The Thermal Interface

What do you say we take a look under the hood, so to speak?

Here, we can see that BFG is using white thermal paste. I prefer thermal paste as thermal pads are messy and harder to clean.

Heat Sink Removed

The GPU is protected by a shim that will prevents the core from being damaged during the installation of the cooler. It is good to note that BFG applied a good amount of thermal paste. In fact, it's a little too much.

If you look at the left side of the core, you will see that some of the thermal paste almost makes contact with some resistors. If you are going to apply your own thermal paste, make sure you apply a thin, even layer. Too much of a good thing is a bad thing.

Now, let's take a look at the memory chips. After removing the cooler, there are still some traces of the thermal interface on the memory chips.

Thermal interface of the memory chips

It appears to be some sort of thermal pad. It doesn't look like the whole chip was making contact with the thermal pad. But then again, GDDR3 chips don't produce quite so much heat. Let's have a close up of the memory chips, shall we?

Thermal interface of the memory chips

Looks like BFG didn't do that good a job with the memory chips. Some have pretty good contact with the thermal pad while others seem to have only partial contact.