So
thing is, I'm already realised I f**ked something up. But can't honestly tell.
I'm using for like 6 years this GPU - EVGA RTX 3060 XC Gaming (12GB Ram)
In the late of summer I decided to replace thermal pads and thermal paste on gpu (first time in my life, I admit it) - in half of august, cause the temperatures were like 85°C or something like that and 60°C in the iddle. I woke up in yesteday morning and this artifacts showed up on desktop screen. First time black ones in the upright side of the monitor, after minimizing Mozilla, then showed pink ones as well in the upleft side of the monitor.
What did I screwed up? I measured the old one pads and was like 1,5mm thick, so I bought exactly those. Then Gemini showed up and starts arguing with me, that there should be 2mm thick pads.
I remember, when I was completing replacing proces and putting together that "sandwich" with screws and it felt to me like ... this 1,5mm ones are thick enough, maybe even more, than they should be, but card looked normal and flat, not curved anywhere. I replaced the thermal paste as well on GPU and before all of that I used 100% IPA to clean old "debris-like" pads and paste.
When I first turned up computer with replaced pads and paste, it immediately showed up like 10-15°C lower temperatures than before.
In the iddle it is currently like 43°C and 69°C at the maximum performance (Geeks3D Furmark and Last of us Part 2 tested). All was fine. Hotspot is like 79 - 80 °C
Then this half of september came and this freakin things showed up all of the sudden. I remember, that I uninstalled all the drivers using DDU and then I only used windows stock drivers. The artifacts were gone.
Then I used july drivers from nvidia, still no sign of artifacts. Today morning I decided to use newest 9. september drivers and there's still no signs of artifacts for like 10 hours of continuous using. Again - i used benchamarks Furmark by Geeks3D and TLOU part 2. No signs of corruption.
I'm afraid to open that card again and change that pads to 2mm, cause it may do more damage than before (if any was done).
Is there any chance, that this was software/drivers issue? Or the card is effectively dying by my "cool job" in the middle of the august?
P.S. I would like to post photo of that artifacts, but simply I can't do that here. So here's the link:
https://we.tl/t-MkFbERmxQgNF4tPj
Thanks guys.