Thermal pads thickness on RTX 3080Ti FE Waterblock preventing the die from being completely touching the heatsink

[bravoleader80]

Hello there.

I've recently finished building my custom watercool loop all with corsair elements. Bending tubes for a noob can be hard but with a bit of luck here and there I was able to do it and I was able to put everything in place to work properly. The system has CPU and GPU waterblocks ( I have ryzen 9 5900x and 3080 ti FE)

I switched everything on and it seemed to be working, yay. As soon as I started the first game...sleep mode. what the hell!?!?!?!?

I Did a bit of troubleshooting using various hardware monitors. CPU seemed fine, motherboard fine (but I did not touch the MB anyway), GPU seemed ok, Vram seemed ok but there was this GPU hotspot at 110C. After a bit of research I found that basically that temp is related to the hottest bit of your GPU die.

I opened the system and found the following:

As you can see, the die hasn't been touching the plate for most of its surface. I did a quick search on google and found this topic: 

which seemed to be having the same issue I was experiencing. the guy apparently fixed it using a different thermal pads so I got those with the same thickness he used and I got an even worse result. the die wasn't touching at all. Then as I was absolutely too stressed by all of this assembling and disassebling and all the time you know, there's the system to empty and put together again...ok so what I did as last resort was to use the thermal pads on the GPU die as well. Now I can get to a place where the system boots and I can stream and play but under stress the temperatures of the DIE and the VRAM are pretty high, in the region of 80C for the die and 90 for the VRAM. The guy in the other thread seemed to have reached something awesome like 50C which was my objective to be honest when I switched from air to water.

So, now I have ordered 0.5mm pads. I'm going to remove the 1.0 pads that I have now on the vram and on the die, put the 0.5 on the vram and normal thermal paste on the die and I hope to get a contact this time. I wonder if this is a know issue. If I got a defective unit because the pads that I had on my unit were not able to squish enough to get the die to adhere fully as you can see from the first picture.

Is there anything I should do aside from moving to a competitor for a unit that works properly? Kind regards.

F

 

[ne7]

Silly question, but are you putting enough pressure when doing the screws on the top part of the board.

Looking at that the bottom thermal pad of for the single ram chip looks proper squished... did you go round the 4 screws for the gpu evenly? or did you do them all up one at a time hard?

[Bailey]

bravoleader80 - how did the new thermal pads workout?  I have a 3080ti FE as well and just received my corsair xg7 block for the card.  Would like to make all of the mods to it before I do the install.  Did you add any thermal pads to the back plate?

 

Thaks