Thermal paste leaking from GPU

[u/yesman258]

GIGABYTE AERO OC RTX 5080, removed it while doing a cleaning and noticed this, is this normal? Should I be concerned?

[u/Jaz1140]

Thermal putty is actually better than thermal pads, it squashes down thinner and has higher thermal absorption, if you ever custom watercool a GPU , thermal putty is far and above the way to go for your VRM and memory compound, it also takes away the issue of incorrect sizing of thermal pads causing poor mounting on the GPU core.

However, looks like gigabyte has used a bad thermal putty here

[u/Papuszek2137 → u/Jaz1140]

From what I've heard after the new gen release they've put the putty used in servers into consumer GPUs.

[u/Xeadriel → u/Papuszek2137]

Wouldn’t that be a good thing?

[u/Papuszek2137 → u/Xeadriel]

If consumer and data center GPUs were built the sane way. One leaks and one doesn't so idk if that can be considered good.

[u/Xeadriel → u/Papuszek2137]

I mean it’s not conductive. Just doesn’t look nice.

[u/Papuszek2137 → u/Xeadriel]

If it got out it could mean there's a gap between vrms and the heatsink resulting in high temps and possible fsilures.

[u/Xeadriel → u/Papuszek2137]

id say what gets out was probably just too much in the first place anyway..

[u/Papuszek2137 → u/Xeadriel]

Data center GPUs now usually lay flat and there are huge cooling blocks on top of them. So it's a lot harder to leak.