I miss EVGA. :(
Are there any reputable vendors out there nowadays? I hope to keep my EVGA 3090 for as long as possible, but don’t know where to turn when I eventually upgrade… Maybe just buy a card from another vendor and re-do the thermal paste myself?
So here’s the thing, really: there’s a lot of companies that make good hardware.
The problem is there’s not a single remaining AIB that has above shit-tier support if something goes wrong. They’re all fucking awful to deal with, slow, and just suck. See: the recent ASUS support kerfuffle, except it’s not just ASUS so much as every vendor in those same spaces.
EVGA is missed because their warranty support team was fucking stellar in a universe of otherwise wet diapers.
Asus made me handwrite a note with a picture of the card in the computer in frame, and the box and receipt, just to register the warranty.
Assholes.
Gamer’s Nexus is pushing for ASUS to have better support across the board. Their theory is if a leader in the industry does it, everyone else must naturally follow. I’m personally praying for their success.
People will recommend this brand, or that brand, but I haven’t heard any consistently good stories about any of them like I did with EVGA.
My brother had an MSI AMD card and got denied an RMA because the HDMI port was supposedly burned out, which makes no sense to me. They sent a picture to us, and to me it looked like someone jammed a soldering iron in there or something. 🤷♂️
I think you’d be fine just repasting whatever card you go with. My spouse has an EVGA RTX 3080 FTW3, and I have an MSI RTX 3080 Gaming Z Trio. Both cards have been fantastic for us. If I stick with Nvidia, I might try a different brand but so far I’ve been very happy with MSI.
I have no experience with AMD cards, but I’ve heard that Sapphire is highly regarded, probably great like EVGA.
Intel I don’t trust yet, so I’ll wait before I consider their Arc cards.
They stopped selling GPUs because, in essence, NVIDIA is an asshole company. Might be over-simplifying it, but you get the idea
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.
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.
How is this even possible??
9 out of 10 dentists recommend that paste brand!!
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.
