I grabbed this Gigabyte GTX 1080 Ti about 3 years ago for around $90 USD, which, in hindsight, should’ve been my first red flag. Living in a tropical climate, the card ran insanely hot, pushing 90°C on the regular (ambient temps in my room are usually 28–32°C). I ended up slapping on an NZXT Kraken AIO mount I got for free froma friend, which brought temps down to ~70°C. (I don’t think the GPU’s sensor even reports anything higher than 92°C.)
Now, here’s the thing: I do not recommend this setup. The NZXT bracket only cools the core, leaving the VRMs and memory with nothing but a single fan blowing across them. And if you know anything about Gigabyte 1080 Tis, they were infamous for frying themselves thanks to weak VRMs and bad caps. Of course, I had no clue back then.
My “fix”? I bought a pack of cheap microchip heatsinks, two M.2 heatsinks, and a stack of thermal pads off eBay for about $10, then Frankensteined it all together. Three years later, I just cracked it open for a repaste (and to re-stick the little heatsinks that had fallen off). You can actually see the insane levels of corrosion on the U brackets around the core, I live by the ocean and the humidity here is usually above 80%, combine that with a room that doesn't have climate control, I'm shocked it's not in worse shape. Especially since I've killed 3 motherboards, 2 cpus, a 1070ti and 1 psu in the past 3 years living here (finally learned my lesson and bought a coated corrosion resistant motherboard even though I think the bad psu was what kept frying everything, just glad AM4 is cheap af).
Praying for another 8 years of good service from the GPU gods. I don't think I'll be leaving behind this 1080ti until it dies or I win the lottery!