Enshittify my thermal paste to save 10 cents on a $500 graphics card why don’t you.
Why not leave off a few resistors or use leaky caps while you’re at it.
The answer is money, but it’s not material cost that’s driving these crappy thermal interface pads, but labor expenses (and I’d guess consistency too). Pick-and-place is absurdly fast at putting components onto a PCB, and if they can put the pre-cut pads onto the board that’s huge for a manufacturer.
It’s the difference between slapping a post-it note, or the dot/line/X/cross/etc method with grease. No contest that TIM pads win for them, any fallouts get handled via warranty.
How is this even possible??
9 out of 10 dentists recommend that paste brand!!
Redoing the thermals with new pads and Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut turned my 114C crash happy RX 6700 XT into an 84C stable speed runner. Worth the effort for a used gpu.
This is something that simply, should not happen. This kind of mishap should have been weeded out during R&D.
I won’t say any more on it right now, and I definitely won’t excuse the behaviour. I do, however, want to give advice to anyone affected.
If you can RMA, then do it. If you just don’t want to deal with all that, and you want it fixed, whether you’re directly affected, or if you just have a hot/slow GPU, I strongly recommend redoing the thermal material. You don’t have to go all out with fancy phase change material or anything (though, that is definitely an option if you want to spend the money on it), but repasting shouldn’t be difficult.
My recommendation is to do a small amount of research and try to find something that’s not too expensive that is hopefully non-conductive, so any screw ups don’t end your card. If you can get thermal pads that are the right size, you might as well replace those at the same time.
Most of the time, getting the cooler off is simply a matter of taking off the backplate, unbolting the cooler from the GPU chip location (remove the tension bracket), then carefully pulling it apart, and disconnecting any fan cables/RGB as you go.
Clean existing thermal compound off with tissue/paper towel, etc, then clean and polish the surfaces (both the GPU and the cooler side) using alcohol, generally isopropyl, and either a microfiber cloth or something else lint free. In a pinch, q-tips work. Both sides should be a near mirror finish when you’re done, though, depending on the cooler, it may not have been machined to a near-mirror, so just clean it until your cleaning cloth/qtip comes away mostly or completely clean.
Once cleaned, apply new compound, fix any thermal pads and reassemble (reverse of disassembly). Be very careful when reattaching the tension bracket to move in a criss-cross or “x” pattern, always go opposite of whatever one you just tightened, and tighten everything just a little as you criss-cross the plate to ensure equal pressure across the cooler. Everything else should be trivial in terms of order.
Once everything is tightened and secure, reinstall the card and test.
Well I just re-tested my MSI 4070 Super Gaming X Slim. I got it back in January, and I reckon ambient temperatures were 3-4°c lower then.
Running the same tests, GPU temperature max was 4.9°c higher, hot spot was 8.1°c higher. Not much of an increase when normalised for ambient, but still an increase. Funnily enough the memory was exactly the same as before, and that uses pads, which does point to the paste getting less efficient, rather than dust (of which there is some).
Disappointing, but not all that dramatic. Don’t think I’ll need to repaste any time soon.
