memory temps by keeping them 25-30 degrees cooler.
My 3090 has 65c-70c mem temps and I even have the mem overclocked to 3090ti spec. I simply changed the pads to higher quality ones just a teeny bit thicker, put a Asus ROG 120mm fan (that has a amazing balance of airflow and pressure) onto the backplate pulling hot air out straight into my case’s rear exhaust fan. I was able to drop vram temps without even affecting the core temps negatively
Attaching a heatsink to the backside of the PCB where my VRAM was allowed me to OC from +1000 to +1250 for benchmarking. Core temperature was still the same however, and once the heatsink at the back got heat saturated, +1250 would crash also.
Damn you heat saturation, damn you!!!!!!!
can you just add a fan to it?
@@giaopx Yeah I could, but from the limited testing I did it would just extend the time that I was able to run +1250 OC on VRAM, but it would still become unstable after long enough.
I just rested a server CPU passive heatsink on the back of my 3080ti and got almost 5C off the memory temps.
I was going to thermal paste it but ended up putting better thermal strips on it.
And this is why you don't waste money on silly solutions like that and instead just watercool when you want to push OC limits
Would be interesting to see difference with just a 80mm fan placed on its side on top of the card, blowing along the backplate from power connectors in the direction of the IO plate. I'm pretty sure that would be about as good as the 50 EUR thing or perhaps better.
Î would bet my money that your assumption is correct, the fan alone would be better^^
Do the same thing but after removing the backplate. My bet is that no backplate will perform slightly better since the bare PCB has more surface area since you have have all of the SMD perimeters that lose airflow when you slap a backplate on, SMDs sink most of their heat into the PCB and skips the thermal pad resistance.
Used to do that all the time, would put plastic motherboard standoff's in the screw holes and set it right above the back of the GPU..
I don't know about a backplate but for an HDD it works pretty well; mine dropped from 50 C to 40 C moving it from the bottom of the case to a middle bay where it gets the air of the front fan of the case.
@@teardowndan5364 Honestly I'm not sure about removing the backplate from gpu-s which using thermal pads between the board and backplate. The backplate functions as a heat spreader in those cases, without it you'll get bigger surface for sure, but you can get hotspots or even overheating chips (like vrm or memory).
The second cooler:
- Mom, can we have a Thermalright cooler?
- We have a Thermalright at home!
- Thermalright at home:
These could be interesting with rtx 3090 which has memory on backplate side and gets toasty.
3090 Ti doesn't have memory on the back of the card.
@@bgtubber oh ye fixed it then.
@@MrUkkone 👍
true, those coolers are intended for rtx 3090, especially mining ones. gpu capped at 50% TDP and vram overclocked as high as possible. And they are not that expensive either. like the 2nd one is about 18 Euro in China
I got -10 degrees from mem temp on my 3090 during mining using the cooler #2.
That's the definition of Jank. Something I could see Linus and Alex doing, but definetly not something sold to public. Thank you for sharing these kind of (deservely) obscure products.
This would have been a good use-case for the Maxsun MegaGamer which Gamer's Nexus did an episode on two weeks ago. Steve went a bit lyrical about how well it conducted heat to the back-plate, which should provide a "best-case scenario" for this type of cooling.
The most import to know with this kind of active heatsink on the back plate are RAM and VRM Temp change.
Definitely a creative way to add a fan for the memory. Wouldn't be my first choice but I'm not going judge.... I'm using a flexible arm DC fan that I got at FRYS 15 years ago bolted to a $500 mobo.
I think der8auer missed the mark on this one, a 400W GPU is going to hit the RAM and VRM much harder than the 270W class GPU
That's only applicable to cards that have those components on the back or have thermal paste which transfers the heat from them to the backplate.
I used to use my 3090 for crypto mining when I was not using it. The back-mounted VRAM was constantly getting way too hot and it would hinder performance a lot and could not reach its normal hash rate. I installed a backplate cooling solution and it worked perfectly. In normal gaming applications though, it would have never gotten hot enough to warrant having a backplate cooler.
