I have been and continue to be confronted with graphics cards from my readers whose initially good cooling performance dwindles after just a few months and whose hotspot temperatures are then well above the 100 degree mark. I have already published several articles on this topic, dealing with the symptoms and repair, but now I finally have the technical means to investigate the exact causes. I don’t want to spoil too much yet, but I’m really flashed by so much mindless ignorance and greed. It has to be said so harshly, because money is being saved at the wrong end at the expense of paying customers.
It doesn’t matter whether cards from Asus, Manli, PNY, Palit or others are affected, because the traces always lead back to the same thermal paste pimps, who deliver extremely inferior products whose data sheets may read nicely, but have nothing to do with reality and which are delivered to a wide variety of graphics card manufacturers. Of course, this is all good for the first moment, for sales, marketing and reviews. However, after just a few months of intensive use, the cooling performance of the graphics cards deteriorates enormously and the paste degrades into a godsend. Pump-out, outgassing and ultimately large-scale hardening – the list of failures is long. As a reminder, here are two links that clearly state the problem and the solution:
Back to the beginning: I am butchering a brand new card
So far I have only been able to “marvel” at the consequences of using such inferior paste, but with suitable equipment you can do much more: you can finally test this dirt. That’s exactly why I got myself a brand new and unused Manli GeForce RTX 4080 16GB Gallardo, similar to the previous article with the Manli card. After all, examining the dried and degraded gunk on the defective cards is (almost) useless.
I disassembled the new card on camera (the video is linked at the end of the article) and documented every single step. Of course, this also included “collecting” the original paste, the consistency of which I have to describe as extremely thin and which also pulled strings like crazy. This sight alone is enough to give me an idea of what to expect. After all, if you develop such a thin paste with such a low filling of (expensive) heat-conducting particles, then you have to find some way of ensuring that it performs properly to begin with (even if only for a brief moment). This is certainly possible, but it is a bit tricky and above all: extremely inexpensive, i.e. cheap.
The next step is to test the paste on the TIMA5 as if it were a normal paste from a tube. The amount collected was also easily sufficient to apply a 500 µm thick layer to the measuring body for safety reasons and thus to make a completely regular measurement. As a reminder, here again is the basic article on pastes and their production as well as my test setup for refreshing or obtaining information. The test will then continue on the following pages.
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