5080 Solid Core OC Replaced Fans, Pads and Paste
Hey everyone.
I just wanted to provide some information that I hope helps others needing to do this.
After about a year of use, several of my fans developed bad bearing whine that gradually occurred throughout the fan curve so I needed to replace them. Upon researching I discovered no one has taken apart this card and documented its disassembly, specifically referencing the thermal pad thickness used on this card since it differs from the regular solid SKU. There was a video on taking off the shroud but not the heatsink and Steve did a Solid GPU teardown so I felt I had enough information to tackle this with ease.
I replaced the thermal paste with Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut Extreme and the thermal pads with Thermal Grizzly Minus 8 Pads. I replaced the OEM fans with replacement OEM fans from GPUFanreplacement.com.
A couple of things to note here:
The measurements were taken by calibrated digital calipers. The backplate thermal pad thickness measured at 2.5mm, the cap pads at 2mm and the memory pads at 1mm. I used an Xacto Knife to precisely cut the orientations.
The stories about using the website mentioned above were just about them shipping OEM fans so it will probably happen again. I watched a couple of videos of people unboxing and installing products from them and it was just OEM parts. However, I received a different model than what was in my GPU so maybe the difference in fans provided will aid in their longevity.
Zotac did a poor job on the card’s thermal paste application, which I assume was the leading cause of my poor temps (85C + on load, with undervolt 76C).
When reassembled and tested, I haven’t seen temps rise above 64C with the same tests currently. I have ran a several hour stress test to make sure I had full pad contact and not throttling. So far so good.
Lastly, many might ask why I didn’t go with a RMA request instead of opening up the card. Well one, I like doing these things and they are easy for me. Two, there’s so many horror stories about Zotac’s RMA process these days, greatest hits include damaging the product during repair, losing the product, exchanging the product with a refurb or a different sku, or just refunding the customer MSRP minus proration at times. I wasn’t very confident in the idea that if none of the above actually happened to me, would they do a better job than myself ? Not if they could, but whatever service center it gets sent out to, the employee doing the work might be over worked and do a rush job just good enough to pass QC. I would have gotten a new fan but who knows on the thermals. So I did it myself.
I hope this might help someone else.