Gigabyte graphic cards - TIM gel SLIPPAGE problem

[_roman_]

So sad. Where is the issue to outsource the thermal paste replacement to certain "repair shops"? Or to just hire a few people who learn only to do that? I doubt gigabyte has so many different type of graphic cards with that problem anyway.

Samsung Smartphones in my area are not repaired by Samsung. Third party shop which has the permission to do so.

I quick checked the german Igorslab text. In my point of view they used something without thinking over the long term effects or how a product is being used. There are so many fishtank cases where most likely the graphic card is mounted to showcase the 4000€ nvidia graphic card in the glass show fish tank with lots of rgb lights.
there is no excuse to use "ketchup" and save some money when there are proven other materials on the market. When you have process control you should have numbers and other data. It seems gigabyte just applied the "ketchup" without really thinking further or checking the products. I think they use a cheap manufacturing without quality control and without thinking what they produce. I doubt they did any FMEA for that product also.

 

[BoggledBeagle]

There is now a report on Reddit of someone's Gigabyte Windforce 5070ti in horizontal orientation leaking. It was manufactured in March 2025. It seems like if gravity is enough to make it leak vertically, fan pressure (from either GPU fan or case fan) could similarly cause leak horizontally, just might take longer.

It is here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gigabyte/comments/1kqh0ti/should_i_be_concerned_5070ti_leaking_horizontal

This gel dropping is about to hit the fan....

... There are so many fishtank cases where most likely the graphic card is mounted to showcase the 4000€ nvidia graphic card in the glass show fish tank with lots of rgb lights. ...

I think I may have to change my estimate that only 10 to 20% of people mount their cards vertically. The number of people who may be affected by this may be much larger than I thought.

 

[Deleted member 234478]

Send it in immediately and cause the public trouble via VCZ, GN, Igorslab. Thanks for the insight HERE and please share that as often as possible^^

post to reddit too


wow what a mess to clean!!
if I had to open and saw this, id replace it all with pads

 

[_roman_]

I think I read in german that igor wrote that it's cheaper to make such "ketchup" design. You need to really know how the thickness is for every pad. If you use such gel / paste / "ketchup" you just do not need to care about those tolerances.

Good Luck in replacing it with thermal pads. I think looking into putty may be a better choice.

 

[BoggledBeagle]

Good Luck in replacing it with thermal pads. I think looking into putty may be a better choice.

The only common retail source for putty is I believe TG, and it is VERY expensive, they sell just 30g in tiny half empty containers and for a whole large card you may need 3 of them. And that is something like 120 euro for the best putty.

It is suspitious that they do not publish any thermal parameters for them, so you really cannot tell the difference between the 3 types of putty they sell. With this lack of parameters they push people to buy the most expensive one.

I wonder if some of the original sh*tty putty may be reusable, if you let the excess oil drain from it, by for example layering it on some paper/filtration paper (e.g. coffee filters).

 

[Ruru]

lol man this cracks me up. They prey on gamers and people that don’t really explore outside there circle.

I have worked on tons of servers in my professional career and none of them even the gigabyte servers use gel as thermal anything anywhere.

My best bet is that a typical gamer just plays games and isn't that interested in tech, so you can sell crap to them without them even knowing what they're actually buying.

 

[Kwadratowicz]

The only common retail source for putty is I believe TG, and it is VERY expensive, they sell just 30g in tiny half empty containers and for a whole large card you may need 3 of them. And that is something like 120 euro for the best putty.

You've got some of thermal putty in china based shopping web, and there is a ton of it to chose from.
Snarks domain on Youtube is showing a lot of stuff.

I've even bought Upsiren UTP-8 but card that was going to have it installed "died" before instalation -.-

 

[_roman_]

The issue is also with those guys who counter-argue when I say the build quality is not the best. I don't even know if they are trolls or if they genuinely believe the build quality is good enough.

The only common retail source for putty is I believe TG

I think Harwareliebe something also sold in the austrian / germany / central europe area thermal putty. It'S not only thermal grizzly. I think if you ask politely on igorslab you get a decent source for it.
Hardwareliebe = german company name which translates to hardware love

I do not follow a lot those thermal putty, copper shi"n" or shi"m" graphic card destroy mods, thermal pads and other stuff.

I may suggest anyone who is interested to check igorslab and their forum first please.

 

[Ruru]

The issue is also with those guys who counter-argue when I say the build quality is not the best. I don't even know if they are trolls or if they genuinely believe the build quality is good enough.

Maybe their samples work - for now.

