Dacien

Driver issues have plagued my 5700XT since I bought a reference card in July. I've been waiting for a driver to ease the BSOD's and crashes but it hasn't come yet. Usually it's a dual-monitor issue, where I can't have anything playing (youtube, twitch, etc.) on my second monitor while I game, but even some low-demand games like Gungeon crash after 15 minutes or so even when nothing is up on the second monitor. Tried everything under the sun. The performance is there, but the drivers are not.

I tore my reference apart and went crazy with ram heatsinks and Arctic Xtreme 3 with Kryonaut, so I'm glad my score reflects all my work.

Honestly $135 is actually quite a lot for the slight increase over the 5700XT. Noise and thermals need to be very important to a person in order to justify the cost, particularly when a simple repaste helps a lot. Free games come with the 5700XT also so that's not a factor (Xbox for PC).

Not on your list, but the Redragon K556 RGB has really impressed me with their Outemu Brown switches. I cheaped out on the keyboard in my $2000 build to try and save on costs, but I actually love this keyboard, especially for the price ($60). Minimalist, solid, and zero flex in the keyboard. It's got enough heft to stay put if you bump it, and like I said, it does not flex at all. No big forehead or extra size, and the backlighting looks great, you just have to dig around a bit to find the program for it called simply "Mechanical Gaming Keyboard" that lets you set up the colors. I couldn't be more pleasantly surprised with this keyboard considering I was going "cheap" on it. Edit: This is basically the same keyboard I think, looks and functions just like the one I have:

I just ran it at stock, and Vram topped out at 84C. The heatsinks and shims come with adhesive tape. I'm not sure if it's 8810, but I'm sure it does an acceptable job.

Updated the OP.

My heatsinks come in today or tomorrow, I'm crossing my fingers and will update the thread. Ideally I'd like the memory temps to stay under 90C during a stress test, but even if it's still really high, temps are reasonable in a gaming workload, so it won't be the end of the world.

Run DDU in Safe Mode, re-install drivers. Worked for me. Also, don't run MSI Afterburner (if you are) and see if that helps. I was also getting weird artifacting and random shutdowns day one, and then I did that and it never came up again.

I was having random shutdowns when I first got everything up and running. Ran DDU in Safe Mode, installed the newest drivers, and it hasn't been a problem since.

I used a 50/50 mix of thermal epoxy and Ceramique 2, and the heatsinks stayed on when the card was installed, and came right off when it was time to remove them. Almost too easily. I'll probably go with a bit more epoxy than Ceramique 2 next time, something like 60/40. Alternatively, 3M 8810 is supposed to be good too, and I might go with that for ease of use. But I'm going with these for the heatsinks: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002BWXW6E/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 Because I'll be needing to slightly tweak the poles to fit underneath the gpu heatsink, fins won't work. But I think yours look better at dissipating heat.

There's some 100X100mm slabs on Amazon, and I can cut them down at work since there's a bandsaw on my jobsite, but the problem is numerous IC's blocking a perfect path. It might be a better situation for your cooler, but for the Acceleo Xtreme 3, I'm going with some 14x14x14mm heatsinks and some 20x20mm copper shims. I can shim out for enough room to fully seat the heatsinks, but I'll probably have to tweak the pins to get them under the GPU heatsink fins. Here's the 100x100 slabs. If you have something to carefully cut with you can size them yourself. Tin snips would probably warp the shim.

When I studied for the CompTIA A+ certification (never finished, but that's beside the point) the book went over the fact that damage to electrical components can occur from static shocks that are so low voltage that you would never know the discharge occurred. And the worst part about this is that these minuscule discharges often don't manifest as complete component failure, instead they manifest as phantom errors, shutdowns, and random crashes. You'll spend forever trying to figure out what setting is wrong or what configuration is set improperly, and you'll just be chasing ghosts. Every time I work on an electrical component, whether it's a GPU, a motherboard, or whatever, I use a strap. In a pinch, you can simply get situated, ground yourself by touching bare metal of a grounded object, then clamping on to a metal part of the component you're working on. That way, at least you'll be at the same potential. Ideally I'd plug in my PSU and clamp to it. Just my two cents.

My next plan is to install copper shims on all ram chips to extend the surface area out so I can fit some large 14mm copper heatsinks, instead of the included aluminum ones. I'll have to wait until more Kryonaut arrives because I used it all building my comp. The entire cooler will need to be removed to access all the ram.

No, I just have tons of heatsinks and fans. They only hit max 86C during heavy gaming, so it's acceptable. It's only during the stress tests that it gets so high, so I'm just living with it for now.

Did a little better. I just picked a high plot on the GPU Clock, but it was max 2099 MHz. I tried to edit it in but I think it's better to just leave the original without "Max" enabled, because I forgot.