I was here when J did the gag with the 780 and he said "Where's the Ti!?" Seeing the reference 980 sure was a blast from the past.

@MrJimmyPenguin

4 ай бұрын

It’s also still very nice seeing he’s maintained and kept so much weight off, I remember widdde J

@chaosordeal294

4 ай бұрын

"Blast from the past." I was gaming on a 970 until a year ago. And, honestly, it played games just fine.

@PTFuZi

Ай бұрын

My 980 died a few weeks ago

Recently picked up a second hand RTX 2080 Ti with the same issues. I replaced the fans, replaced the thermal paste & pads, and cleaned it up. Now it works like its brand new 👌🏼

@GregoryShtevensh

4 ай бұрын

Good card too. Probably better than a 3070

@MikeSims1103

4 ай бұрын

What parts did you use/get to do it? My 2080 Ti is at best loud now and sounding not in great shape, and no clue about performance degradation. I have an i9-9900 and I do need to get a new computer soon(?) but throwing a 4070 or something in here at this point just seems silly.

@rustler08

4 ай бұрын

​@@GregoryShtevenshKind of. The 3070 is a bit faster and doesn't have memory chiplets that kill themselves. But, a few more gigs is nice for the 2080 Ti. Honestly, I'd probably take a 3070. It's a newer card with better DLSS and everything.

@GregoryShtevensh

4 ай бұрын

@rustler08 neither get dlss 3.0, and both can use DLSS 2.0, but I get you though. It's just the vram that's going to make the 2080ti a better card in some situations. HW unboxed showed this with 8gb cards in the past. Mind you, updates may have changed some of those issues

@Torchedini

4 ай бұрын

@@GregoryShtevensh Updates can't fix memory, they'll just serve you low textures faster/more often.

That gpu design is a piece of art

@jolness1

4 ай бұрын

Besides the thermals, my 1080ti had the same cooler and it… got hot as fuck. Even when new. Does look good. The FE cards this gen are beautiful and the thermals are great.

@bonanzabrandon6877

4 ай бұрын

@@jolness1 Yeah there's a reason that blower coolers went the way of the dodo. They don't have the cooling capacity needed for modern cards. I'm a stickler for noise in my PC. I was using a stock 3080 for a while, but during gaming the fan would spin up to max and I couldn't stand it so I slapped a waterblock on it and now I can game in blissful silence.

@Beezzzzy_

4 ай бұрын

They’re so loud and the temps suck lol

@user-ju3fp6gd8f

4 ай бұрын

The 700 series first used this design. My EVGA 780 was one of the loudest pieces of gear i've ever owned.@@Beezzzzy_

@Fletchersketche_

4 ай бұрын

Another person of culture! I was just about to comment the same thing. I really want a 1080ti version just because it's the card I always wanted back in the day.

I LOVE Phil’s laugh. The end got me 😂 💀 Great video as always!

@Mr_Spock512

4 ай бұрын

I love the whole crew ... Phil is a talented editor. I've learned so much about computer hardware on this channel over the years, it's presented in a fun and entertaining fashion. Just love the occasional "goofyness". 😂

@DethNade

4 ай бұрын

me to lol

That ending! LOL If he went from a happy to horrified expression it would have been a twitch emote for sure! LOL

@Lurker-dk8jk

4 ай бұрын

Was going to say the same thing. His face got all stretchy.

@michaelmonstar4276

4 ай бұрын

He turned into Sid from Ice Age.

Probably should’ve taken the cooler apart too, the shroud around the heat sink means there can actually be a lot of dust that gets accumulated on the heat sink itself that’s not that easy to blow out. A great video nonetheless, repasting does so much for anything pre-2021 when manufacturers moved on to using phase change material

@Bangulo

3 ай бұрын

I thought the same especially with that crappy blower he used. Honestly the video felt half assed to me.

@LedNe0nDevil

3 ай бұрын

@@BanguloHello, it went from 84º with no fan speed. To 64º with fan at 100%. All they showed was no fan vs fan speed at max. You think these whales move?.

I have an old 980Ti and an old 750Ti I cleaned up and repasted about two years ago. That really helped the performance a lot on both of them.