 

[Kwadratowicz]

The issue is also with those guys who counter-argue when I say the build quality is not the best.

Maybe their samples work - for now.

It depends, cause even with my radeon gigabyte 9070 xt the build quality is great, but I'm talking about the outer shell and cooling performance (for now), but I don't know if the rest is great, that means, the pcb and thermal interface (how long it will last).
And maybe the build quality that is visible is great, but details that will make problems later, are not visible enough.
You can't touch layers on pcb (without dremel ), but You can touch outer shell .

 

[Vayra86]

Ever since my first and only Gigabyte card, a 780ti... never again. I think it was the worst performing top end card I've ever had my hands on. Couldn't even do 1 Ghz, hot under load, noisy fans of which one managed to fail during use (something I've never seen before... like sure, they degrade... but failure? In the first five years?). Gigabyte never fails to impress with their race to the bottom of what's acceptable, and far beyond. It doesn't matter what price segment you're buying either. Its luck of the draw, but you are always guaranteed its a product made with the bottom of acceptable tolerances - where acceptable is subject to change.

Nuke these assholes, they need all the bad PR they can get.

Additionally, avoid their stuff like the plague. They were, and are now definitively on my shitlist, and not just for GPUs.

I'll just update that I still got no update from Gigabyte service, 2 weeks now almost.

EDIT

Back when it started their PR rep reached out to me here in DM, but now no response for couple of days when I asked for update on the case. There is also a ticket in their esupport portal and same story. They vanished. Great service 10/10.

Class action is what people need here. Individuals are easy to trick. They need to suffer damage.

 

[Hussar]

I bought my aourus master 5090 one week ago, still in return period. My sn is 2515 rev1, batch is from 3rd week of April 2025. Grat temps, very quiet, minimal coil whine, boosts over 3k stock. I have an option to replace the card with Asus astral OC. Stay with gigabyte or pay the asus tax and go for the astral ?

When you look at my pics the thermal putty is not shiny, no oily finish, no flat smooth finish. Did gigabyte change something in Revosion 1.0 ?

 

[BoggledBeagle]

I bought my aourus master 5090 one week ago, still in return period. My sn is 2515 rev1, batch is from 3rd week of April 2025. Grat temps, very quiet, minimal coil whine, boosts over 3k. I have an option to replace the card with Asus astral OC. Stay with gigabyte or pay the asus tax and go for the astral ?

I do not see anything suspitions on the gel, it looks dry.

If I had the 5090 Master card, was running it horizontally and the gel would not look suspitious (as for example the gel I posted on the first page did - with oil seeping out of it), I would probably run the additional upper fan on the card all the time, lowering the idle temperatures and not be too much worried about it.

But GB being silent about this problem does not help anything. If you want to be extra safe, you can of course return the card and get another one which uses normal thermal pads (probably any other than GB).

 

[remekra]

Well, I've got an update on my card.
Got info from retailer that a new GPU is sent my way, should probably arrive tomorrow. They have also sent me a serial number and it starts with 2514 so card was made in April.
It's a lot better than scraping off the excess and telling it's fixed so I'm happy for now. But of course I will monitor "the slippage", we will see if something was changed in the gel itself or its application.

If it happens again I will not stop until I get a refund.

 

[BoggledBeagle]

Well, I've got an update on my card.
Got info from retailer that a new GPU is sent my way, should probably arrive tomorrow. They have also sent me a serial number and it starts with 2514 so card was made in April.

That is great news, please post some HQ macro shots of the gel on this recent card, so we can see, how it looks.

GB should have made the hopefully improved material a different colour than the original oily slippery sh*ttyputty, so that people can tell if they got a card which should be OK.

I am of course presuming that GB solved the problem already.

 

[remekra]

Once I have it I will of course post pictures on how it looks now. Even for comparison sake after some time.

 

[Hussar]

Reddit user just posted pics of horizontally mounted card batch 2508
4th picture

https://www.reddit.com/r/gigabyte/comments/1kssriu/decided_to_pull_my_gpu_out_and_check_it

 

[BoggledBeagle]

Reddit user just posted pics of horizontally mounted card batch 2508
4th picture

That is an early date card and it can have the problems, too bad that he photographed it with a potato, although you can clearly see one gel blob sliding.

 

[Hussar]

That is an early date card and it can have the problems, too bad that he photographed it with a potato, although you can clearly see one gel blob sliding.

