Please don't do this - AliExpress GPU Backplate Cooling

foreign welcome back to another video I recently met randomly a viewer who was on the way to the case King store and he had an AliExpress backplate cooling solution in his hands and he was on the way to buy some thermal pads which was quite interesting then after having a quick chat with him he pointed out that his graphics card was having a very hot backplate temperature so when he touched it it felt like he was burning his fingers which usually occurs at a temperature of about 60 degrees Celsius plus that's still kind of normal to me the question is how much heat is actually dissipated over a back plate and does it help to add some very questionable cooling solutions to the back of your card apart from maybe cooling down the surface does it even help cooling the card I ordered a few of these on AliExpress which we're going to check out in today's video this video is powered by hatzner with their brand new ex-44 dedicated root server powered by the recent Core i5 13500 with 6p and 8e cores This Server will be very efficient and at the same time powerful which allows hatzner to offer the server for only 44 Euros per month this includes 64 gigabyte of memory which can optionally be increased to 128 gigabyte if needed two 512 gigabyte Gen4 nvme ssds in raid 1 together with the gigabit connection allow a very fast workflow with unlimited traffic find out more in the link below so that's the first one which you're going to check out is you'll have to unpack it we can already see two fans through a little bit of shiny copper then this was included it's definitely not a thermal pad it seems to be some kind of fabric texture I don't know stuff maybe it's adhesive at least with the stripe on the back seems to be like that and we have zip ties included and the cable to connect it so this already looks pretty interesting and just when I touched it first I straight noticed it's extremely sharp like very thin layers of copper definitely some surface area but extremely sharp not like the bird or anything also seems like it's just like collude in there like the fans by hand probably also didn't pay much attention on keeping this nice and clean if we look in between we have some kind of pillars or anything in between could be that those are like heat columns similar to heat pipes or just maybe massive pieces of copper I am not sure at all and if we flip it around we basically have a huge contact surface that's what this thermal pad is probably for a big one and then we somehow have to find a solution probably with zip ties to attach it to the GPU I decided to test all of this with this 6900 XT simply because it has a very even and quite easy to clean back plate I didn't want to yeah mess up the back plate of my Founders Edition card especially like a 4090 which is much more difficult to clean and not as even and and also this backplate has direct contact with the GPU behind that because I have one more of these and it came with thermal paste and I'm not quite sure if I want to make my Founders Edition messy so I picked this one and now we only have to find a way to attach this to the card which certainly is going to be interesting but before we start with that we first have to figure out what's the stock condition like what kind of temperature can we see on the back plate and also on the GPU that's the system which we're going to use for today's testing I already installed this 6900 XT and I also attached a thermocouple like right here next to the side of the back plate so we can actually measure the back plate temperature I also closed the system so it's pretty realistic conditions and after 15 minutes in idle we have a temperature that's closing in on 39 degrees Celsius in idle all the fans inside the system are constantly running at 1000 RPM fixed fan speed same goes for the pump fixed fan speed I'm now going to perform 30 minutes of a 3D load so we can see the stock condition temperature wise and also fan wise on the GPU so let's say it ends up at 1600 RPM under load then I will later on fix the fan speed at exactly this RPM for further testing because otherwise if we would attach any additional Cooling it might just lower fan speed instead of the temperature but we want to see if there is any temperature gain the measured temperature on the back plate after 30 minutes of load is about a 60 degree celsius and looking into Times by extreme in gpu-z we can read out a GPU temperature of about 73 to maybe 74 degrees Celsius and a hotspot temperature of about 87 degrees Celsius and the fan speed is constantly at about 2100 RPM I quickly checked again on the AliExpress sales page how you are actually supposed to mount this and first of all it seems like you have to use these zip ties underneath the back plate and I carefully inserted them and now obviously the thermal pad has to go in between and the last thing after tightening the zip ties is adding these adhesive stripes to the side like left and right so yeah I'm not quite sure how well this will look so the pad already on the cooler um well I mean it will push down the fins or like the layers so it's not really that nice honestly if you have any kind of Standards to the design of your system I'm pretty sure that you would never put this inside your system this is like I mean that's horrendous just just look at how the zip ties are squeezing down the copper plates and then you have like the thermal pad that's partially exposed and will definitely attract a lot of dust they recommend in the online listing that you should wrap the these kind of I don't know this tape stuff also around here which would mean I would have to also detach the back plate which I did not want to do but I mean yeah it was also very much on the limit of even inserting the card at all because of the zip tie going around the GPU in the back I'm not sure if it will be detected or not but I mean you will also have this extra Touch of ugliness with the cable going from the back like not being sleeved but let's check even though it doesn't look nice at least it's working the card was detected I will now close the system and we will check back in like 15 minutes to see what kind of idle temperature which we can reach at least in idle it's about five degrees Celsius colder but let's see what happens under load well so at least the back plate is about 5 degree celsius colder but checking in gpuc I mean there is honestly no difference best case it's like one degree Celsius colder on GPU temperature but I also want to point out that the fan is now running about 20 RPM higher so probably just measurement tolerance so this backplate cooling solution it looks hideous and apart from that it doesn't do anything except for lowering the amount on your bank account because this costs 40 and the profit is best case one degree Celsius on your GPU maybe like five on the back plate which is not even really helpful so yeah that one not useful whatsoever but there is one more back plate cooler that we want to test and just looking at the packaging alone not quite sure let's open this I received this in a simple shipping bag and that's why I'm not sure if it's supposed to be with this weird angle or I mean at least looking at the images at AliExpress it was showing pretty much a 90 degree Bend oh well and this shows some high quality painting and yeah I'm not quite sure about this but we're going to check this in a second then we had some thermal paste some thermal pads rubber bands zip ties included and the fan and then I straight noticed that there is a lot of dust in the fan and also if you look at the the holes of the fan you can see this is a used fan nice I always like if you buy something and then you just get used stuff honestly I really don't know what to say I mean this probably happened due to shipment so after removing this from the cardboard looks kind of bent I can probably just bend it back because it's just a heat pipe but what is this this paint job like I mean did somebody not decide if he wants to paint it or not or it was the the spray bottle just empty halfway through what the hell is this I don't get it's like like 50 painted yeah just spray a bit on it but um yeah maybe not as usual with these kind of products there is no manual included so we will have to figure it out ourselves I mean it probably goes on like this you could probably also flip it 180 degrees so the heatsink is in the front and this might make sense if you have a fan on here but since we have fans on the right I will just point it in this direction and I mean we have again zip ties included so I guess we will just use the zip ties to push it down and I will definitely go for the thermal pads that's included and not for the paste because honestly I don't want to clean my card with a ton of paste on there we even have a thermal glue included but I will surely not use that just look at how the pad is cut like can they even cut a straight line and maybe to the correct size doesn't seem like it honestly this zip tie stuff is really painful especially because I mean this is flat right here so like no matter how much you tighten this you will never get like a good mounting pressure and now the last thing remaining is installing this like probably incredibly loud and annoying fan and again I mean the zip ties will directly sit on the board yeah that's not a good thing to do nice it's all the small fan it's making some like tiny weird annoying noises that makes it even better the active back plate cooling with this cooling solution is I mean it's slightly better than stock as you can see it's about 36 degrees Celsius in idle with this active cooling Solution on the back plate at least compared to the stock condition we can see an improvement on the back plate temperature it's now 51 degrees Celsius and that's about 8 degrees Celsius better than stock and checking in GPU Z there is actually an improvement talking about three to four degrees Celsius on the GPU temperature and also three degrees Celsius roughly on The Hot Spot temperature running the same RPM as previously if you are thinking about getting one of these active back plate cooling solution do yourself a favor your card and also me and don't do it at least not these kind of cooling solutions from AliExpress because especially price performance wise I mean this is 50 Euro this is a complete waste of money for what you're actually getting because if you pay a bit more than twice you will actually start getting a custom water cooling block which will do a lot more than this obviously you will have to get the rest of the cooling Loop for custom water cooling but still I mean this this is definitely not the solution and even if you're looking at let's say a 30 90 which will have much more problems when it comes to the back plate temperature then this one like a 6900 XT doesn't have the memory on the back side so it's different from let's say a 30 90 but the majority of cards are like this one so they have a back plate and the back plate makes contact to the vrm in the back and also maybe a round of memories like through the PCB and also to the GPU but most of the cards don't have memory on the back like the 3090 as I said is an exception but for most of the cards like don't just just don't and if you had the money to buy a 30 90 then if you really have a problem then might go for for custom water cooling and most of the time it's more subjective so the back plate might be really hot but technically it's still running so yeah always have to consider that but this is yeah just don't thanks for tuning in enjoy the rest of your Sunday bye foreign

