After some guys here on EHW triggered my interest in the Tesla M40 cards I decided to start looking for one in Europe.
Last Saturday I found one in Belgium for a reasonable price, so I did not hesitate and buy it. Besides that I bought an MSI 980ti cooler, a few screws, washers and nuts and a few m.2 SSD coolers.
The idea I have is to improve the air cooling on this M40, in such a way that it is usable in the air cooled workstation I'm (slowly) building. See it as a little side project to get my fix of GPU's in this time of shortage, not that I can complain.
[An interruption of this post, to post the final product]
[And we continue the original post]
So let's start with the card itself:
Looks pretty with those red lights reflecting on the original cooler, which looks even better in person. A shame I have to remove it..
The old paste and pads:
The paste was pretty dry, but it wasn't hard to clean it.
I'm not sure if this is original, it looks like someone replaced the pads.
Looks good after cleaning, but we will have to wait for the cooler to arrive.
New pads on the aluminium backplate:
I did some measuring to get the thickness right for the pads next to the Vram.
I'm pretty sure I don't have any option to cool anything on the other side of the PCB, so I try to cool this side of the card as good as possible.
A lot of bolts to get some pressure on the back, and not too tight for obvious reasons.
Also, an IO shield from a GTX580 installed on the card. Not the strongest solution with only one bolt, but at least it's a good fit.
And here are the m.2 coolers on the back with some double sided tape/coolpads. As soon as I can fire the card back up I'll measure the temps on the back with a digital thermometer, to see if I have to improve it.
That's it for now, I'm waiting patiently for the cooler!