Question Question about thermal pads on GTX 1080 ti Founder's Edition

pcpagan

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Jan 7, 2019
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I took apart my GTX 1080 ti founder's edition card because I wanted to build a hybrid-cooled card. I decided eventually (the card was sitting out exposed for a long time) to stick with air-cooling, but now I need some guidance regarding its reassembly.

There are at least two kinds of thermal pads that the card uses.

The first is maybe a millimeter or so thick, and is made of a light-green colored, springy material. These are the pads that are used on the VRAM. I These ones I don't have a problem with; they're accounted for and in the right places on the card.

The second kind of thermal pad (the one I'm having problems with) is like a combination of a white/light-gray putty, with fibers/threads in the material. These things became loose as soon as I opened the graphics card, they were not as adhesive as the green pads. Furthermore, they were extremely fragile. Just trying to hold them, they broke down and deformed. They were used on a few other sub-components of the card, though I don't know the name for these components.

Due to the fragility of these white pads, and because I left them out for so long, they were covered in dust and debris, and falling apart. I think I ended up throwing them away because they seemed unusable. Now I'm looking for a solution to make sure the card is sufficiently cooled.

I do have some of Akasa's VGA RAM heatsinks, which I still had from when I planned on watercooling. These come with square adhesives that go on the bottom of the mini-heatsinks and presumably serve a thermal-related function; but these pads are so thin, thinner than the putty the card came with, that I think it causes a problem:

The green thermal pads are thick enough that (I'm pretty sure) they sandwich between the VRAM and the other plastic part of the graphics card that they stick to. The Akasa thermal pads are much thinner than the green pads or the white putty, and so they don't make contact with both pieces of the card. I think they're supposed to, because I can see the residue where the putty was on one piece of the card (which also tells me which components on the opposite piece of the card need cooling.)

What would you recommend for this situation? I don't want the card to overheat, and yet it seems like it needs cooling on those components. Is there a product you know of that would work as a replacement for the thermal pads, or another solution you can think of? Thank you.