How much thermal gel is too much?
© Correct_Difference72/Reddit A GeForce RTX 5090 AORUS owner has opened the card after more than a year of use (and end of warranty) and found a large amount of factory-applied thermal material inside the cooler. The Redditor claims the card was mounted horizontally, which should reduce the chance of thermal gel moving due to gravity.
Factory thermal material replaced with PTM7950
According to the post by “Correct_Difference72”, the thermal material had pooled on the upper half of the vapor chamber. The user also claims the lower half of the GPU core had little to no coverage after disassembly. The owner reported regular GPU temperatures of up to 76°C, but also noticed fan speeds reaching around 2000 RPM during gaming.
The user is now replacing the original material with PTM7950, a phase-change thermal pad commonly used by GPU modders and laptop repair communities. The post does not confirm whether hotspot or memory junction temperatures were logged before disassembly.
Frankly, I had my gpu mounted horizontally, so I was never worried about the migrating thermal gel… but with this amount I’m thinking it wouldn’t have mattered even if half of it drifted onto my motherboard.
My main complaint is that the liquid metal composite they used at the factory seems to be susceptible to pump out, or they were pinching pennies with the application because there’s literally no coverage on the lower half of the GPU core. And it left a bunch of discolored stains on the vapor chamber in the upper half where it was pooled. Oddly my gpu temperature never seemed to go above 76°C, but I think it just wasn’t reporting hot spots because I noticed my fans would jump up to 2000 rpm during games.
I’m applying PTM7950, and I suggest fellow aorus owners check on their thermal paste if it’s been a year as well.
Don’t worry about warranty, Gigabyte was never going to honor it anyways.
— Correct_Difference72
Gigabyte thermal gel
This is not the first report involving thermal gel on Gigabyte RTX 50 series cards. Gigabyte previously acknowledged that some early RTX 50 series cards may have received excess thermal gel at the factory. This might be the worst example of this yet. The company said at the time that this should not cause damage and referred to visible differences as cosmetic variance.
Thermal gel was never found to have caused damage to the GPU or motherboards, but users who mounted RTX 50 cards vertically noticed that the gel was slipping into PCIe slots, and could’ve been a real issue. However I do not recall any user reaching that point.
The post had already been removed by the time I found it and shared it with you. Since I still had the Reddit app open, I was able to save the image before it was no longer accessible.
Source: NVIDIA/Reddit (Removed)
