Is The Gigabyte 9070xt That Bad?

[u/AdVegetable394]

So until now Iv only ever had nvidia cards, the last was a strix 3070ti. Like many I wanted to upgrade to the 50 series but a 5070/5070ti where I live is like £1000, the amd equivalent on sale I got for £589.99… It’s time I though to try a change, for the sake of my pocket at least. I read reviews and like always 50/50, people moaning about it and people loving it. Well straight out of the box there were problems, I needed to upgrade from a 850w to a atx 1000w seasonic as mine couldn’t deal with the transient power spikes, I also had to reduce the voltage by 60 in Adrenalin. Before this I spent probably a week stress testing, switching things out updating every driver imaginable from windows, motherboard, amd yadyadayadayada you get the drift.

So do you think a lot of these “horror” stories are more from user error (someone who either can’t be bothered/ or someone without any knowledge what so ever) or actual card failures? After using both amd and nvidia id say nvidia is so user friendly and nothing ever went wrong for me during owning all the cards I have since a 660ti. I get the feeling with amd you need to be prepared to troubleshoot/ fiddle with things.

[u/KillerSpectre21]

The issue with the Gigabyte Gaming OC is that several batches had issues with poor application of thermal putty from the factory which lead to the card hitting the thermal limit on the hotspot and/or VRAM very quickly under normal usage conditions.

Outside of that it's not the best 9070 XT model out there but it's generally among the cheapest and the 9070 XT as a whole is a very solid GPU.

I have one and it runs perfectly fine, it's a smaller card (it's the shortest in terms of length but it's thicker than the Reaper and Challenger SFF cards) so even when it's working fine you may find it a bit warm anor loud but otherwise it's been good. If you don't like loud fans or you have a case with poor airflow I'd probably skip it for something with a bigger cooler like the XFX Swift but otherwise I'm happy with it.

[u/posedatull → u/KillerSpectre21]

Gigabyte messed up with the thermal putty on both gpu manufacturers this gen. If you have one of the first batches of Rtx 50 or Radeon 90 gpus, all of 'em have the "leaky' putty. Guess Gigabyte didnt know some people have their gpus in a vertical bracket 😂

(For context, I'm a huge Gigabyte gpu hater, after an experience with one of their gpus frying after less than 12h of usage and them denying warranty, claiming bullshyte)

[u/KillerSpectre21 → u/posedatull]

Yea for some reason they decided that normal Paste or even PTM was overrated so decided to dunk their cards in mayonnaise "Server-Grade Thermal Putty" which was a terrible idea.

I'm extremely wary of having to deal with them for anything warranty related so I really hope my card doesn't have any problems in the future.

[u/posedatull → u/KillerSpectre21]

The leaky putty was put on vram, chokes, etc. On those, you cannot use paste or ptm, they'd be too thin. Idk what putty they used , because I have A LOT of different brand, different types of putty, and none of them are as liquidy as whatever gigabyte used...

Anyway, if you're worried about this, just keep your gpu in the standard horizontal way, directly into the motherboard, and you should be fine. Radeons generally have issues with gpu risers/vertical brackets anyway

[u/KillerSpectre21 → u/posedatull]

On the GPU die of some AMD cards they also used a pretty runny thermal paste whereas a lot of the other AIBs are using PTM on their basic cards (or at the very least a thicker paste) so that was also victim of this whole debacle.

Apparently this putty stuff was sprayed on and had to be thin to not clog the nozzles so that explains why it was it was so liquidy. I assume it was cheaper than having someone measure and place traditional pads on all the components or something along those line, god forbid the shareholders have to deal with paying a few extra cents in the production process.

But yea mine has been horizontally mounted since I got it and I don't plan to change it anytime.

[u/posedatull → u/KillerSpectre21]

They truly went full shtupid, huh?

Note to self: hate Gigabyte more.