What’s the thickness of the stock thermal pads on the front side of the PCB?
Manual measurements with calipers gave me about 0.5mm for VRAM pads and about 1mm for all the VRM pads.
Here, in the alphacool waterblock manual (https://www.alphacool.com/download/GPX-N-PRO-2080ti-2080-M11.pdf)
for my GPU, they say that for both VRAM and VRM 1mm pads should be used.
So, which are correct? Gigabyte declined my direct request for the measurements and sent me straight to service center.
I am not much help here, but the thermal pads will need to be compressed in order to function optimally.
You measurements are more than likely because the pads have been compressed. Also, keep in mind there are different types of thermal pads so I would see if AlphaCool has a recommended vendor for thermal pads.
Well, about the compression thing - i did measure at places that weren’t obviously compressed by the components (at the VRM - pretty easy, with VRAM - it still had some parts that didn’t actually cover modules)
About “Different types” - alphacool obviously recommends their own pads, which they do ship with their waterblock. But since i’m not going to replace my air cooler with it (even if i wanted to - there’s 0 stock of waterblocks left) - their recommendations about thickness aren’t all that helpful. Their layout is a bit different from what mine has, and i see some changes in terms of heights too.
I mean i could go “overkill” and get 1mm’s for VRAM and 1.5mm for VRM’s, but i’m a bit unsure if it’s gonna hurt that direct heatpipe serup for the GPU itself if it’s not gonna compress properly.
I am going to bump this for visibility. We have some members that are deep into the water cooling and custom cooler world that should be able to give some input on this.
Also, there’s not that much variety of thermal pads around here. It’s either some really cheap chinese stuff from noname manufacturers, or (usually) Arctic pads. Sometimes - Alphacool pads. Both are of “middlend” variety.
