Question Reapplied thermal paste on the GPU, getting hotter every day

[ribasmudj]

I recently got a used Zotac 1080 TI AMP! edition, and it was running pretty hot, about 75c under load and over 80c when OC is on.

So I decided to try a new thermal paste since it's a 2-year-old GPU and applied a new one both to it and the CPU. So after replacing them, GPU dropped about 7c and my CPU dropped a whooping 20c as well, and I thought great, problem solved!

However, basically every day since then, the GPU is getting a little bit hotter, and now (a week later) it's almost back to the state it was in before reapplying the paste, near 80c during overclock, but the CPU temps are fine so I guess the problem isn't with the paste itself. Does anyone have an idea why this might be happening? It's not a huge deal but Pascal being what it is, the more temps go up the more it throttles...

 

[Newtonius]

It's simply a limitation to your cards air cooling design. The paste you applied sounds like it didn't have a better heat-transfer efficiency. Perhaps improperly applied? But if you're confident the latter isn't the case then simply put, your air cooler is the culprit to the high temps.

Try setting an aggressive fan curve. That model has dual fans, putting them to maybe 85% total fan speed should lower it a bit more. If not keep fiddling around with it. But these are just the results of air cooling.

In the end, perhaps liquid metal would work better on your GPU. You just need to be careful when using it.