You mentioned the whole dead person being in the GPU thing. It reminded me of a story a coworker told me when I worked at a data center in Mexico about how a new NOC employee/intern got stuck/locked in one of the server racks during a holiday weekend, and he stayed trapped in there standing upright unable to sit down because there wasn't enough room to move for the 4 day break. Other people were in and out of the data center, but it was such a massive place and so loud, even though he could hear the doors (they make a loud beep when opened), they couldn't hear him screaming. But even worse, he knew the entire time that there was a fire suppression system test coming at the end of the holiday weekend, so he would have been panicking, because when the other employees got back they did a sweep of the data center to make sure it was empty of people, and then they activated a test of their argon fire suppression system while there was "no one left" in the data center. This system replaced all of the oxygen in the server farm with argon. The kid passed away in there, and they didn't find him until a couple days later when someone came to switch out the tape backups. The crazy thing? All the kid had to do was reach back and pull a little latch and it would have opened the rack door from the inside.. Freaking tragedy.

@fullboostturbo1

4 ай бұрын

Dam that is a pretty sad story the poor bugger losing his life, if only he knew about the little latch for the problem that he actually found himself in. Hopefully his in a better place now God bless him and his family.

@sodapopinksi667

4 ай бұрын

Damn, that's quite the story. Thx for sharing

@vedinthorn

4 ай бұрын

What? Bro I would have just started unplugging things and making a mess. Someone will come check when the entire server goes offline.

@thestig007

3 ай бұрын

That's nuts. Definitely learn how server racks work before you climb in...

@thestig007

3 ай бұрын

@@vedinthorn Exactly lol. Make an outage so someone comes and checks on the rack... EZ.

I just redid paste and pads on my 2080ti this week, the memory pads were hard and crumbly as dry clay! Temps obviously came down by a significant amount, it's absolutely worth doing.

Hey Jay, you seem to be looking and feeling better. I hope it all stays that way. Just wishing you well man. Thanks for all the cool vids 👍

Tks for the reminder of old paste drying out. Have a person who is having issues with an older card that needs to be replaced and cannot afford it right now. This might give it a little more life until that new graphic card can be purchased.

These old cards can still live with the correct maintenance and still keep its performance good.

@scythelord

4 ай бұрын

Except memory wise. They're very lacking for anything modern.

@kivulifenrir

4 ай бұрын

@@scythelord I think it was Tom's Hardware that recently did the Titan test and it failed horribly at modern stuff.

@daghostds

4 ай бұрын

And at worse find a new home in someone server for AI related task (Home assistant voice AI, content generation, etc.), video transcoding, video out, but personally I went for a pair of Tesla p4 instead.

@DedlyAidan

4 ай бұрын

it really depends on the card, older high end cards (most XX80 tier cards, for example), sure, but I was stuck on a 1050 Ti for 4 years until recently, and I would not wish that on anybody, the amount of games that were either straight unplayable or had to be smeared in Vaseline was really high

@raresmacovei8382

4 ай бұрын

​@@kivulifenrirThat's only because Kepler has aged like dogshit, probably Nvidia's worst uArch to age past GeForce 5 FX.

There is something about Phil being happy in your videos that gives me so much joy to listen to.

It is so nice to see 4M! Congrats!! Still got my 1080 and just did this about 9 months ago.

From TechPowerUp: The GeForce GTX 980 was a high-end graphics card by NVIDIA, launched on September 19th, 2014. So almost 10 years old. Nice to see that they can still work for some.

Love that your still passionate about what made you to all of us. Your still “king” brother. How about an update on you? I feel like after so many years of watching you, and using you knowledge to improve my builds, ....your family an I hope your doing better. Love ya bro.

I wonder if Jay has ever told a joke that Phil didn't bust a gut at?! Lmao😂

@lifespanofafry1534

3 ай бұрын

No. The guy is obnoxious.

I was not ready to hear a card only 1 generation older than mine referred to as "old school".

@jolness1

4 ай бұрын

10 series is 7yrs old now. It’s pretty old. Doesn’t mean it’s a bad card. I loved mine and only upgraded because I need a 4k monitor for coding and the poor 1080ti couldn’t run the games I play at a good frame rate at 4k. Otherwise… I’d keep using it.

@user-hr4hu8xb5f

4 ай бұрын

RTX 20 released on 2018, It was almost 6 years ago and GTX 10 released on 2016, It was almost 8 years ago. They are old AF.

@alexturnbackthearmy1907

4 ай бұрын

@@user-hr4hu8xb5f And, unironically, more then enough for most things to this day. Even old 3060 is considered as a medium card that can somewhat do anything there is, and decently.

