After having a few issues with one of my Founders RTX 3080s, I had swapped out the copper shims that we had installed on the cards to help with the temp issues with the VRAM, I was getting some weirdness with temps and such, so I wanted to find out what was going on...
I stripped the card down and made sure that I was pasting on everything as it should have been..
Sadly the temps didn't really improve. I believe there where getting very close to thermal throttling before, so 110C at times, you could hear the card spinning up the fans faster to try and help with the temps every so often.
So I decided try some new pads afterwards because that was the cheapest option and putting to water cooling wouldn't have been the best option... So I grabbed a couple of packs from our friend Amazon, they came through and we got those installed....
When we tried them, I was impressed considering.....
The hot spot and the TJunction temps had come crashing down which was great. As I use these cards for FAH mostly, I try to keep them as cool as possible and I make sure I don't run them at 100% power because of the extra power consumption. Trying to keep them cool and save a bit of power to help with the efficiency can help massively
Just like when your mining but its the same thing as Folding I think really. Its not about how fast you get something done, its about the efficiency and the fact your not going to wear the card out completely doing it.. Anything for me to keep my GPUs about the 50 to 60C during the heat of summer, I'm happy with. Anything higher like 80C or so, is getting to hot for me especially when these cards can run sometimes 24/7 when or if I'm feeling up to the electric bill
I'll see if I can find some comparison screen grabs and post those up as well just for reference if you'd like