Channel: der8auer EN

Views: 122,341

Keywords:

Id: VZayTZg3ajU

Length: 13min 26sec (806 seconds)

Published: Sun May 07 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/jerryfrz]

Pretty disappointed that he didn't test with the 3090, the only consumer card that would actually benefit from backside cooling.

[u/ramblinginternetgeek]

I spent like $8 to get some small heatsinks (with pre-applied thermal tape) and covered around half of my card's backplate, mostly around where the GPU area was. The small heatsinks get warm. I feel like the fans on the card spin a bit less aggressively. The small heatsinks are also black and match the theme of the case/card.

Possibly worth $5-10 and 10 minutes of time. Probably NOT worth $40+ and 30+ minutes of time.

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This video is NOT me but the idea is similar - https://youtu.be/OzcAo38rkqQ

[u/AtomicTardigrade]

I wonder why no one does backplate with fins milled into the surface of the backplate and contacting with back of GPU as well as memory modules or at least backs of them through PCB. The way cards are always oriented in the case, air from front intake would always flow across it to the back and out with rear exhaust fan.

[u/SomeoneBritish]

Absolutely terrible purchases, but I love it when this type of content comes out to prove whether or not it makes sense.

[u/bubblesort33]

I would like to see some more punchouts in PCB design, to let some airflow from the fans through. That tiny amount of airflow alone from like half a dozen gaps in the PCB would probably already be enough to cool the backplate enough. Then again, if you have actual functional, and unrestricted front fans on your case, you'll probably already have a massive amount of airflow over your backplate.

At least on the GPUs with VRAM on the back it would be useful.