@helenHTID

4 ай бұрын

10 years is a long time, More so in tech... That's a 10-year-old child becoming 20! In perspective. So yeah your card is old ass lol

@ffwast

4 ай бұрын

The 900 series is the last with Windows XP drivers. It's not just old it's retro computing now.

I needed this today, Jay's humor and Phil's laugh always makes me laugh.

Love this video. Like the throw back to the early years

So excited, exactly what I am like when describing any kind of tech to anyone I know and them looking at me like I have 3 heads.

I love these types of videos from you guys

Always love the goofy stuff you guys come up with 😂 Keep it up!

1:18 man, if they had one that was fresh out from the box never used. it would also be good to see how much the performance has decarded over the years

@cosminmilitaru9920

4 ай бұрын

Linus tested GTX 480 new vs 10 years old used, difference was 2%, basically no degrade.

@SiliconS32

3 ай бұрын

Performance doesn't degrade, it either works or doesn't

Amazing video Jay! I dropped 16C and was able to crank my clocks way up on my 1080 thanks to these tips!

I love these kind of vids. Keep em up!

Loving videos about optimizing and tweaking old hardware

I really enjoyed this content. Thanks for a great video.

Just picked up one of the Mats from your store, thanks again

This is the stuff i like! I love videos on old hardware

Ha, ha! Jay knows what dust is REALLY made of... PEOPLE!

@ffwast

4 ай бұрын

In a house it is! Mostly skin.

@aleksandrbmelnikov

4 ай бұрын

@@ffwast So is Soylent Green.🍽️ Yum.😈

My dad recommended this channel to me and I am glad he did. You just earned a sub! 😃

Fun fact: the 900 series is the last with Windows XP drivers, officially up to the 960 but with a little tweak they all work.

45fps in battlefield is kinda awesome for such an old card

These little goofy videos are my favorites. I like the more informative videos as well, but these videos are just fun to watch.

Just started watching and love it already.

That outro, though! It was epic.

same cooler as the 1080ti the front screws remove the perpex plate allowing you to air duster it. i did this when i last dfismantled it and applied kryonaut to the cooler, made sucha difference to its boost clocks back in the day.

i did this same thing to my 980ti a couple months ago. Brough my temps down between 15-20*C depending on the game. Brought some life back to my card for a few more years probably!

Phil busts out laughing every morning when Jay says hi. This guy would laugh at his own funeral

Great video! My i7 6700k with a 980Ti still runs great in 1440p. No problem running OW2, D4, POE, LE... good maintenance does miracles.

Its funny that i saw this just now. I usually do a good dusting on my whole pc which also includes cleaning the fans. I was just thinking today "dang, my gpu is still a bit dusty, maybe i should do a detailed clean and re-paste." Great stuff. Jay always putting out very useful and inspiring videos!

That gpu cooler reminded me of Jay's videos back in 2014-2015 time

Just sharing my experience with 440GT - it's cooler was so old, that it wasn't cooling the card at all. I've checked if it spins - and it was! But after I decided to repaste it I've noticed that the blade was basically rigid. So not only it managed to spin masking the issue of low cooling performance - it was most likely heating it up even more just because of spin resistance.

Thank you for motivating me to do this on my old 1080 TI, it runs much cooler now. It has no backplate but a tripe fan + rgb shroud design nightmares are made of...no wonder it had never been taken apart before. It's a Gigabyte Aorus 1080TI Gaming OC for those who are curious...also one of my fans was dead(the one closest to gpu of course) so I just swapped it for one of the non dead ones (had no PWM signal on my OS but I do now since the one I swapped it for in the daisy chain had no PWM connector for some reason). Even with one dead fan out of 3 it still runs much cooler now. I looked on amazon to replace them but you have to buy the entire daisy chain...eh wait till it gets too hot this summer before I go through that ordeal again.^^'

Too many people, especially the so-called 'gurus' forget that the simplest changes can have huge impacts. Thanks for the solid content & testing, including any collabs with GN & der8auer. You all make tech FUN & easy to understand/relate to.

YEEEEEEES THATS THE KINDA VIDEO I LIIIIKE BRO

Thanks Jay!

i actually gave someone this card a year or two ago for a upgrade for them. they were still using a gtx 760

@peksn

4 ай бұрын

That must have been huge for them, thank you for being a nice friend!!

@spiketamara2007

4 ай бұрын

@@peksn it was heck it was a nice big upgrade for me when i bought it off a buddy that was using it since day 1 for super cheap so i figured pass on the good deed they did by selling it cheap to me by giving it away since it now was many years old the person i gave it to still uses it to this day and streams using it. im shocked it still has the horsepower to pull it all off.

