Question Gigabyte G1 Gaming GTX 1070 thermal pad thickness, etc?

[Crossvxm]

I opened up my G1 Gaming 1070 Rev 1.0 to replace the thermal paste and unfortunately there was no way to avoid compromising the thinner thermal pads as they are sticky and tore like nothing. How thick are they, and what are the best options to replace it with?

The closest thing locally is "Arctic Cooling Thermal Pad with 6.0W/mK Thermal Conductivity" (it is 1.00mm). Is this as good as whatever it originally uses?

P.S. the super thick one it has is still perfectly fine.

 

[13thmonkey]

Why did you do that? What's the relatively new obsession with replacing thermal paste every year? I've never done it on a GPU, and only once on a CPU (currently 3.5 and 7 years respectively), never mind the older ones. What's driving you to do this? what tuber is telling you it's needed?

 

[Crossvxm]

Why did you do that? What's the relatively new obsession with replacing thermal paste every year? I've never done it on a GPU, and only once on a CPU (currently 3.5 and 7 years respectively), never mind the older ones. What's driving you to do this? what tuber is telling you it's needed?

I don't think people really have an obsession with replacing thermal paste. I know what I'm doing, I've been doing this for years, but not once have I had any thermal pads tear on me. The 1000 series is a bit old already, they were released in summer 2016, that's almost three years and this was purchased the first week it was released. Most experienced individuals know that manufacturers never use good paste. Over time the temperatures have gradually increased on mine, indicating that the paste used is nothing amazing. It still wasn't running hot to the point it would cause concern, however it was causing the card to drop a few MHz, and I'm not a fan of manually overclocking a card that is still very capable. This particular card's fans are very audible, and temperatures play an important role on how loud your fan is. Last but not least, I have my own ways of testing a card. One of those is seeing how the card's temperatures perform in different games with V-Sync on. Most games should not really be hitting mid 60°C. In my tests, all games did.

 

[13thmonkey]

This is more just asking the question in the hope that you'd say xyz suggested it needs doing every year on you tube or similar. I've seen maybe 3-4 posts a week (that i'm aware of) where the first we see is 'reapplying thermal paste didn't work, now my card doesn't perform the same' and the real question is why did they do it in the first place. The difference between good paste and bad paste is very little you'll see more in my opinion from the fan blades pickup up dust and being less effective.

As to the thickness of the thermal pads, get a range of thicknesses, and see which ones compress a bit when you dry-reassemble it, and hope that a bit of compression is all you need.