4mo ago

Expert criticizes Gigabyte's alleged use of 'viscous paste with questionable long-term performance' instead of tried and tested GPU cooling solution

www.pcgamer.com

13 comments

I feel like every electronics manufacturer is skimping on thermal paste for some reason. Doesn't make much sense, you're just knee-capping the performance of your expensive products for the sake of fractions of a penny.
- the performance in the short term doesnt change much. its long term that does, and theyd rather you upgrade your gpu rather than use your current one indefinitely.
- Honestly must have been a manufacturing error. Which is no excuse, QC should have caught it.
  You'd think that high prices would mean the ability to have higher quality manufacturing without affecting the margin much. But I think much of that money is going to TSMC, Nvidia and AMD, with third-party manufacturers getting squeezed as well. But idk.
- They don't care because people buy it anyway. The article even says this is better but they just didn't apply it correctly at the factory. It also says it allows them a simpler cheaper cooling solution which is definitely more money than pennies in research and manufacturing
  
  Do they? How do they know that? If customers are experiencing performance below what they expected from x processor, wouldn't they be inclined to return the product? Or at least not buy it again? And if not, couldn't they have just used a cheaper processor and then sold it for the same price?
I've had very good results with PTM7950 phase change material on my CPU, which has not been delidded. I expect it would work even better on a GPU, which typically doesn't have a lid.
(Note that PTM7950 is somewhat difficult to apply, since it comes in a pad-like form that is both sticky and brittle. If you decide to try it, I recommend refrigerating it first, and being careful and patient when applying. I feel it was worth the effort.)
- Really interested in trying PTM on my graphics card, but it's still too expensive. You need several sheets to cool all the components and Thermal Grizzly is the only brand I can get a hold of.
  It's cool (hehe) that it's even available at regular computer retailers though.
  
  How about using one sheet for the GPU itself, and less expensive thermal pads for the memory chips and/or voltage regulators? I think AIB designers often use this approach.
Wonder if the 9070s were also affected.

13 comments