Nvidia RTX 40-Series GPUs Hampered By Low-Quality Thermal Paste

'Anyone who is into gaming knows your graphics card is under strain trying to display modern graphics,' writes longtime Slashdot reader smooth wombat. 'This results in increased power usage, which is then turned into heat. Keeping your card cool is a must to get the best performance possible.'

'However, hardware tester Igor's Lab found that vendors for Nvidia RTX 40-series cards are using cheap, poorly applied thermal paste, which is leading to high temperatures and consequently, performance degradation over time. This penny-pinching has been confirmed by Nick Evanson at PC Gamer.' From the report: I have four RTX 40-series cards in my office (RTX 4080 Super, 4070 Ti, and two 4070s) and all of them have quite high hotspots -- the highest temperature recorded by an individual thermal sensor in the die. In the case of the 4080 Super, it's around 11 C higher than the average temperature of the chip. I took it apart to apply some decent quality thermal paste and discovered a similar situation to that found by Igor's Lab. In the space of a few months, the factory-applied paste had separated and spread out, leaving just an oily film behind, and a few patches of the thermal compound itself. I checked the other cards and found that they were all in a similar state.

Igor's Lab examined the thermal paste used on a brand-new RTX 4080 and found it to be quite thin in nature, due to large quantities of cheap silicone oil being used, along with zinc oxide filler. There was lots of ground aluminium oxide (the material that provides the actual thermal transfer) but it was quite coarse, leading to the paste separating quite easily. Removing the factory-installed paste from another RTX 4080 graphics card, Igor's Lab applied a more appropriate amount of a high-quality paste and discovered that it lowered the hotspot temperature by nearly 30 C.

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