Accidentally Damaging the Graphic Card by Putting Heatsink Copper on

I purchased some copper heatsinks (better than Aluminum ones as copper transfer more heat).

However, when I attached them one by one carefully onto my AMD Radeon 6700 Graphic card, there was a sparks of flash and my screen went black.

The HPZ800 can reboot – which still works showing some basic text on BIOS – however, the windows also went dark. I guess some units were short-circuit-ed and thus damaged.

Lessons learned: I should really do this when server is turned off. And also avoid directly attaching the copper heatsinks on the board – as it might burn the board because the copper is Conductive. You might want to attach the heatsink on the chips (CPU).

I then have to replace this graphic card with Nvida Qudra 2000 and re-attach the copper heatsinks on to the motherboard of HPZ800 server. The Nvida Qudra 2000 GPU card is not that hot – on normal temperature range of 50 to 70 degree.

–EOF (The Ultimate Computing & Technology Blog) —