Modern graphics cards use lots of power and all of it is turned into heat. So if you're paying many hundreds of dollars for a powerful GPU, you'd expect no expense to be spared on the cooling system. It turns out that for many Nvidia RTX 40-series vendors, the expense is being spared and cheap, poorly applied thermal paste is leading to scorching high hotspot temperatures and performance degradation over time.
That's the conclusion hardware tester Igor's Lab has come to after testing multiple GeForce RTX cards, analysing temperatures and performance, and discovering that the thermal paste used by many graphics card vendors is not only sub-standard for the job but is also poorly applied.
