Over on Reddit, a user decided to take apart his graphics card—an Aorus RTX 5090—once the warranty had expired. It’s worth noting that the card’s fans were regularly spinning at 2,000 rpm despite the GPU running at an acceptable temperature. Upon disassembly, the discovery was “shocking”—the card was completely submerged in thermal paste.
Aorus RTX 5090: A Card Drenched in Thermal Paste!
Too much thermal paste:
Thermal paste is the thermal interface material used by Gigabyte to cool its graphics cards. It had been the source of controversy because, on some cards, it tended to be applied in excessive amounts and could leak. Furthermore, Gigabyte stated that this posed no significant risk to the hardware since the thermal paste is not conductive. The only downside: it’s pretty unsightly. Moreover, this mainly affects the first units produced by Gigabyte.
Clearly, we’re dealing with one of the first units, given the large amount of thermal paste. As you can see, it’s literally everywhere. The memory, the power stages, and even part of the GPU are submerged in the gel. Luckily, the card was mounted horizontally; otherwise, there would have been gel all over the inside of thePC.
Not enough liquid metal:
However, upon disassembly, he also noticed that his card was lacking liquid metal. As you can see, only half of the die is covered by this material. Despite this, the GPU temperature was acceptable: 76°C. However, he didn’t report the hotspot temperature or his VRAM temperature—data that’s important to know in this kind of situation.
In any case, he also mentioned that he removed everything to replace the thermal paste with phase-change pads, specifically PTM7950s. These are well known among those who perform maintenance on their components.
