So essentially... you pay a premium to purchase an improperly assembled item. You then have to take it apart to figure out that thermal pads were left out. In so doing, you possibly void the warranty. Nice!

Kaarme:

It's pretty funny that prices are higher than ever but quality is lower than ever.

alanm:

I think manufacturers have been under pressure to ramp up volumes to meet demand over the past year and is why we see some of these issues.

There have always been single incidents in QC like this, nothing new really, just catches more attention these days caused by widespread social media outlets. Seen some and experienced a couple of these Monday incidents myself, it is what it is. Worst thing I have seen is a friend getting 4 stick of quality RAM, 2 of the sticks came with completely loose chips, they simply fell off when he opened the package, that was around 10 years ago. Single and very few incidents is still nothing one should be afraid of, it's when there is a rise in reports of failures with a given product that things start to be serious.

Welp. Don't expect card prices to move if isolated incidents that DO happen to any company, happen. This will only ramp up more QA costs when nothing really needs to be changed here, except a single card.

guys don't forget we didn't have the tools (I don't think so) for that, nobody really cared about or knew the memory temps before apps gave us that number and the gpu hotspot that's definitely why people notice this more, we can see our ram temps now reasony why I ditched my alphacool 3090 water block and went ek+backplate on the 3090 (a special case but still)