Are there any reputable vendors out there nowadays? I hope to keep my EVGA 3090 for as long as possible, but don’t know where to turn when I eventually upgrade… Maybe just buy a card from another vendor and re-do the thermal paste myself?
People will recommend this brand, or that brand, but I haven’t heard any consistently good stories about any of them like I did with EVGA.
My brother had an MSI AMD card and got denied an RMA because the HDMI port was supposedly burned out, which makes no sense to me. They sent a picture to us, and to me it looked like someone jammed a soldering iron in there or something. 🤷♂️
I think you’d be fine just repasting whatever card you go with. My spouse has an EVGA RTX 3080 FTW3, and I have an MSI RTX 3080 Gaming Z Trio. Both cards have been fantastic for us. If I stick with Nvidia, I might try a different brand but so far I’ve been very happy with MSI.
I have no experience with AMD cards, but I’ve heard that Sapphire is highly regarded, probably great like EVGA.
Intel I don’t trust yet, so I’ll wait before I consider their Arc cards.
Not that it makes it ok, but I'd bet a large amount of money the single biggest reason for this happening now is how much Nvidia has been squeezing their board partners. It's why we lost EVGA.
The stock paste on my 2080ti was a joke. It would cause my hotspot temp to be >100 and the fans would go crazy. Repasted and now it’s great. Pita though.
Well I just re-tested my MSI 4070 Super Gaming X Slim. I got it back in January, and I reckon ambient temperatures were 3-4°c lower then.
Running the same tests, GPU temperature max was 4.9°c higher, hot spot was 8.1°c higher. Not much of an increase when normalised for ambient, but still an increase. Funnily enough the memory was exactly the same as before, and that uses pads, which does point to the paste getting less efficient, rather than dust (of which there is some).
Disappointing, but not all that dramatic. Don’t think I’ll need to repaste any time soon.
Redoing the thermals with new pads and Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut turned my 114C crash happy RX 6700 XT into an 84C stable speed runner. Worth the effort for a used gpu.