 So Nvidia brought it to my attention that there is actually a way easier way to replace the thermal compound on the GTX 580 And if I had sort of, well, thought about it or been a little bit cleverer, I probably would have figured this out But all you have to do is take out the screws, okay, that hold in the plastic shroud here Take those, ho-ho, there you go, you can actually access the card that easily And then, if you want to replace the thermal compound, okay, please note that these are all Phillips head screws that I have removed so far And more Phillips head screws on the back So you do not need a Torx screwdriver, which I ran out and bought specifically so that I could completely take the card apart You do not need a Torx screwdriver in order to disassemble this card and replace the thermal compound I mean, if you wanted to take off the unisync that covers the VRM and the RAM, then I mean, there is nothing preventing you from doing that If you have a Torx screwdriver, but Nvidia also brought to my attention that there are a number of concerns that I should be warning you guys about If you do remove those components, so hold on, let me just get this last screw out first And then we'll go ahead and put the card back over there, look at that So it's that easy to remove it, and now you see you have total access to the GPU, but we've left the metal unisync on So, the reason for leaving the metal unisync on is, remember the thermal pads that I pointed out on all of the RAM as well as on the VRMs? Well, the thermal pads, when the card is originally assembled at the factory, get compressed So what that means is that they start out thick, and they end up as thin as they get when you put on the unisync and you put in all the screws from the back Now, when you remove that and put it back again, sometimes you can run into a situation where it's not making proper contact, or even any contact at all Especially on the voltage regulation modules, so that, even though you might not notice the problem right away, can seriously diminish the lifetime of the product So that was the reason that Nvidia had asked me to show you guys this alternate guide, which is by the way much easier, much faster And if you don't own a torque screwdriver, much easier for replacing the thermal compound That was it This would also be pretty good if you wanted to water cool your card, and you just wanted to use a GPU only block Because you can actually see here that with a little bit of modification to the hold down plate, you could probably get like an MCW 80s, the current model An MCW 80 or a similar GPU only block on there, and then you'd probably have some incidental airflow from the fan Which should be enough to keep things sort of cool enough in the other parts of the card And yeah, you could actually water cool your card fairly inexpensively without buying a full cover block Because Nvidia has this integrated heat spreader built onto the entire card, so thanks for that Nvidia