Imagine opening up your GPU after a little more than a year of use, because your fan speeds were constantly hitting 2,000 RPM during gaming. Imagine the horror when you find out that, beneath the cooler shroud, the manufacturer had been generous – and we do mean generous – with the amount of thermal paste, to the point that it covered up the entire PCB. That’s the scenario that greeted one gamer and their Gigabyte Aorus RTX 5090.
The post, which was originally posted on Reddit but has since been removed by the moderator, was basically that of the user Correct_Difference72 showing off the underbelly of his Aorus RTX 5090 having been slathered with what can only be described as an excessive amount of thermal paste. Luckily, Videocardz managed to save the picture before the takedown occur, so you can all share in our pain as well.
“Frankly, I had my gpu mounted horizontally, so I was never worried about the migrating thermal gel… but with this amount I’m thinking it wouldn’t have mattered even if half of it drifted onto my motherboard. As per Correct_Difference72:
“My main complaint is that the liquid metal composite they used at the factory seems to be susceptible to pump out, or they were pinching pennies with the application because there’s literally no coverage on the lower half of the GPU core. And it left a bunch of discoloured stains on the vapour chamber in the upper half where it was pooled. Oddly my gpu temperature never seemed to go above 76°C, but I think it just wasn’t reporting hot spots because I noticed by fans would jump up to 2000 rpm during games.
I’m applying PTM 7950, and I suggest fellow aorus owners check on their thermal paste if it’s been a year as well.
Don’t worry about warranty, Gigabyte was never to going to honour it anyways.”
As they said, Correct_Difference72 said that they replaced the excess thermal goop with PTM7950 pads, on the GPU die, along with less viscous pads for the memory chips and capacitors around it as well. On that note, this isn’t the first time Gigabyte has been cast into the spotlight over the issue; the brand had said in the past that some RTX 50 Series cards may have received excess thermal gel when being assembled at their factory. Once again, and in the case of this particular card, either the machine applying thermal paste was faulty or the human responsible for the job just got lazy and/or sloppy.
And that’s just with thermal paste. Imagine if that was liquid metal: the entire board would have fried at first boot.
(Source: Reddit (removed), Videocardz)
