I recetly purchased and installed a artic silencer which seemed to work fine until i put my card under a full load. When I looked closely at this cooler I found that it has thick thermal tape/pads which sit on the ram but I believe this is causing the heat sink not to make good contact with the actuall GPU. This is the new revision of the card. The old ones just had raise copper plates which could be filled down in order to get the card to sit properly. Has anyone else had this problem and if so, What was done to correct the situation?
The cooler is supposed to come with those thermal pads. Are you sure it's not making contact with the GPU core? What are the temps when it's under full load? Are you having trouble with artifacts or crashes due to heat?
Make sure the nuts used to secure the cooler to the card and tightened all the way down. They will only go so far and then stop, and stop long before the X-plate touches the card. One of the things I did before doing a final install was to put the cooler on and tighten down the nuts most of the way, not all. Then take the cooler off and see where on the GPU the thermal compound was and wasn't. In my case it completely covered the GPu with only a little hang over around the edges. This also let me see that all of the pads were going to be on the RAM chips. So then did the final install which including taking the protective paper off of the thermal pads. I am pretty happy with it. My idle temps are down as much as I would like, from 61C to 58C originally now 55C with the fan at 100% all the time. It was the loads that made the difference for me. Stock cooler was at 85+C as high as 90C. With ACS5r3 they are around 73C as high as 75C, with the fan at 100% it levels off at 70C (load tests done using rthdribl 1.2 for 10mins) it spiked at 72C, 53% or 100% it takes about 6-7mins to get up to it's load temp, which compared to the stock cooler too only a few minutes.
It was supposed that old revs did that. But, do you have rev 3? It shouldnt do anything like that. But believe me, if your card is not doing good contact with your heatsink (talking about the core) then, it would be burned because if the temps. But maybe is just not doing good contact, install it again.
Throw away that POS! I bought one of those things and the fan didn't work. :mad3: Piece of JUNK. Arctic Cooling may claim to offer a warranty of their products but they don't honor it.