Thermal pad thickness on the Gigabyte Aorus RTX 2080 Ti Xtreme

VarHyid · February 23, 2021

How thick are the thermal pads on your 2080 Ti Xtreme? I need to replace the paste on the GPU, but would like to also buy some pads just in case some may require a replacement. Are they all 1mm or also 1.5mm?

I sent this question to Gigabyte's support, but they refuse to tell me:

AlienALX · June 21, 2021

On 2/23/2021 at 1:04 PM, VarHyid said:

How thick are the thermal pads on your 2080 Ti Xtreme? I need to replace the paste on the GPU, but would like to also buy some pads just in case some may require a replacement. Are they all 1mm or also 1.5mm?

I sent this question to Gigabyte's support, but they refuse to tell me:

This is absolute bullcrap Gigabyte and you know it !

I bought a 2080Ti Aorus Xtreme with a water block on and I want to put it back to air. However, I have no idea of the various pad thicknesses so I am stuck with an expensive door stop.

AlienALX · June 21, 2021

https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/20/asus_thermal_pad_thickness/

WTF is with companies these days?

AlienALX · June 21, 2021

Right I have made progress. Good progress it seems. I initially tried 1mm pads on the VRAM and 1.5 on the VRM, with 1mm elsewhere. Card worked fine at idle, 45' fans off. As soon as I loaded up Superposition the fans honked to 100% and it hit 86c. The VRAM hit 96. I shut it down. When I took it apart I could see the thermal paste had not made full contact on the core.

Cleaned off the thermal paste, then put the card together with no pads. Made a feeler gauge out of some 0.45mm plastic (verniers) and then put it between the memory and plate. I felt drag. I then found this.

Well I lied. I already found that, but I know that WBs are not always the same as a air cooler. However, I found some small pieces of 0.5mm I had lying around (not enough to do all of it) and then put pieces on each part of the cold plate. 1mm all over, 0.5 on the RAM. And after dry assembling the card again it all seems to make good contact. I tried pulling them out with pliers (I left some hanging out for this) and they wouldn't budge. So I would say they were all firmly pressed into place.

I had already ordered large pads to cut up, will try again on Weds when they arrive.

This is serious bullcrap though. The pads they used stock are paraffin wax and total crap. If you repaste your GPU they go all soggy and usually fall apart. How can they make this information "classified" when basically it's all a part of maintenance. Why would they hide this information when they are advocates (Gigabyte have been known for years to allow this) yet hold back the information when you need it? Surely it would just generate more RMA FFS.

Stupid. All just very very stupid. £1400 GPU and they can't even tell you the pad thickness on it.

objecttothis · July 2, 2021

The Magnuson-Moss Warranty act makes it illegal to void a warranty by someone just opening it up unless they can prove that by opening it you damaged the card. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty_Act