You should've tested with a 3090 because that's the only card in need of backplate cooling.
This kind of cooling can lead to interesting problems. I built an ITX rig for a friend once where a 200mm top fan blew onto the back of the graphics card. The PC was always crashing when gaming, because the temp sensor of the GFX card was cooled too, and didn't spin up its fans. As a result, the GPU actually overheated, although the back of the card was cold to the touch ^^
Just get a little bit more airflow in the case if you have issues........ Or if you are going to use zip tids anyway, do what I did in my spare computer to cool a part of the motherboard that got hot and rebooted me. Hang a fan with zip ties for directed airflow, it does alot. :)
I tried compressed air and it did wonders
you could try this with a gpu that has memory on the back like the 3090
I did wonder if a 3090 would have been a better card to test with because of the hot gddr6x VRAM being back-mounted. These products seem to be a response to that , and probably useless for anything else tbh. Gave me a good laugh. Surely having your backplate running hot is a good thing!? means it's dissipating heat I'd have thought.
Agree, it's for RTX3090 and not for gamers but for miners. You can find many videos from them with these types of cooling backplates.
When you're mining on 3080 or 3090 these are the difference between stock memory throttle and running +1000 memory. Made a big difference to roi.
You should test mounting a fan directly on the backplate. I guess that would be more efficient. And you can use zip-ties to get the same professional look.
Clearly rubber bands are the preferred fan mounting solution. Must be for noise damping or something.
Free tip when using zip ties to secure things down around square objects.
Tennis Balls, Hollow Rubber Balls, and Ping Pong Balls.
Cut them in half, in this case it would have been flat line down on backplate, and zip ties over the top, not only toes this allow for serious pressure to be applied, it also EVENLY pushes down into the backplate thanks to natures most stable of shapes. :)
I had a 3090 that I cooled with a backplate addon. It def helped the memory temps. I took a large heatsink and used thermal adhesive to stick it on, combined with some thermal compound. It def helps if you have memory under the backplate.
On a multi RTX 3090 setup I used 1u Server vapour chamber heatsinks on the backplate. It really helped with the insane vram temperatures
Could you test with a 3090? I'm wondering how effective it is on the memory temperatures.
Please test them on a 3090 or rear mounted VRAM card
Also aliexpress has better made coolers than these 2 shown in the video, but definitely more expensive
There's no point. Even if you just put some thermo paste in there, it'll help + one 120 fan
@@XMoldyMe Ok then, how about Dell Alienware's 3090 🤔
I swear nvidia either did this as planned obsolescence. Or they just don't care about the fact their cards throttle with the stock coolers, like an intel CPU.
RTX 3090 would be perfect to test it, because of double side GDDR6X memory and temperatures like 90 - 100c from the backplate side.
Would be a good idea to put something between zip ties and cooling solution on top of backplate.
Should help significantly with mounting pressure and that is important when it comes to heat transfer.
I would say just having a fan from the front blowing air over backplate would be plenty.
Also yeah the tie rip stuff is painful...probably why they included thermal glue, and man if that second one was just done more professionally, it would actually be pretty cool imo
5:50 you can put top ziptie inside the finstack, on top of the fin closest to the card.
also you can cut off excess termal pad, it'd look better-ish.
It's always a shame when an expensive GPU with a metal backplate doesn't even have thermal pads to make use of it. (looking at you Powercolor Red Devil 7900xtx)
Manufacturer: I'm gonna paint this entire thing black.
Spray paint bottle: Nope.
Hey, I recall seeing a company (non-ali express, afaik) that sells a generic GPU backplate water block (looked it up, mp5works). It would be really interesting to see the actual wattage removed by measuring delta T and flow. Also, if there was any improvement by adding additional thermal pads behind the gpu die/vram.
I added a 100x40x20mm aluminum heat sink on the back of an Nvidia T1000, with 3mm thermal pad. The air flow is sealed with tape and a 40x40x28mm fan. Result is 10°C reduction in temps under load. What prompted me to do this was noticing the thermals creeping up as time passed and measured 75°C on the back of the card. All while maintaining the single slot tiny cooler on the other side. It's also a way to get heat away from the single slot DP plate where there's nowhere for the heat to exhaust. Things just were getting more and more heat soaked.
