Most of you may never have tried this (like me,) but have built your own gaming rigs. Lately my 7870 HAWK has been increasing steadily in temperature, I could tell by my fan speeds. I continually managed the user control GUI, to see if I could manage the heat, but the GPU was topping out at 80c. I Googled and found I wasn't necessarily near the thermal threshold, but my fan was working at 100% to keep the card under 80c in PlanetSide 2. I figured I would put down some thermal paste to see if the temps would drop, I was hoping to see a 5-10c drop. The cards heat sink was held on with 4 screws, and the cleaning of the old material was easy to do with the Arctic Silver cleaner. The gpu is very small, so I applied a very thin coat to the heat sink and reattached. I booted up the PC and immediately loaded up PlanetSide 2, the card now is running at 60c max at 52% fan speed. That's an immediate drop of 20c! I'm sure the temps will drop further the more cycles I put through it. tl;dr: Change your thermal paste to save your graphics card, and extend it's life.