@peksn

4 ай бұрын

@@spiketamara2007 Yeah I feel like the jumps in rasterized performance in between gens are not as big anymore as they used to be going from the 600 700 900 and 1000 series, like now it's like meh

I just picked up some MX-6 and some performance thermal pads for my 3080 which is getting into the 80 degree range and hot spots hitting 97+. Will be my first time taking apart a GPU to do some maintenance. Thanks for the video

An all time classic card, beautiful!

Awesome video!

This was a fun one thanks.

i have a 1050ti that was black screening and flickering without load. I re-paste it and its perfectly fine again. so yes i agree heavily that a re-paste could do wonders! i was so close to just throwing away a good card. (ps i did upgrade to a 3060ti now and i love it)

I still have a reference 980 in my HTPC and was wondering it if was worth repasting it, that video was on point. My temps are still a lot better than that though so I'm still not sure if I'll do it

This came out at a perfect time. I just built an old parts computer for my future step son to play Lethal company. The card I put in was a old GTX 770 my partner had left over. Runs the game just fine but reaches almost 80c with fan at full speed. Gonna pull it apart and clean it all out and reapply thermal paste.

Wow Jay! Thanks for this... I'm running a 2080ti that started giving me some issues a bit ago... maybe it just needs a little TLC to get the performance back.

@Dave-kh6tx

4 ай бұрын

it'd be worth a shot giving it some new paste and some thermal putty to get a head of possible vram issues, especially if you have micron. i recommend ptm7950 for the die and some upsiren ux pro or cx h1300 thermal putty for everything else.

I had 2 of the gtx980's in SLI, glad to see one opened up and cleaned. I upgraded to the RTX 3060 because of power draw and the heat that my system was getting in general. I still have the GTX 980's for relics sake. One is being used till this day on my dads living room PC for theatre purposes.

I have that exact same card in my computer. It's overdue for a cleaning and re-pasting, but that cooler's a pain to clean.

Good old founders edition. I still have a 1080ti fe. Shes still kickin in one of my guest PC's in my game room. Its always run hot... But I may give her an overhaul now that you've motivated me. Even if it drops 1c 😅

Great video concept! I run old cards (anything CUDA is useful for my little render farm)... Kinda hoping that cleaning them is useless.... because I don't want to clean them....... all!

@mortoopz

4 ай бұрын

Arse! I'm still not going to clean them.... but it sucks knowing I should.

Finally someone holds the fan when dusting it, been on about this for eons and I always got told nothing bad will occur.. Thanks @Jay zTwoCentsfor showing ppl this can and is an issue

@slayerdwarfify

3 ай бұрын

That was absolutely horrifying!

A few years ago, before I bought my 6700 XT, I was still using an old R9 290x. I replaced the thermal paste on it a year or so before I retired it and the difference was night and day. The idle temps went down by 20C, and while performance didn't increase using stock settings, the fans didn't have to run nearly as hard. With AMD known for having bad coil whine, you better believe that was such a relief to the ears.

Thanks for doing this i have a gtx 960 that was kindly given to me and it been through alot. So im doing this asap.

I did some maintenance on my used 3070 Ti - not *that* old of a card, and yet dropped 15 C thanks to new Gelid GP-Extreme pads and Gelid GC-Extreme paste. Still hits 105 C on the hotspot sometimes... but at least doesn't drop the clocks that hard.

Love it! So safe to say an old 1080 gtx i gave to a friend could most likely see some improvements 😅

My wife got me one of the retro gaming mats for Christmas and I love it! Even the box it came in is cool AF.

I use compressed air to clean my computer, but I stop the fans from moving with a toothpick or something when I blast them with air. With some multi-fan case setups, I can see a fan over revving just from too much positive airflow from other fans, so I think most fans now have diodes in them to stop current flow being generated. At least for the well made ones.

I still run a 980 strix and just ordered a new build less then a month ago. Never re-pasted but I clean it a few time a year.

in the sink it goes Jay!! :)

Cleaning makes a lot of difference on those blower cards. Back on the last mining craze days od 2020, I built a rig with some used blower Vega 56 and I had to open and clean them every month, it made a lot of difference in its cooling.

I repasted a heavily used 7900xtx with Kryonaut extreme and idle temp dropped 10*, the stock paste had started to get hard. So I highly recommend doing this especially if you're on your computer hours everyday.

