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.
this post was submitted on 15 May 2025
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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.
They definitely are cheaping out. I bought a Powercolor Hellhound 7900 XTX last month, and it was running 60°c while totally idle. I got a Thermal Grizzly Kryosheet for it and when I opened the card, there was already significant thermal pump-out in the paste with completely bare spots on the die. That card was brand new with less than 8 hours use when I opened it. After installing the Kryosheet, all temps dropped 20°c.
It's total horseshit that even top end GPUs made by "reputable" manufacturers are shipping with cheap shitty paste.
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?
Video cards have been basically scalper only for the last 2 generations where have you been? People are paying $3-4k for rtx5090 they don't give a shit if the thermal paste is bad they will just buy it because it's the one available for purchase as retailers have no stock age Nvidia is not making more because they'd rather use their manufacturing allocation at tsmc for their highly profitable Ai chips.
- They are in stock everywhere
- Nvidia is not the only one selling cards. There are a dozen brands to choose from. If you needed one, wouldn't you pay even more money for a functional one vs. one knee-capped because the OEM saved $0.005 on cheap thermal paste?
- These brands sell other products besides GPUs and it hurts their brand
- We weren't talking exclusively about GPUs.
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.
Yeah, I realize now that I'd have to do that anyway, as PTM pads are not available in those thicknesses (if the material even works well at those thicknesses).
What I should do is get some thermal putty to replace the pads, so I don't have to bother with getting and cutting the right size of pads.
I also found a PTM pad from Cooler Master on the market called Cryonamics. But it seems like a very new product. I can find no one even as much as mentioning it online. It's half the price of the Thermal Grizzly so I'm tempted to try it.
I read somewhere that Thermalright's Helios line includes pads equivalent to PTM7950. (I don't know if it's Helios V1, V2, or both.) Maybe they're worth a look?
Wonder if the 9070s were also affected.