We need a third test... add the copper one with two fans on top of the 3 heatpipes of the active one... lolz
Please test a 120mm fan blowing down on the backplate - i did the thermalpad mod on my reference 6900xt and did see 6c lower gpu temp
If you don't have water cooling on the CPU, it will take more heat to the GPU
What if you only add pads to the memory and the GPU doesn't touch the backplate
@@XMoldyMe that might be true - personally I have a AIO on the cpu
you need some holes for the fan to be effective. You want to blow away the heat trapped under the backplate, not to cool the backplate.
@@dreyga2 Nope, heat is transferred to the backplate. That's the point, all you need is a fan to take the heat away.
Sometimes it's there to help prevent the most extreme GPU sag and be more protected from dust and static.
Makes the whole gaming experience fast and smooth , if a hitch or stutter occurs it now self scans and comes up with a fix test or a replacement with its own catalog of software stencils
To be fair! I honestly really enjoyed the ""custom scrap diy"" look! Reminded me of han's millennium falcon
I have put a 100mm fan on the backplate of my 3090 and it dropped Vram temperature during mining. It was thermal trotteling before and I was able to stabilise it. So it does help. For this reason I just left the fan there even after I stopped mining. Just a simple fan pulling away the air from the back plate helps a ton, and the fan is not even set at a high RPM
back in the days I used to just point a fan directly at the back of the card and that fixed the heat issue if any, in most cases there is just not a whole lot of airflow towards the back of a gpu in the first place so just adding some airflow pretty much solves the problem
You need to also test overclocking because the back plate helps cool the VRM
Only GPU I can see this working with well is the RTX 3090 with it's ram being on the backside
If youre placing VRMs on the back then yes you need a better cooling solution other than the thin metal plate. I tore down my 3090, repad/pasted everything and put additional aluminum heat sinks on the back plate. It dropped my temps by over 25*C.
why not remove the backplate and place them on the memory...then u get excellent temps on memory and gpu core because there is no trapped heat.
man you gotta do like a weekly aliexpress tech review lol, this is just some golden stuff.
Thermal Grizzly Man decides to examine the competition and is not surprised at the quality of craftsmanship.
Heat from the core, VRMs, etc is in the PCB..:
Getting it out (into the air eventually) using cheap thermal pads is a waste of time and money.
Just point fans at the hotter areas of the bare PCB.
ie: Go directly from PCB to air, skipping the delta T losses of pads and backplates etc.
This got me up to the top frequency of one memory strap up on a R9 280X.
Hypothosis:
Heat from the core and VRMs etc was seeping INTO the RAM modules via their BGAs etc.
Ameliorating such allowed the RAM OC quickly, cheaply and effectively and slightly cooled the core aswell.
I wonder if just having a Fan put near the back plate would have as much affect as those solution as the backplate is already a flat radiator, just add some airflow to help the performance should be enough. As you said, the water cooling is what will help with cooling and performance.
Yes it would, I got a 3090 & while the memory junction (the hottest module) never really got to dangerous temps there has been a few times I seen it top out around 98/99C (thermal throttling is supposed to start at 110C on GDDR6X modules). Which is a bit too close to the limit for my liking. I put a 120mm Noctua fan with some bumpers to hold it up off the backplate a little on it & have never seen above 92 on my mem junction temp since.
I love stupid cooling
"if you have any standards..."
During the GPU Apocalypse daughter wanted a PC so she's running an old GTX980 with an AMD copper slug CPU COOLER strapped on.
Sometimes standards got to drop LMAO. It's still running now, lifesaver at the the time.
Recently I took apart an old PNY GTS 460 that was collecting dust. I realized the heatsink they used is just an old Intel CPU cooler that looks like it had the sides chopped off with an angle grinder so it fit under the shroud.
