After adding the 3mm 6w pads to the back of the card i saw a slight decline in temps. Not enough for the work involved. Fans still ran too fast and RAM wanted to still cause thermal limiting on mining.
Still waiting for one last piece to arrive before I open the card up again and replace all the pads. The card was mining with stock RAM timing and core speed locked at about 960. This gave me the best hash rate and RAM temps about 104°. Still too loud and still too hot. I have some 2mm 6w pads. Just what is needed to replace the thermal pads on the vRAM chips on the face of the card. Opening the card up the second time went a lot faster. Pulled the stock, greasy pads off the RAM and dropped in the cheap 6w pads. I did not take the time to clean things up since I plan on tearing this thing apart in a couple weeks to replace everything.
Card now runs with +900 RAM timings. Fans dropped to low 60s. tJunction temps were still hitting about 104°. Playing around with the Nicehash Quick Miner OCTune software I found out you can set a target temp for the vRAM and not just a set fan percentage. Just what I was looking for. I did not want to lock the fans at 75% to then have the room warm up and the temps go up but the fans not respond. I would be right back at the 100° plus range again.
So after playing the the OCTune app I came up with a fixed core of 1050MHz, RAM +900, and vRAM target temp of 94°. This is giving me about 95.33 MH/s at 219W. The fans slowly bounce around from 68% to 85%. Not killer but a lot better then the 86 MH/s I was able to do before swapping the front vRAM pads out.
I tried faster RAM settings. I was able to do +1100 with out errors and temps not climbing much. It causes my hash rate to drop. I tried a few different setting and playing with power but never found something that gave me better timings then my +900 settings.
Tracking for my package shows it has arrived in the US. A few more days and I should have everything I need for my next experiment with this thing. Just need to find the time to do the work.