Nitro Saphire cards driping oil?

You are correct.

Pulled out one of my Nitro R9 Fury cards and can confirm the above, oil leaking out of the heat transfer pad on the rear side of the card, in between the card and the heat spreader.

Have removed the faulty heat transfer pad and will monitor.

I notice oil gathering on top of my riser cards on nitro rig but didn’t put two and two together @cryptomined send all his back and receive replacements,I thought it was condensation and have been wiping it of

its grease from the thermal tape melting.
call sapphire and bitch. this kind of thermal tape is designed to melt and fill gaps, its not really faulty or defective… just a design flaw IMO.

Lets collect info in this thread and I will warn everyone.

I have previously confirmed this finding with others, so i have known for a while its not just me (about 2 months).

can you please post photos?

and anyone else reading this, finding this problem, please take photos and show them.

although they say it won’t damage the card, I believe this can leak into the 8pins and cause a card to die

can you unscrew the backplate and take photos for everyone and post them here please? can you check as many of your GPU’s as possible?

you cant really totally clean it off is the problem… you will have to RMA them if you want the problem totally gone. Now with the stain, if you sell it to someone second hand, and they find the stain, they will think that you sold them a card that you damaged when it is just Sapphires neglegence.

if it drips out, it can get on your motherboards, your PSU, etc… its a real pain in the ass… and to say i was upset to find this problem … is an understatement… i was downright :rage:

thats right and thats why i just bought a load of XFX and Dataland (powercolor) cards. I need to unscrew a dataland and see if they have the tape, and if so, remove it and replace it with a kind that does not melt (which my RMA’d sapphires now have)

Note: Sapphire has changed to the kind that will not melt for the 500 series… maybe due to my complaints. I talked to someone higher up in Sapphire.

As you can see same story back plate hear transfer tape faulty. The oil itself will wipe off but it leaves an ugly stain.

thank you for the report and photos
greatly appreciated

Hi cryptomined. Back in town after being gone for a week, rigs are happily running but AMD cards are starting to drip again. I was planning to sell these rigs soon but I now have stains on the mobo where that stuff dripped. I tried to put in a ticket with AMD but only got this:

Do you have any contact info for AMD? When they replaced your cards did they send you new or refurbished cards? I just bought these cards in December. Also: did they send you replacements first or did you have to send in the RMA cards first? I would rather not take 4.4KS/s off-line when I am waiting for replacement cards.

Also got the parts in and going to try for 8 GPU’s on my rigs. The 7 GPU rigs are running great, never have a problem with them.

I think i got refurbished cards (they said new, but i dont think so), i was pissed to say the least, one would crash on first hash… and 2 of them were missing the OC bios (actually silent bios settings were on OC bios and nothing was on silent bios…nothing … wont even boot on silent switch…)

not happy to say the least.

i do have a contact but would prefer to wait until I finish before giving it out. anyways i had to take them offline and send them all in

Sorry for all your trouble. Thanks for sharing / warning all of us. I think I will try to get AMD to send me the new thermal pad used in the RX580 or just buy my own and replace.

probably a better choice yes. if you need I can try to get you such said thermal tape

actually i was lied to by sapphire, they told me I would get new replacements. I trusted them. only 2 of my 13 cards were issued new… the rest just had new thermal tape applied… stain is STILL THERE!

so yes for sure, just apply tape yourself and save yoursefl the headaches

Hi Cryptomined,
Do you have any recommendations/specifications for the thermal tape? I can get the following here:

Guys just a heads up I’ve taken one card and removed the thermal tape from the back plate and cleaned it all up and am running it without the tape. It makes no difference to GPU temp the back plate is cooler but still gets warm even without the tape! So if you get cards back on RMA I would advice just removing the backplate tape to be safe.

The thermal tape is for the memory and not the GPU. I would not recommend running without the tape as your memory will likely be running very hot.

So I got this from Sapphire today.

No the memory is actively cooled by contact with the main heatsink. The backplate does almost nothing for cooling.

yes i agree, just remove it is better
or reapply some that won’t melt if you can get some (I can)

thats total B.S. you should call them on their bluff… maybe we should start some sort of class action lawsuit for defective design.
they should be honest… i have found them to be a bit dishonest at times
upsetting becaues i will probably purchase more sapphire cards today… damn heatsinks on 500 nitros are too good…

first reply back and ask… so your engineering dept. has never heard of this problem? I am the first to report this? this is an isolated issue?

corner them

we should get everyone we can to complain about this… and we should tell them we are going to sue.

I would imagine that those in the USA could easily do a class action lawsuit

even if i dont get a dime… i want to see them fess up

they should post a public apology and recall…
but they wont be honest like that will they?
they know better yet they act ignorant of the situation

heh… they have now switched thermal tape for 500 series
ask them WHY they SWITCHED!?!?!?!

what prompted the decision to suddenly switch thermal tape?

I dont appreciate being lied to by a company i have supported so much

we gota make this headlines on all the major hardware sites… that will teach them to be honest

they wont be able to lie to us after that!