RTX 2070 Temperature Discrepancies

[SirLordMoo]

Just wanted to run this by anyone who knows more than I.

 

Recently my 14month old Gigabyte RTX 2070 started ramping up and down fan speed, like someone revving a car. Going up to max speed then back down after a few seconds when playing games. Noisy and irritating. After some googling it seems some 20 series Gigabyte cards had inferior thermal paste applied to them which crumbled and didn't aid in transferring heat very well and the card overrides any custom fan curves to apply max speed to cool the card down. I was only ever getting 81C when under load on the card though.

 

Today I took the card apart found some very dodgy looking thermal paste, removed it and applied some fresh new paste. Brilliant! Solved the fan revving problem, so far so good and I'm getting better performance perhaps 10-30fps more in MW and Warzone, but card now goes to 85C under load. I'm not sure where the temperature readings are taken on a GPU but is it possible with the inferior thermal paste the GPU was experiencing a much higher temperature than it was actually showing? Hence the high fan speeds and now with some decent conductivity its showing a more accurate temperature? 

 

If anyone knows why this might be I'd appreciate it. 

Thank you very much,

Tom