Grubby Graphics

A little job to keep my hands and mind busy, it is a cleaning job on an ATI HD 5770 Radeon Graphics card that is bunged up with dust, I bought it on eBay and knew it was dirty from the single, blurred, photo that the seller had included in the listing. It was funny, in the description he had put "seller refurbished" but when it arrived it was obvious it had never been cleaned, perhaps in it's lifetime.

A graphics card processor unit (GPU) is similar in some ways to a CPU and is cooled by a heat sink and a fan, the heatsink has thermal compound applied to take up the air gaps between GPU and the heat pipes. The first order of business was to use the compressor to blow out as much dust as possible, but then it was down to disassembly, paint brush and elbow grease. 

The dry old thermal paste and enough DNA to create a new species had to be removed.

Close up of the cleaned GPU.

The cleaned copper block and heat pipes and heatsink, reattached to the plastic cowl. Then fresh thermal paste is applied to the GPU and everything is clamped back together. This is quite a fiddly job for my fat fingers, some tiny screws that can not be lost, which is why I use the bar mat on my bench.

Everything assembled and into the bench PC for testing.

A satisfying job, bringing a grubby graphics card back to almost new condition. This card will be used as a backup, a "known good" card for testing motherboards and perhaps at some point it will be let go and released back into the wilds, back to eBay with an honest seller refurbished description and some decent photos.

If you have a PC that has been running for a few years, it would be wise to unplug it, remove the side cover and use compressed air to blow out all your skin cells. The PC has an intake fan or two that will pull in quite an amazing amount of dust, and over time the cooling fins of heatsinks, and the general surface mounted electronics and power supply, will become gummed up, just like the item above. When that happens the PC will run hotter, less efficiently, and is more prone to fail, so a little bit of cleaning will lengthen the life of the PC.

Ok, what is next I ask myself, what is next... 

It's Alive!

 Well, nothing (so far) has gone terribly wrong with the new build.

I suppose I should crack on and install the SSD and the operating system, which is perhaps one of the saddest moments of building a PC, as I am already planning the next one and this will be relegated to it's home under the bench, along with the other lonely and unused computers. 

I know, it makes no sense, building stuff that will not be used, but for my brain, the joy is definitely in the journey, not the destination. I learn something new in every one of these endeavours, I find joy in the assembling of unwanted parts to be (theoretically) useful once again and it matters not that I initially have no use for the end product, however, that can change in the blink of an eye with electronics.

As a final note, I see that the BIOS version is F10c and I checked on the Gigabyte support website and that appears to be the latest, which makes me happy as it removes a task that I have never found comfortable, the dreaded BIOS flash. 

ASUS R9-370 2GB Graphics Card

The current build makes progress, and I continue to take my time and reflect on life, the universe and everything as I assemble the computer. I moved the wiring somewhat for the space where the graphics card will sit, that being PCI Express slot one, the 16x slot on the Gigabyte GA-Z97-HD3 motherboard.

There is only one PCIEX16 slot on the motherboard, even if the other looks the same, that one, in the lower part of the photo, is a PCIEX4 slot. The graphics card "of choice" is the ASUS R9-370 Radeon, with 2GB GDDR5 memory. I say that as the current retail environment for new and used graphics cards in general is horrific, world shortage of supply, scalpers and of course, crypto currency mining has driven up prices to ridiculous levels. I was fortunate to buy this card for about 50% of the going rate.

The card takes one six pin power plug, which augments the 75 watts of the PCI Express slot. At peak power the card can draw 150 watts and of course produce a lot of heat. I run an R9-270 on my gaming machine, which allows me to play my games at 1080P with good frame rate, and the average G3D mark is 4260 with the Curacao (Volcanic Islands) Processor, 1280 cores and 256 bit bus width. It isn't the fastest graphics card around by a large margin, but it gets the job done.

This R9-370 is surprisingly similar, but has a Trinidad (Pirate Islands) Processor, same cores, same memory, same bus width and what appears to be a slight tweak to the base clock (925 MHz versus 900 MHz) and boost clock (975 MHz versus 925 MHz) resulting in a marginal increase in performance and heat generation. It is eight year old technology that was re-released six years ago with a bigger model number, a common and sinister habit of the graphics card industry. 

The gaming community affectionately calls this type of hardware a potato.

The next step in the potato build process is to add a boot drive, which will be a solid state drive, or SSD, but before that, I should see if the machine will start up to the BIOS screen and all the fans are running, so that will be the subject of the next blog post.
                                             

Thermal Paste, filling in the gaps

Thermal paste is nothing new, and really, nothing special. It is just a bit of specialized goop that is used to fill in the tiny air gap between a processor and a heat sink so that heat is transmitted efficiently.

A typical CPU or GPU has a processor mounted on a circuit board and a "lid" of metal bonded to the circuit board in a thermally efficient way. However, if power is applied to a CPU without an additional heatsink the temperature will typically rise to boiling point in a few seconds. The processor will shut down to protect itself.

Thermal paste to the rescue!

Well, thermal paste and a honking great heatsink and usually a high powered, temperature controlled fan. The paste is applied to the processor lid, just a small pea of it, and then as the heatsink and fan assembly is clamped down, the paste spreads into a thin laminar to take up manufacturing tolerances and provide efficient heat transfer.

Unfortunately, the trend for home computers is for temperatures to continue to rise as transistors increase due to higher density, operating frequencies increase to make the machines faster and hotter. This means that solutions to cool our gaming computers are becoming more complex, more fans more noise, even water cooling is not passive, it requires air extraction. Thermal paste is part of the solution in the near term, but I hope that in the future the industry will continue down the road of power efficiency, reduce operating temperatures and the need for fan noise while we are playing our silly games.

Rosewill TYRFING Tower Case layout

The project is moving along and I'm already assembling items for the next one, well, during these pandemic times we have to do something to keep our minds, and hands, busy. 

A few more photos of the current project, the first showing the Rosewill case, which is a bit of a monster.

A good example of waiting for the right moment, I bought this on the black Friday weekend, it was half price if I recall, thirty-five bucks and it was bought "because it was so cheap" for some future project, and here, six months or so later, it is the current project.

Amazingly at the price, it came with two 120mm pre-installed fans, front and rear, although the downside to those fans is that they are three pin connectors. The three pin fans are voltage variable speed and the preferred four pin allow for greater fan speed control and can be quieter at idle, how they do that exactly is lost on me, so four legs good, three legs bad (Animal Farm reference there).

The case is big enough for the Gigabyte ATX (30.5cm x 19.0cm) motherboard and has probably too many expansion options. As with most modern cases nowadays, it has power supply mounting at the bottom and both side panels are removable for access and cable management. I've already noticed a flaw in my cable management from the above photo as I have tied the front USB 3.0 cable to the front panel cables right where the graphics card will be, ah well, an easy fix and another cable tie bites the dust.

I suspect the large case format is going the way of the dodo, hence the low price, as more and more computers are being built with mini-ATX and micro-ATX motherboards, M.2 SATA and NVME drives and in reality, the only thing keeping computers physically large are the monstrous graphics cards.

The need for those six hard drive and DVD bays at the front is going away, but as can be seen from the above photo, the gap in the middle is required for the long graphics cards, and apparently, this case can handle a 400mm long card.

You will notice that the side panel has a window into the workings of the PC, and this is for the ridiculous trend of turning computers into little disco boxes via RGB lighting. That's my old man's opinion though, being an old tech geezer I can be grumpy about sparkling things that the young ones love. 

The next blog entry will see the graphics card and SSD installation, and that, as they say, will be that.