I have recently change my RX470 thermal paste with this Gelid thermal paste, but i could hit the max GPU clock now. It will throttle down when i stress test it but the temp is still under 80c. I tot maybe its insufficient paste on the gpu, so i applied again with more paste but its still throttling. Is this thermal paste not up to the standard for GPU?

It has 8.5 W/mk thermal conductivity. Is this sufficient for a GPU? Now im looking into higher thermal conductivity of 12w/mk paste. Is this enuf?

Bigger and better cooler fins required.

I din overclock the GPU, im using the stock cooler with 2 fans. The heat sink is probably not the problem.

ok you know better then.

What's your brand of rx 470? Thermal paste rarely factors in throttling the gpu unless you used a shit brand to begin with or the original paste had harden.

previously, did your gpu manage to hit max clock freq all the time? or if when it was new, did it manage to hit max clock?
Or is it just after changing thermal paste that you noticed the temp shoot up?

Its a Sapphire

Previously i did not check the clock speed, but i leave it to the stock setting, Then it started to freeze on some gaming, so i change the harden paste with Gelid. It improve slightly but over time, it will still freeze. Now it is even worse, i have to lower the clock speed by 16% to be able to play games.

That's the limit of the heatsink design. As malaysia's ambient temp is quite hot, it's normal for the card to throttle back a bit when hitting 80C. Those few mhz doesnt really make a huge or noticeable difference.

but now the temperature hover around 76 c max but still sometimes will freeze...

Okay now that's not normal. What's your psu? How long have you had this gpu for?

It looks like from your description, the heatsink is pretty much saturated. Indicating that having better thermal paste may not be of much help, assuming nothing is impeding air flow and the fins/metal of the heatsink is dust free.

Btw, when you are testing, is it over open air, or in the case? Cos depending on the air flow, the temp is off by a bit, and it makes a difference to throttling (if it is even the right term for gpu). At least for cpu it does.

Also don't know if silicon decay is part of the issue for the freeze.

I bought it second hand 1 year + ago, this card is made in 2017.
PSU is cheaplak 19A (12v1)+ 19A (12v2). So called total of 650W PSU.

I test it with both open and close case. Not all the time it will freeze, most of the time when i run stress test with Aida64, it wont freeze, but when playing games it will sometimes freeze.
Well, maybe the last resort is to change to a better thermal paste and a better thermal pads as well.

Can you take a pic of the label of the psu? It's highly possible that your psu does not supply 650w at all. 19A * 12V = 228W. Your psu is only supplying 228w from the description that you gave me. The sapphire rx 470 takes in 120w. Bundled together with the rest of the system, 228w is not enough.

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Model and brand of psu? According to more digging, 12v1 is used to power everything except the cpu. So the 228w is used to power your gpu and everything else including fans, motherboards etc. How old is this psu?

Only 1 year + new set.

Any crashes before repasting?

Yes, but not so offen.