Damn, this is like a comedy episode. You obviously didn't do anything wrong or bad. I really salute you for buying and checking out these so called products. I know not everyone is as handy, but I would rather go and buy the copper sheets myself and do something with. Regarding the second product, I would so much rather have it unpainted than that shitty "paint job", it hurts even calling it a "paint job", heck, even a toddler would do it better. In my opinion copper is really awesome looking and I could really imagine having a complete water loop with only copper and brass parts. It would look sick as hell!
That 2nd one looks as bad as the time Alex and Linus made a heat sink with heat pipes
Always so hyped whenever you upload!
The second one reminds me about the series of passive VGA mosfet heatsinks from Thermalright for Radeon 3xxx/4xxx/5xxx series. Those were almost like pieces of art, I still have a bunch of them around just for their aesthetics.
I just took a chance on one of them RX580's off Aliexpress, with coupons etc came in at £45ish which I am going to be happy all day long if it runs OK and I know I have to thoroughly clean the thing up and new thermal pasta of course. I was tempted for a few pounds more grabbing a 590 but looking through the seller feedbacks it wasn't positive whereas the one I got my 580 from had all but one positives and the one not positive was a missing edge conn trace and the company sent him a replacement. I am working on building a killer water circuit for mine at the mo, my case is the enormous HAF XM which has room for top and rear rads and was thinking of going 2 rad, with the rear rad sitting between the GPU and CPU blocks and the top rad for max thermal exchanges. My last water build I used the Antec Skeleton which I had painted toxic green with red spatters, a twin circuit rig with one circuit for the gpu/ram/bridges etc and another for the CPU...
derBauer EN : I've mounted custom thermal pads on the back of my KFA2 GTX 1080 EXOC 8GB, prior off course cutting out the plastic non-conductive cover from underneath the back plate to fit the thermal pads for the backside of the memory chips, backside of the GPU die itself and the backside of the VRM-s....and in my testing the GPU core temp fell 7-8°C, the VRM-s around 10°C and memory chips around 7°C. This model of mine actually has a good and very usable aluminium backplate that has a sign "caution hot" but is out of the box completely un-utilized.
There are a few models out there since the GTX 900 series and R9 200 series that I've had the chance of modifying and helped with the temperatures quite a bit.
Instead of a custom water block, just get a Morpheus 8069. I was sceptical at first, especially after I unboxed it and saw, that it was smaller than the stock cooler, but after I installed it, I was blown away. The coretemp dropped by 18°C and it got a lot quieter.
For $174? Lol no just buy a bykski waterblock for less than that. They work great, i have one on my 3090 ti 50c while gaming.
@@eternalbeing3339 The price has dropped. At least in Germany und unless you already have a waterloop, it's not just the waterblock. You also need tubes, a pump, reservoir, fittings and a radiator. So all in all, you are looking at about double the price of the Morpheus.
derBauer turning into the best PC hardware channel
I think that thing was meant for the 3090 people in the cripto mining sphere were complaining about how the back memory chips had next to no way to dissipate the heat so people started adding things like that to bring down the temp even if it was only 5 or 6 degrees.
got good results using an old GPU heatsink attached to my watercooled card to reduce the memory temp for OCing. Backplate had thermal pads to the PCB and got quite hot.
why u not try 3090???
The second heatsink, "We will *sigh* use the zip ties..."
kryonaut is the solution
btw back in the days i've added ~92mm fan on an 9800 GT which had no backplate, simply placed the fan on top of it without any zipties but with 4 rubber thingies instead of screws and it actually saved the card from overheating on auto fan speed (it stopped doing purple screen which would lead to shutdown of the pc, such thing happened after the card reached mid 70c) , later on i learned how to manually raise up fan speed so tiny fan was no longer needed as the card was running at 100% fan speed all the time to avoid reaching 70c, even was able to flash the card to more than 9800 GTX+ performance thanks to extra volts
so extra fans on top of the card can help, but perhaps only if without backplate
Had me me in tears I can hear the disgust in your voice, excellent content!
