In a bizarre quality control issue, a gamer discovered protective film on the VRM thermal pads of their Gigabyte RTX 3070 Gaming OC graphics card. As per a Reddit post by u/buczi94, the GPU was purchased brand new and had never been disassembled or sent for any sort of repairs. After using the GPU for almost five years, the owner of the GPU started noticing high temperatures on the VRMs. They also faced frequent black screens during higher loads, waking the PC from sleep, and cold boots.
The Redditor claims that they upgraded their motherboard BIOS and GPU firmware and drivers, alongside disabling several settings including custom PBO curve, XMP, and Resizable Bar. Unfortunately, none of these measures helped alleviate the problems. They further performed some benchmark tests using Furmark and OCCT, where the GPU temperatures would reach as high as 80°C with the GPU hotspot at 105°C. While these numbers were not alarming, they also found that the cooling fans would randomly ramp up to their highest speed, despite setting a custom fan curve in MSI Afterburner and limiting the fans to 90%.
