Question Do I need thermal pads for vram and if so what thickness?

[grasmaaier]

My gpu is overheating a lot so a while back I decided to open it up and change the thermal paste. There were no thermal pads on the vram, but I didn't think much of it then. Fast forward to now, I just saw a video of a guy opening a gpu, and there were thermal pads on the vram. After a google search I found out that thermal pads aren't that important on vram, but they are important on the vrm. But I'm not sure if I have thermal pads on those, because I didn't check. I don't have any spare thermal paste laying around atm, so I can't open it up to check. Should I buy thermal pads for the vram? And if so, what thickness?

I have an asus r9 280x directcu II 3gb

 

[Dunlop0078]

Did you take the thermal pads off? If not then the card never came with them and it likely doesn't need them. If the PCB photo I found of that card is right then the VRM has it's own mini heatsink, the thermal pads are under that, they don't need to be changed. The VRM is under the black finned piece of metal behind the 10 grey square chokes.

 

[grasmaaier]

Did you take the thermal pads off?

No, they weren't on there to begin with. Looks like the overheating issue isn't caused by this. Thanks!

 

[tennis2]

"Thermal pads" are intended to be used between a chip and a heatsink. Similar to thermal paste. If your GPU heatsink has no flat bits positioned over the VRAM or VRM, adding a thermal pad will actually be WORSE than nothing since you're then insulating the chips against the airflow from the fans.