I did my own thing to my 3070ti. Got a couple aluminum heat sinks off digikey. Instead of zip ties I masked off about 3mm around the edges with tape, applied thermal paste, removed the tape, and then applied 2 part epoxy around the edges. Stuck them on, put some weights on it and let the epoxy cure. Then flipped it over, drilled the holes for mounting. Stuck on two noctua 90mm fans and she was good to go. Got 15c on GPU and Hotspot. It looks kinda jank, not as jank as these things for sure but it works really well.
same -15c if you remove the back plate :))
i could only see this working if it was a backplate replacement, taking an aluminum sheet , changing it for copper and adding fans should reduce board temps but it seems the transfer between materials with a backplate still in place isn't much better. 5-8 degrees C at best and only the outside most layer, not the PCB necessarily. slight worry to over compress the pads and short out components with copper plates though.
My 7900xt memory got 80C+ overclocked, I was actually considering buying one and thanks for the video.
If there is anything components needing cooling.. there is never too much of cooling!
Those things are what needed for gigabyte gaming oc Vega cards, which has notorious issue of crashing because of VRM overheat, due to half of the VRM placed on the back of the PCB... There's heatpipe and thermal pads on the back but its just not enough... I put heatsinks with thermal tape on my gaming oc Vega 56 and it works, no more crashing...
I usually prevent my fingers from burning on the backplate of my GPU by not touching the backplate of my GPU
I like that “don’t just don’t”
I have a Nitro + V64 and i have it water cooled with an aftermarket 240 AIO and since i have removed the backplate, i have x2 12cm fans from the side which, like with the AIO fans, these two ramp up based on the Hotspot's temperature and blow air from the side on almost the entire card directly.
So they cool the VRMs and the back side of the card.
This has reduced the back side of the card's PCB by almost 19C overall (18.9 to be exact) since there isn't anything to impede heat from getting blown away, like a thermal pad would have done, i checked with a thermal sensor and with an IR thermometer and the hottest component with no UV and max OC it was was on a component which was at 66 when the card boosted up to 1810MHz (stock max is 1630MHz for this one) sucking up to 392 Watts (power limit set to 50%, GPU core clock set at 1715MHz manually) and the even with water cooling that specific time the Hotspot reached 98C iirc.
Before i did this to the card (had the stock Nitro air cooler), the card wouldn't hit anything above 1715MHz without crashing and oddly enough with the Hotspot at 92C (mind you, same system, settings and drivers).
Without this kind of cooling the card would've cooked itself doing this probably.
This OC was just for testing i now have the card back to stock clocks and UV but the setup is the same and the card is barely heating up(in the summer i almost reach 80C on the Hotspot when i am maxing out the card in some triple A game).
In the beginning i had tried with these 2 fans above it on the back but sucking the air upwards away from the card instead of blowing it down to it (i've helft around 0.5cm space with rubber risers on the fans' corners), and it reduced the Hotspot temp by around 7C iirc and GPU by 13C.
This simple way is amazing if your backplate is setup up correctly from the start in order to get good results (good thermal pads and contact or even remove it entirely) otherwise adding thermal buffering layers which bottleneck heat transfer which isn't gonna give you a good enough result.
It's also nice like this because you don't have your stock air cooler blowing like, 70% of the heat coming from card back to its PCB.
The second cooler reminds me of a bunch of laptop heatpipe radiators with the heatpipe flattened 90 degrees compared to in a regular laptop.
I'm like 95% sure the AVC fan that came with the second heatsink is from an AMD CPU stock cooler circa 2005.
Watercooled my 6900xt redevil with kraken adapter 360 aio. Added thermal pads to back plate also m.2 heatsink to the Hotspot. Interesting video thank you!
On that first cooler, might have worked better if you ran the zip-ties just over the base of the cooler and the 1st fin and added a middle zip-tie.
On the second solution, it looks like the fan is mounted in the wrong direction so it's fighting against the front fans instead of pulling fresh air over the heatsink.