One of the VRAM is exposed. Now we have reports from owners that horizontally mounted gigabyte cards are having same issues, it just takes longer for the problem to appear. It’s not looking good !
The earliest date card I found on Reddit that has thermal putty leak is batch 2515 rev1 3rd week of April 2025. My card is batch 2515 rev1 LOL

https://www.reddit.com/r/gigabyte/comments/1ks86mx/is_my_5070_ti_leaking_or_is_this_how_its_supposed

 

[Hussar]

Korean community claim that new gel application on the gigabyte cards start witch batch 2519. Only application change, no change to the consistency of the thermal putty.

Use translator

어마 써멀 개선품이 있나요?

컴퓨존에 며칠 전에 문의했더니 이번 주중에 써멀 개선품이나온다고 해서 입고 되면 알려주겠다더니 오늘 들어왔네…

quasarzone.com

 

[remekra]

Korean community claim that new gel application on the gigabyte cards start witch batch 2519. Only application change, no change to the consistency of the thermal putty.

Use translator

어마 써멀 개선품이 있나요?

컴퓨존에 며칠 전에 문의했더니 이번 주중에 써멀 개선품이나온다고 해서 입고 되면 알려주겠다더니 오늘 들어왔네…

quasarzone.com

My replacement card is 2514, so we will see how's the application and if it will slip after some time.

Just got the card and it's in fact a brand new one. All the stickers etc. are in place.
As for the gel application, here are some pics (I don't have macro lens in my phone, so did as best I can):

Didn't install it yet, so I can't compare temps yet, but will do that later.

 

[remekra]

Installed it over the weekend and did some quick testing in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2.
Overclocked it to the same values as before so +375 on core and +2000 on memory, power limit raised to 450W.

The temps on memory dropped a lot. When I did the same run in KCD2 before sending the card the memory would reach 76-78C, now it's around 64-66C. But more interestingly core temps also dropped, or rather not dropped but the fans are spinning at a lower RPM. Before to keep the core at ~64-68C it would sometimes reach 2000RPM and more with aroud 350W power draw in KCD2, now it doesn't go above 1700RPM. That would mean that not only the gel is the problem but the thermal solution they use on a core also can degrade quickly.
With my old card I did notice that over time fans were spinning faster than when I bought it but I blamed it on a different case as at first I had NZXT H7 Flow with a lot of case fans.

Now we will see how long those temps will hold. If anything changes I will report back.

 

[A Computer Guy]

It is here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gigabyte/comments/1kqh0ti/should_i_be_concerned_5070ti_leaking_horizontal

This gel dropping is about to hit the fan....


I think I may have to change my estimate that only 10 to 20% of people mount their cards vertically. The number of people who may be affected by this may be much larger than I thought.

In a few weeks defecating GPU memes gonna be wild! Seems like Jenson's kinda taking a poo in PC's right before the 12VHPWER connector might melt while AMD fanboys raid Nvidia forums saying "it rubs the gel on it's GPU" in an eerie kind of silence of the lambs sort of way. Not a fun time for Nvidia users right now it seems. I hope my 4060LP lasts a while.

 

[BoggledBeagle]

The temps on memory dropped a lot. When I did the same run in KCD2 before sending the card the memory would reach 76-78C, now it's around 64-66C. But more interestingly core temps also dropped, or rather not dropped but the fans are spinning at a lower RPM. Before to keep the core at ~64-68C it would sometimes reach 2000RPM and more with aroud 350W power draw in KCD2, now it doesn't go above 1700RPM. That would mean that not only the gel is the problem but the thermal solution they use on a core also can degrade quickly.

Igor reported that the GPU chip had some major paste degradation...

I am stuck with a GB 5070 Ti, which nobody wants to buy now used but I think I slowed the decay and rot by keeping the card cool when idle with an additional fan on top. I am not sure now If I should not remove it and let the card to do its thing, whatever it will be. I may be just prolonging the suffering.

 

[_roman_]

am stuck with a GB 5070 Ti, which nobody wants to buy now used

I assume because of the selling price, right?

I saw may peeps who thought selling 95% of their purchase price or when higher the current asking price is a good asking price for an used graphic card.
My stuff sold well with 60 to 70% of the cheaper of those two prices.

-- RMA such cards. Hidden defect which was unknown at point of purchase as 100% refund if you are based in central europe. The only thing I would accept an RMA when gigabyte would be open about such issues. As gigabyte stays quiet i classify the problem as hidden defect. It would be much different when gigabyte would went public. When they had put on any subpage of their graphic cards a note with that problem, e.g. tech specs, pictures, generic overview it is not an unknown issue anymore and the consumer most likely has to go the RMA route.