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!!
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?
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.
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.
They stopped selling GPUs because, in essence, NVIDIA is an asshole company. Might be over-simplifying it, but you get the idea
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.
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.
