Replacing Thermal Pads for EVGA FTW 3090

EVGA cards generally seem to have pretty good thermal paste and pads, but I've occassionally run into issues when buying them from B stock. Out of four cards from the B stock, two of them required some new thermal pads.

The primary issue seemed to be that the thermal pads used weren't quite thick enough so they weren't making full contact

Materials Used

  • Gelid Ultimate 3mm
  • Gelid Ultimate 2.5mm
  • Arctic MX-5 Thermal Paste
  • Screwdriver

GPU Opened Up

EVGA FTW3 3090 GPU opened up and showing both halves

Pad Sizes Used

Here you can see the card initially opened up. Some thermal pads on the memory have disintegrated, and the pads around the core were not making firm contact (especially the small pad).

I ended up replacing the pads around the core with 3mm and the pads on the memory with 2.5mm, plus new thermal paste.

Results

The core and memory temps both decreased. I've lost my exact initial data from mining ETH, but the memory temps on both cards were hitting the 110 C throttling point with conservative overclocks. Both cards are now mining Kaspa with memory temps between 38-44 C and core temps between 42 and 48 C.

The thermal paste seemed best to use an X pattern with dots on the chip, which is what I've started to do when replacing the paste on all of my cards.