XG7 missing thermal pads?

[tbfaulk]

Hi All,

I recently installed an XG7 STRIX water block on my Asus ROG Strix 3070 Ti. Corsair's website says the water block is compatible with my card, but I'm a bit concerned about the thermal pads that came on the block. One row of the VRM's don't have a thermal pad, but the other row does. I found an unboxing video of this water block, and the number of thermal pads are the same, so it looks like this is by design? Is there any reason there wouldn't be a thermal pad here?

[LockDots]

Not sure why they wouldn't put a pad there other than maybe they don't get that hot to necessitate a pad. I would add one anyway to play it safe. Just have to figure out what size/thickness to use.

[LeDoyen]

the chokes probably don't need that much cooling. It's mostly the chips that do heat up. At worse it's just copper coil and big pads, heat will sink towards the mosfets.

It's still a 290W tdp card, so i wouldn't worry too much.

 

[Corsair GregX]

The part that you circled on the PCB are the chokes that do not require active cooling. On the right side, there are no thermal pads due to different choke heights on various GPU series within the Strix lineup. On the left side, choke height is constant. You can install this GPU water block with confidence, consider the left side choke coverage as a bonus 🙂

[tbfaulk]

Thank you all!!!