Seller Note “The radiator corroded and leaked, so the loop has little to no fluid inside which is causing the card to overheat and shut off. I can boot it to the desktop and within 1 minute the card shuts off. So at this point, i am selling for spares and repairs.”
Summary
- It cost £44, It’s this one https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/inno3d-ichill-gtx-980-ti-black.b3338
- I hope the seller is right about the issue being purely thermal, 980 ti’s can be risky faulty buys. He seemed on the level, I really like the ichill cards, so hopefully I can restore it.
- It appears the seller is on the level. The card seems to nearly overheat even when on the desktop (no load) and the radiator remains cold.
- Need to strip it down and try and fit one of my liquid coolers.
- Resistances
- VCore – 5Ω
- VMem – 18Ω
- PEX – 604Ω
- 5V – 2.2KΩ
- 3.3V – 829Ω
- 12V MΩ+
Investigating the liquid cooling issues…
Here we need to work out if the pump is still working. The system seems to have lost all it’s coolant and some kind of attempted repair (glue) can be seen on the radiator. Hopefully, the pump is OK and the radiator is the issue. First, I cut off the hoses from the radiator inlet/outlet using a craft knife. Then to test the pump, I bought some distilled or deionized water from a local auto repair shop (try not to use tap water) and a large syringe to help me prime the system. It’s necessary to prime the loop with fluid before the pump with hopefully kick in and start drawing water in and out of the tub that I partially filled. Thankfully it seems to pump and isn’t too noisy! 🙂
I can’t see any leaks from the tubes or pump, so let’s hope it was the radiator that was leaking (a reasonable assumption given the repair attempt I can see). So where can we get another working radiator? I took a look on EBay and Alliexpress, and there seemed to be a few. However, I would prefer a branded one e.g. Corsair. So, I managed to win an auction for a cheap pair of faulty liquid coolers (one listed as having a noisy pump, the other having a weeping radiator leak). I am hoping to reuse the radiator from the one with the noisy pump when they (hopefully) arrive.
Replacing the radiator…
The 2nd hand coolers arrived, and seem mostly as described. I am still not 100% confident that the radiators don’t leak, but here goes. First, we’ve got to remove the old tubing.
The pipes came off pretty easily. Now to prime the system and fit the replacement radiator.
The syringe is really handy for priming the system and flushing out debris and air. Once the pump is happily primed and running, it’s good to wait for a few minutes for the air to work its way out, it then becomes noticeably quieter. The final part is fitting the inlet pipe over the outlet port of the radiator, but after a couple of goes it was there!
Reassembling and testing…
Well, the good news is the cooling issues are fixed and better, and the clocking seems very impressive whilst maintaining very low temperatures:
In my experience, the 980 ti’s are pretty juicy cards that run quite warm, but this one is the best I’ve seen in terms of thermals. I need to test it more and be sure that there are no leaks. The only potential issue that I have seen is that the VRM fan doesn’t seem to cut, a custom fan profile would be a workaround. More testing required, this is a great card so far! 🙂