User discovers a missing thermal pad in the VRAMs of his Asus RTX 3080 Ti TUF OC

And it's not the first time we hear about stuff like this happening. It's either reported more or getting more common. Kamaloo92, a Reddit member, found that his Asus RTX 3080 Ti TUF OC's GDDR6X VRAMs were missing a thermal pad after observing that the graphics card's graphics were suffering from extreme overheating.

The customer initially ran an extensive entire software review, and after concluding that everything was in working order, he proceeded to dismantle the graphics card in order to check the hardware, where he discovered this unexpected surprise.

My RTX 3080 Ti had a temperature of VRAM very high, usually 110 ° C . So I finally opened it to find that a thermal pad was missing on four VRAM chips.

There are some marks on the heat sink, as if the pad has been in place for a few seconds, but the VRAM chips are clean. So I guess the thermal pad somehow fell off before I put the heatsink on the board .

It worked normally, without any kind of reboots, it only suffered from constant thermal throttling.

Other Reddit users approached him and inquired as to which heating pads he used as a substitute. The habit of replacing thermal pads for improved performance is typical among more experienced users, however this particular replacement was not motivated by performance improvement but rather by necessity. In this regard, kamaloo92 provided the following explanation:

I added the missing pad and replaced the others, just to be safe. I also added additional pads as recommended for the 3080 TUF (not Ti) and the temperatures dropped to a maximum of 80 ° C. So I hope everything works fine.

Just in case, I have used Gelid GP-Extreme. 1.5mm between the heatsink and VRAM, 1.5mm at the end of the video connectors, 3mm between the heatsink and the main heatsink, 3mm at the end of the power connector. I haven't removed the back plate so I don't know what's there. On the GPU I have used Kryonaut.

Another the user obamaprism3 identified a flaw with the thermal pad that should have been covering the VRAM of his RTX 3080 Founders Edition in the same Reddit r / nvidia forum, which was only 7 days ago. This causes the GPU to pull up and not establish appropriate contact with the GPU, resulting in overheating of the graphics card's graphics.

These are only a few of the numerous incidents that have come to light in recent months in which manufacturing faults or foreign objects have been discovered in various pieces of gear. The pandemic, it is claimed, may have resulted in several issues, including overworked assembly-line workers and a workforce without the appropriate experience, which may have been hired to make up for the shortage of workers. In addition to determining the root cause of these issues, it is critical to monitor the temperatures of our gear in order to avoid similar difficulties in the future.