Preparing to watercool this "mining-special" MI50. The graphite thermal pad is a nightmare, extremely difficult to fully remove, and you get conductive dust everywhere. I cleaned the package with a brush, IPA and compressed air, hopefully the GPU isn't going to explode after I reapply power... :woozy_baa:
Watercooling mod of this "mining-special" MI50 has completed... Crude water block from a small workshop, but it should work.
Just after 1 minute of starting installing the watercooler, I completely damaged the fins at one spot on my radiator... The fins on this radiator are so fragile that you can bend them just by grabbing the wrong location with your fingers... It's literally the Blinkenlight meme. :woozy_baa:
"DAS KOMPUTERMASCHINE IST NICHT FÜR DER GEFINGERPOKEN UND MITTENGRABEN! ODERWISE IST EASY TO SCHNAPPEN DER SPRINGENWERK, BLOWENFUSEN UND POPPENCORKEN MIT SPITZENSPARKEN."
Finished watercooling installation for the MI50 to the test bench. The original plan was mounting the reservoir horizontally, but air bubbles were too difficult to remove and I had to redo it vertically. The mounting bracket doesn't have enough clearance... I finally found a productive use of those old university textbooks on MSVC programming with questionable quality.
Watercooler has been running for an entire night without leaks, time to power it on. ⚡ Before modding, I was getting Tedge = 76 ℃, Tj (hotspot) = 91 ℃, and Tvram = 86 ℃ (a 3000 RPM fan could reduce it by 5 to 6 degrees more). After watercooling, now it's Tedge = 70 ℃, Tj = 86 ℃, and Tvram = 79 ℃. Not that impressive, it's a crude water block mod from a small workshop. But at least I can run it at reasonable temperatures without jet engine noise.
@niconiconi watercooling sounds and looks so cool (pun not intended) but how do you deal with anxiety of it leaking and destroying everything..
@niconiconi how do you do a pressure test? That’s intriguing. But yeah salvaging troubled hardware is great
@rip_imho@schelling.pt All the watercooling vendors started selling these leak testers in recent years. In a sealed loop, there's a leak if gas pressure drops rapidly after pumping. It's nothing magic, just a (sometimes overpriced) pressure gauge with a hand pump. Still, an useful sanity check, also a convenient way to force all water out of the loop during reassembly...
@rip_imho@schelling.pt I got this GPU for $120, so it's not that valuable (it's not a real MI50 but a Radeon VII Pro PCB repurposed by board makers as "mining-special MI50" in quote marks during the mining boom, with very similar performance). Watercooling is an attempt to "salvage" the card, otherwise its server-only passive cooler is practically unusable for workstations. If I got it with the original $5000 price tag of a real MI50, I definitely won't try any modification, with water or not.
It's also on a test bench, so a leak from the radiator side won't drop into the chassis. You can also do gas-pressure test periodically for leaks.