@johannesdatblue4164

4 ай бұрын

Any issues with thermal pads or is it easy to replace the paste without damaginf them?

@TheForce_Productions

4 ай бұрын

​@@johannesdatblue4164Better replace everything.

@rustler08

4 ай бұрын

@@johannesdatblue4164I'd replace them while you're in there. Buy some Gelid extremes of the same size, or use thermal putty

@bradhaines3142

4 ай бұрын

the level of used means very little, crap to begin with is the real problem. my asrock 6950 is known to be crap out the factory and easy to get 20c improvement out of. these are more of an age issue

@bradhaines3142

4 ай бұрын

@@johannesdatblue4164 you can never be sure the pads dont get ruined on disassembly, and theres no real way to prevent it. just depends how they stick. theyre cheap enough you should go ahead and order the CORRECT thicknesses before you tear it down so you can replace them. even if they dont get ruined, that resets the clock when you need to do it again, plus the oem pads are likely shite

I use KPX thermal paste too. It is a very good paste.

the 980/980 ti reference (when they weren't called FE yet) were such good looking cards. I remember when Linus painted his 980 TI orange back in the day

Have done 3 RX 580 8GB for Kids PC this X-mas Season. Thermal Paste and cleaning brought them back to stock clocks, one went from 1350 down to 1150. After Repasting the Card i tested went up to 1300 in Furmark after 30 Minutes in a Case at 84/85°. All three Cards were Dual Cards, i did a Fan Swap, now the hot one is running 78° stable at 1350 boost. I got a RTX 2070 with the same Problem, is running in thermal limiter and the Fans seems to be shot. All the Cards have in common: Dual Fan Models. Longer Tripple Fan Models don't seem to have this aging Problem, i got several older tripple fan models which still run fine.

I ran into almost the exact same situation with a Dell RX 580 two days ago. Brand new system, and as soon as I put the GPU in, it acted unstable. I pull the card and decide to repaste it. I have never seen scorched thermal paste, but this had it. It also had a big old discolored patch on the heat sink that wouldn't clean off. Spent 10 minutes cleaning it with IPA and put some MX-6 on it. Poof. steady as a rock.

I just had my amd rx 480 start hard resetting my computer the second I started furmark, so it was not a temp issue. It's old, I figured what do I have to lose so I took it apart to clean it and look the board over. It wasn't as bad as the card in this video, but it was dirty. I cleaned it and put it back together and now it works again. I think a piece of conductive dust was shorting something important. Bonus is since I thoroughly cleaned and repasted it, it dropped the temps by almost 20 degrees. I gained a few hundred points in furmark and now the fans are off when it's idle again.

The 980 came out in the time I really started getting into pc gaming. Always gamed on pc since I was young but around 2014 I wanted my own pc. I would binge watch multiple build views from different channels and that’s how I learned how to build a PC. Eventually bought my cousins old rig very cheap in 2019 and the only parts left from that pc are the cpu, ram and motherboard. All the rest either broke or got replaced.

nice one phil and jay you two are funny at the end with your face like that yes you are yep LOL. 😁😆😲🤯

I undusted my MBA rx 6800 yesterday that hashes rvn since it was released and bought back in 2020.(since it does not need thermal paste replacement). But it was so clogged up with dust and cat hair, I straight got 10 degrees better temps after cleaning was finished.

I bought a 970 in 2021 and since I had been out of the topic for almost a decade it took me a few weeks to figure out that the thing was thermal throttling all the time. Tbf playing Doom 2016 on 1080p back then didn't give much of a hint. I didn't have new pads at hand but I repasted the die and I was actually quite happy with it until I finally got my 30 series.

When I got my GTX 980 in 2015 (same reference model) it was a beast. Every game I played worked no problem at max setting (stock settings, no overclocking). Unfortunately all good thing come to an end, and my GTX 980 died after like 7 years :( Started artefacting and it gotten to the point where my PC would randomly crash (in Windows or in a game). Service shop tested the card and every component was fine, except for the GPU's main CPU. And it is kinda hard to find a working GTX 980 GPU CPU module within the price that would justify the repair cost. In the end I replaced it with RTX 3060 12GB (was lucky enough to find same blower style card). Anyway, it is funny to think that even something as basic as RTX 3050 6Gb is actually faster than a former flag ship GPU and uses only fraction of the power (165 TDP vs 70 TDP). Gamers nowadays don't even realize how great things have become (aside from prices). I mean when I was using good old Voodoo 2 and later GeForce 2 I rememberer being happy that I got like 25 FPS in 800x600 lol.

