So to begin, I’ve had my strix 3090 for a while and wanted to decrease the VRAM temps, at the stock 100% PL of 390w, the core would reach 70c, VRAM 98c, with a fan speed of 2200rpm, on the auto curve roughly.
I was not happy with these temps, especially the VRAM, and wanted to repaste and repad, so I replaced only the VRAM, with 2nm gelid extreme pads on the backplate and the front side, note only the VRAM, didn’t do anything else. This dropped it to about 94c, still not too good. Then I found this post on a German forum: https://www.computerbase.de/forum/threads/asus-strix-3090-oc-summer-copper-shim-mod.2085435/
Translating to English via Google made it easy to read, I followed his instructions, using 1.8mm copper shims and 2mm copper shims for the back, although, he changed all the pads to thermal putty, on the VRMs etc. I did not do that, I don’t think that should be too much of an issue? Maybe I’m wrong. Anyways
I proceeded to put Kapton tape around the VRAM, and pasted the vram, shim on top, then paste on that. Forgot to take pics of the shims on the gpu so, oh well.
Booting up the system I saw that the core was the same, at 70c VRAM peaked at 80c at 390w, so about 16c better. This is at the same part of the auto curve at 2200rpm.
The 23% PL of 480w is completely unusable, fans go to 100% (3000rpm) and core temp reaches almost 80c where the hotspot is now 100c. I will note the hotspot for before and after was the same delta of about 20c and I couldn’t change it even through multiple repastes and reseats. Maybe the die is just convex, I know they’re not all made the same. If anyone has advice on bringing the core temps down let me know, I want to use the 480w limit.
4 Comments
I was in the same boat as you, used a bunch of bandaid mods and ended up water-cooling my strix 3090 with ptm7950 on the core and at 630 watts (1000w bios) my core temp is 45c-47c with my vram peaking around 67c, this is with running 2175 effective clock and +1500 on memory.
My first questions would be how is the airflow in your case. A air cooled card needs good consistent fresh air to exchange. I saw the best jump in temperatures simply changing to a good case, Lian li 216 in my circumstance. Pasted with ptm7950, anything after that was marginal increases at best.
Air cooled with fresh paste 67-69c @ 477 watts, and 74c on the vram
Have you done any backplate mods? Because of the backside VRAM you should see big gains from upgrading those thermal pads. Some people even attach heatsinks + extra fans to the backplate.
The shims are too thick on the front of the card so you are losing mounting pressure on the die.
LM on the core. All day, everyday.
I’m getting 60-65c on the zotac holo 3080ti stock air cooler with almost 500watt power draw.
But in your case, you need to use the putty because with the shim mod. The pads you added are resulting in not enough contact pressure btw the die and the hotplate.
I’ve done this mistake myself before. Putty is a very viscous liquid compared to a fixed but flexible carcass of the pad.
As for the memory temps, shims+putty is the best way to go hands down, I’ve done mem pads and it did very little.