Friday, January 24th 2025
RTX 5090 FE Liquid Metal Swap: Thermal Paste Performs Just Fine
Did you catch our launch review of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition graphics card? If you did, you'd have noticed the hoops we had to jump through to disassemble the card without breaking anything. As we carefully peeled the card's aesthetic finery and worked out way down to the GPU, we found that NVIDIA is using a liquid-metal thermal interface material (TIM) between the "GB202" GPU and the unified vapor chamber plate of the Double Flow Through cooling solution. After our photography the problem arose of putting the card back together, and we wondered if using a mainstream thermal paste would be a suitable replacement since we didn't have the patience to toy with liquid metal given our review volume. So we pulled out our trusty tube of Arctic MX6, gave it a suitable application, skipped the gasket, and put the card back together.
Here's what we found—the GPU temperatures rise by about 2°C on average over the stock liquid metal TIM. In the graph below, you will see both TIM applications compete with each other over a 370-second stress from a benchmark run. In the chart the start temperatures are slightly different, this does not mean that idle temperatures are higher with liquid metal. At the end of test the maximum temperature reached with the stock liquid metal TIM is around 77.6°C. The Arctic MX6, on the other hand settles to 79.4°C. This +1.8°C temperature increase really isn't significant at all—room temperature changes between summer and winter will cause bigger swings. We also tested performance, and it was spot on, the same as pre-disassembly—not a hint of thermal throttling. Both values are safely below the 90°C thermal threshold for the RTX 5090—that's right, NVIDIA raised the thermal throttle point, it's not 83°C anymore like on the RTX 40-series Ada. Taking the RTX 5090 apart and putting it back together was a challenging experience, but we're glad we didn't have to do a liquid metal application to ensure trouble-free operation. This is good news for all DIYers—don't bother with replacing the liquid metal—a thin thermal paste application works fine, too.
Here's what we found—the GPU temperatures rise by about 2°C on average over the stock liquid metal TIM. In the graph below, you will see both TIM applications compete with each other over a 370-second stress from a benchmark run. In the chart the start temperatures are slightly different, this does not mean that idle temperatures are higher with liquid metal. At the end of test the maximum temperature reached with the stock liquid metal TIM is around 77.6°C. The Arctic MX6, on the other hand settles to 79.4°C. This +1.8°C temperature increase really isn't significant at all—room temperature changes between summer and winter will cause bigger swings. We also tested performance, and it was spot on, the same as pre-disassembly—not a hint of thermal throttling. Both values are safely below the 90°C thermal threshold for the RTX 5090—that's right, NVIDIA raised the thermal throttle point, it's not 83°C anymore like on the RTX 40-series Ada. Taking the RTX 5090 apart and putting it back together was a challenging experience, but we're glad we didn't have to do a liquid metal application to ensure trouble-free operation. This is good news for all DIYers—don't bother with replacing the liquid metal—a thin thermal paste application works fine, too.
46 Comments on RTX 5090 FE Liquid Metal Swap: Thermal Paste Performs Just Fine
Nvidia is using the cheapest $hitty available liquid metal
The hotspot is the main issue here, probably before the repaste it was around 100C, now maybe over 110C
You can manually test for hotspot, because it will still cause thermal throttle.
I stopped the fans with my fingers during Furmark and the card didn't throttle until GPU temp showed 90°C.
If hotspot "it's over a million" like you two claim, then this shouldn't be possibleYup, I checked that too of course
Also edge temps stayed the same the whole time with cool 65-70 degrees, just hotspot rose. If Nvidia doesn't expose that then it will be hard to say what is going on. If the fan speed is related to hotspot as in Radeons rather then edge then fans will go crazy, but if they are connected to edge temp then GPU can either cook itself or just shutdown.
EDIT
Yeah thermal throttle will probably happen before it will cook itself. But still would be nice to see how it performs after couple of months :D
If the temperature in the engineering marvel is high, imagine in more modest designs. Why hide data?
(we already saw that with amp cpu and people complaining that they get to hot/the number is to high)
This is a fun little experiment, I never really was sold on liquid metal, I will stick with my MX-4
That Nvidia graphic card will make a great test field for future thermal interface medium testing.
A month or two? :)
Hot Spot will bake the paste and without a sensor, the user won't mention it, so - RMA = no warranty.
The (NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090) GB202 graphics processor is a large chip with a die area of 750 mm²
AMD 9800X3D die size: 70.6 mm²
Intel Core Ultra 9 285K die size: 243 mm²