[Official] NVIDIA GPU Mod Club - AKA "The Mod" - Page 185

Try a third cooler, or try one of the water coolers on your CPU.

Lets review;

You changed TIM, you changes coolers and you back to stock with no O/c? correct?

Is that your main folding card?

Im beginning to think the card may be on the way out.

Its gotta be the IHS on the 470 that's causing the issue. The thermal paste dried up and probably broke from the constant heat. Best bet either completely remove the IHS and run the 620 right on the die (my choice) or sand down the IHS edges and repaste.

im inclined to think so also cakewalk, once all other options have been exausted.

How long have you had the card for, its second hand right, if it did not come with a cooler someone was running a block on the card previous to your ownership.

1) what did you use for cooling prior to the mod or was it purchased just for this mod and youve never ran the card prior to

2) how long have you run the card for and what were the temps before. I ask this because the temps may have been high to begin with and would show an issue prior to modding

3) your using a bracket so you may have it too tight or too lose, both can cause issues, when testing with different coolers did you use the bracket both times.

You should downclock the gpu, both clocks and voltage. See what that does for you. Also has the bios been modded. Did you update your graphics drivers, if so revert to an older driver and check again.

this is a strech but did you run the pumps off your mobo fan headers, you should go straight off the psu via molex to confirm max power for the pump. You bios fan settings could have corrupted and your not getting full power to the pump.... i know but strange things happen

Well this is my first post ever on this forum but I'd like to join "the mod" club ;p I found this topic about 2-3 weeks ago and was wondering if I should do it or not. My Gpu isn't under any sort of warranty and if I screwed up I'm pretty much out the 500 I spent on my GTX 580. Then the very next day I saw the antec kuhler 920 on sale for 80 bucks and thanks to an amazing deal at a local shop (they will beat any advertised price by 25% of the difference between there price and the other retailers) I got it for 70 bucks. As soon as I got home I signed up for these forums and ordered a couple of brackets from DWood (props to him on being cool enough to share his awesome brackets with the rest of us!). Well the bracket arrived today and I installed the "the Mod". It wasn't easy (chubby short fingers and tiny screws make me want to rip my hair out lol) but I'm happy to say this was money well spent.





Never realized until I took these pics how terribly ugly my cable management has gotten over the last year lol

The Temps are AMAZING with the antec 920. I had my reference PNY GTX 580 OC'd to 1.1v at 925/2103 and at max load, with the stock cooler, my temp was 75C with a custom fan curve (which sounded like a vacuum cleaner next to my ear).
Now they are this:


65 doesn't seem that great but when you consider I jacked the the OC to 1.15v and 980, It's pretty awesome. It wasn't actually 65 either. With the extreme preset in antecs program it was 51-53C after 2 hours of running unigine. I switched over to the silent preset for another 2 hours and after peaking at 65 early on it went down to 58-60C constant. So I'll be leaving it on silent since 60C at full load is perfectly acceptable for me. It's to bad I couldn't get 1ghz stable but oh well 980 is good enough ;p

My PC is now barely audible other then the light whirring noise the pump from my h100 makes and the antec pump but once you are playing a game with the speakers on it drowns out any noise from my machine. That sure beats the dust buster like sound that the stock cooler makes when it's maxed out to keep the OC'd temps at bay. That being said on the extreme preset the antec 920 is far from quiet in fact it isn't even much quieter then the stock cooler, just a different kind of noise. Thankfully the silent preset gives decent temps and is well almost silent.

I'd like to thank everyone on this forum for introducing this mod to me and Dwood for selling me the bracket. You guys are all amazing!
Edited by DevilMikey00 - 7/4/12 at 9:47pm

Yeah, those tiny screws are annoying. At least I had a mini socket wrench.

I just added a 2nd GTX 470 to my system with the Kuhler 620. I'll post some pics later, still tidying up some loose cables.
Yes it all fits in my 300R

Anyways, temps are perfect, but now there is a fan that spins up and gets louder and louder as my system starts working.
I have the Kuhlers plugged into the Mobo fan headers. The Fans on the radiators are plugged into a fan controller.
The GPU fans are set at 30% in MSI AB.
Can't be my CPU fan as it is shrouded and just doesn't make that much noise.

I am thinking it might actually be my PSU fan. Corsair TX750. The air out the back is still cool though...

I had an issue similar to this with my GTX 465 turned 470 maybe the 4th or 5th time I reseat my 620. What had happened is I pulled the zip-ties far too tight and bent the PCB. This warping seemingly caused one of the surface mount components ( probably couldn't zero in on it to begin with ) solder points to crack and become utterly useless. I imagine this was to filter down power to the gpu and caused a higher throughput of voltage or something.

A friend of mine recommended I fire up the soldering iron and just reflow many of the surface mount components. Other than knocking off other caps and resistors since, haven't had the same issue.

well i took the card into the office today ready to work on it with all the fancy tools.... the moment i touched the IHS with the razor blade it popped off and the TIM in there was rock hard. 99% sure this is the problem. seems the TIM had just dried up then the IHS had broken contact with the die. i will know tonight when i get home if that is the issue. i am going to run it without the IHS since i am already this far in.

Can you plug the 620 in the PSU powert connector instead? That way you assure that the pump is getting full power all the top and no voltage drop from the motherboard.
Odd the power supply would be spinning up and you'd actually hear that... Dual 470's would be pushin the PSU though...I think...