Red Devil RX-480 OC Teardown

Off-Topic Games, Gaming and Hardware
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I can’t find instructions on this anywhere. I’m hoping someone here has done a teardown/rebuild of one of these and can shed some light on this for me.

I need to know a few things:

What thickness(es) of thermal pad(s) do I need?
     I see 0.5, 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, and 3.0 pads out there and I've seen generic how-to videos 
     on this that indicate that multiple thinknesses might be needed, but this GPU may 
     be old enough that there's only paste in there now and if that's so, wouldn't only 
     one pad thickness be enough?
Do I also need thermal paste?
     Some of the how-to videos show thermal paste on the main processor and thermal
     pads elsewhere in the build. I've no idea what I'm looking at in there because if I 
     take it apart without the necessary things to put it back together again properly
     I might be looking for a new GF as there's NO local source for any of this (in stock)
     and if she has to do without WoW for a week while Amazon delivers pads/paste I'm
     gonna be in serious trouble.
Do I need to do any thermal remediation between the backplate and the PCB?
     I'm seeing reports of there being nothing but air between the back plate and the 
     PCB on this model and recommendations (very vague on specifics) of putting pad
     and or copper and paste back there or just removing the backplate altogether.

Yes, I could buy a sufficient supply of all of the thickness of thermal pads ahead of time in anticipation of maybe needing them, but that’s looking like nearly $180 for what might be only a $30 need and I can’t justify doing that if asking a question might prevent the need to.

Thanks.

Edited to add: Can you stack pads? If a component needs 2mm, can you just put 2 x 1mm pads there successfully? I’ve literally never used the pads, but they look like a better choice than paste, especially if I’m dealing with a situation where there are multiple depths that the conductive material needs to cover.

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  1. 1mm seem to be what another user did.
    Sources: https://www.reddit.com/r/AMDHelp/comments/fdhtoc/powercolor_rx_480_red_devil_thermal_pad_thickness/

  2. Yes. You repaste the thermal on the gpu die. Buildzoid has a video of the bare pcb of a 480 red devil for you to see the die.
    Sources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nEbpn6NKPQ

Though there is an alternative called Graphite Thermal Pad. You will probably have to cut it to size.

  1. Base on the reviews of other users, the backplate is there for show/structure support. It seems to act as an insulator more than anything.

  2. Can you stack thermal pads? Don’t know never tried with thermal pads. I don’t see why not since I stacked copper shims for my g12 bracket + aio on my 1080ti a few years back, but do it at your own risk.

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Thank you very much, Aquorius. Checking out the videos now.