I bought a used Msi RTX 3070 Suprim X and the fans regularly flew at 100% even though I had my own curve set. The temperatures looked good except for the Hot spot, which went over 80 degrees Celsius. After replacing the old cooling paste, with the MX-6 paste is like new. The hot spot does not go above 75 degrees, and gpu temperatures go down about 10 degree. The fan curve in the MSI burner holds.

I still run a 1080ti for mostly maxed 1440p gaming from evga. I do tear it down every now and then and clean and renew it and have had no issues out of it since day one use. It's all about the love and care of the hardware.

@thealien_ali3382

4 ай бұрын

I love u

@Sevicify

3 ай бұрын

Still running a 1080 Ti myself also at 1440p (and some 4K on TV) since November 2017, mine is a MSI Gaming X. I had only given it a handful of light external cleans over the years, temps started out great in the 60-65C but over time had crept up averaging in the 67-72C range. Last year in February I decided to do a deep clean and re-paste as the temps above 70 were becoming more common and were hurting my boost clocks, used Noctua H1 (all I had on hand) and temps saw a big improvement dropping into the 55-62C range depending on the title.

the final clip absolutely SENT ME

I really liked that design because of how easy the cards come apart. You can remove the entire fan and shroud without disturbing the heat sink.

Jay, next test it inside the case and see the difference...coz its an open air test bench you get awesome results.

With those design up to 1000th gen you can (almost) easily remove the front plastic cover and really clean the hestsink, so that could have helped also

Wish I could get one of the retro gaming mats!!! Always sold out when I check !!

ME TRYING TO SOBER UP AND LEARN BUT TO BE JUMPSCAREF AT THE END LMAO

OMG, the end of the video was the best.

10:02 That looks like mine, even after repasting... GPUs usually have a better pressure and dont need that much paste between the die and the cooler to fill the gaps.

I have spent soo long looking at benchmarks back in the day glued to the screen that am the same with 3Dmark 2006, I have seen it run sooo many times, I can predict what FPS its gonna show me on what scene and would wait until the first scene where the door would closed behind the fight scene to check the highest FPS on the run to see if the GPU would score higher LOL

My 2080ti OC edition Strix card came with the tiniest dried booger of thermal paste on the die. Thermal throttling out of the box but wouldnt have known without HWMonitor (thanks J) because the hotspot was gpu memory, and core temp was normal. All the programs that only show the core temp (like my AIO cooler software) were useless.

Fantastic videos. I would love to know how many people even knew their GPU has thermal paste.

So I have an old EVGA GTX 960 SSC 4GB card. Supposedly, the SSC stands for Super Super Clocked, LOL. When I upgraded the rest of my computer as we were under COVID restrictions, I went for the liquid metal option (Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut) on my CPU with an AIO. I had just watched Jay do a re-paste on some newer card, so I thought why not? I blew apart the 960 and cleaned the fins and fans out. They weren't too bad. But on pulling the heat sink, I found the powder formerly known as Nvidia Thermal Paste. After a thorough cleaning of EVERYTHING and applying some nail polish to the electronic bits around the GPU die to keep the liquid metal from potentially shorting something and ending my graphics card, I carefully applied the Conductonaut and put the card back together. I'm still gaming (it's a struggle sometimes) on that card. However, there is a Radeon RX7800XT on the horizon, and I can't wait to get that in my system! Great vid y'all!

This reminds me of when i bought a system years back from a friend for pretty cheap (4790k gtx 980) they told me they had cleaned everything and it was good to go. When i powered it on the rear fan threw out a load of dust as soon as it started up and then when it got warm the smell of hot dust was the worst. i opened it up and the white fans inside where brown from dense dust and tar build up from all the smoking that had clearly been around this system. Cleaning the system was one of the hardest and grossest things i have have had to deal with tech wise... When i took the system apart you could not see through the cpu tower cooler fin stack and the heat sink in the 980 was completely clogged and the fan was to like no gaps between then fins of the heat sink or the fan blades at all. the gpu temps went from high 90's to high 70's/low 80's temp under load and the cpu dropped over 15c after cleaning and repasting both as the paste on them was rock hard.

jay would you say using the stock thermal pads after taking the gpu apart is okay? i want to repaste my 3080 but i cant get my hand on 2mm thermal pads here in the uk

Me over here with a 970 lol 3minths ago i did a deep clean and repast... first time for that card

Thank you.