Thermal pad thickness spec caught me off guard last week

I was replacing a GPU cooler on a used RTX 3070 and grabbed my usual 1.5mm thermal pads without checking. Turns out this particular card needed 1.0mm on the VRAM and 2.0mm on the VRM. The gap caused poor contact and core temps climbed 10 degrees after reassembly. I had to tear it down twice in one afternoon to fix it. The spec was buried in a teardown forum post from 3 years ago, not in any official manual. Since then I've started measuring pad thickness with calipers on every job before I cut anything. Has anyone else gotten burned by assuming pad sizes are universal across board revisions?

1 comments

1 Comment

wendy_jackson15d ago

Gotta say, 10 degrees from a pad size miss is brutal. I feel like people swear by certain card revisions being standardized and then boom, the board revision switches things up with zero warning. I almost made the same mistake on a 2080 Ti once, thought all the memory pads were the same thickness, but the backside VRM pads were thicker than the front ones. Calipers are the only way to go now, I even measure the old pads before I pull them off, just in case. It adds time but beats doing the job twice, for sure.