You need to put the zip tie in the last space just abov the sheet that makes contact with the thermal pad and then backplate, not that it will change something but just for looks
How about the more passive solutions? Like simple, big heatsinks ? Would probably get enough airflow from the case fans anyway, while having a lot more surface area than the backplate
I'm seeing some for like 9€ and its also not as ugly
The moment the attachment options were zip ties my brain said nope. Zip ties have one possible use in my rig, cable management, and that's it.
Get rid of the backplate and fix it directly to the pcb and I think that second one would do quite a good job.
You are a brave, brave man to even bring those things near your PC.
I don't think I would have considered buying one of those backplate coolers in the first place. I tend to focus on more effective case airflow to make sure my GPU doesn't overheat and that has worked well for me so far.
I added thermal pads the back of my memory modules so the backplate would serve as a heat sink and it shaved 18 celcius off my Gigabit RTX 3080 Vision while mining. That's the secret to getting the card really hot because just normal use would not require this kind of surgery
The thermal pads are the reason it's so inefficient, I thought you yourself have pointed before out that the pads require approx 50% compression to effectively conduct, whereas thermal grease is much more forgiving. I installed a far jankier solution on my card with thermal grease and knocked 20C off of my 3090 VRAM temps
The 2 GPUZ readings of under load condition had a slight difference in GPU boost clock, the 2nd one is higher than the 1st run, which could result in higher temperature, so I do think to some extend, this thingy increased the thermal headroom for OC for a bit.
that second one looks amazing! im putting that on my 4080 with the water block!
I like how he already has what I assume is his conclusion of the video in the title in of the video but in the beginning of the video he seems like he's giving is a serious chance lol
this kind of "solution" worked for GPU crypto mining where the memory modules got really hot while the main die remained (relatively) cool.
This helps cooling the memory and helped me (not with these but my own janky solution) achieve higher hash rates with less stability issues when mining on my gaming rig.
Using zip ties in your PC is a way of showing your PC how much you love and appreciate it.
Yes … keep it up , to stabilize the over all multi direction of heat extraction to assist in how the gpu operated in general , more then just more heat extraction a different nano pull anomaly was achieved
Wonderful, I love this stuff. I can not wait to get my hands on your new AMD 7000 direct die IHS solution so I can keep my existing AIO cooler hi.
I think this is the problem of mounting pressure... That heat pipe one seems promising with proper mounting.
10:00 I like hearing what sayings or colloquialisms people pick up who aren't native to speaking English. Hearing him correctly use "shit-ton" in a sentence cracks me up.
Lol that first backplate cooler reminded me of those og zalmam coolers that had fins similar to razor blades. So much curses whenever a client bought those coolers lol.
active backplate required to 3090 mining, or any other high power with dual side vmem chips
In my opinion, this is like a "fuel saver" for cars. If a major manufacturer didn't include a cheap gadget that would improve their product, it does not work.
I did a diy solution on a 3070 FE once. Added another thermal pad on the backside of the core then stuck a Ryzen stock cooler on the backplate held on with just thermal paste. Saw about a 3C reduction in the core
But why are you going with the worst case scenario of usage just to disregard these?
Not that i would ever buy these , but if i had them on hand that's what i would additionally test out of curiosity :
a)Memory temps on full back plate
b)Gpus with cutout behind the chip
maybe
c)gpu's without backplate
and while we are at it
d)Proper , well-thought mounting
If there was a way to mount a fan pointing at the backplate, I bet that would reduce temps. Or even blue tac some fans onto the backplate.
Hey Roman, would you please take a look at the 7900xtx red Devil water block from EKWB? I got mine and am seeing some weird thermals after multiple remounts.
Isn't this more useful for something like the 3090 with VRAM on the back and VRAM temperature sensors?
Im pretty sure this was designed for a 3090 in mind not an AMD gpu. Because the 3090 got very on on its backplate because the Vram was there. Also my 3090 has so much sag now that it just get hot for everything so I had to change the mount to vertical to keep the pressure off the board.
I appreciate your testing this stuff from Ali Express, so that a bunch of us do not make the mistake of sending our hard earned money away, and getting "recycled" e-waste in return.