Gigabyte Strips Leaking Thermal Gel From GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Windforce GPUs
There was some significant controversy this summer when some customers complained of Gigabyte's GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs leaking the "server-grade thermal gel" that the board vendor touts on its product pages. Gigabyte acknowledged that some early-run cards used too much goop and that the quantity was adjusted on later models, but now it seems like the company may have abandoned the product altogether.
The product page for the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti WINDFORCE OC V2 16G (say that ten times fast) is curiously lacking any mention of the high-efficiency thermal interface material despite that it's still trumpeted proudly on many other product pages. Does that necessarily mean this new card doesn't have it? No—it could simply be a matter of an intern forgetting to add it to the page, or a decision to de-emphasize the product in the marketing—but there's another clue, too.
The new GeForce RTX 5070 Ti card has a different arrangement of socket screw holes on the back. While this, again, doesn't necessarily tell us anything about the TIM in use, it does suggest that Gigabyte has redesigned the cooling solution for this new card, although we have to point out that it looks pretty similar to the arrangement on Gigabyte's lower-end GeForce RTX 5060 series GPUs.
The most plausible answer? Gigabyte probably has switched away from the high-end cooling gel it was using before, and it switched the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti to the cheaper 5060-style cooler mounting design to cut costs. We were impressed by the thermal performance of Gigabyte's Radeon RX 9060 XT, which does use the thermal gel, so we're inclined to believe Gigabyte's claims of superior thermal conductivity; it makes us wonder about the thermal performance of the new card given these two changes.
Curiously, there don't seem to have been any user reports of the thermal gel leaking on Gigabyte's Radeon cards. That would seem to corroborate Gigabyte's story, suggesting that the leaking GPUs were simply models that had too much gel applied before the process was refined. We expect most PC builders have had the experience of accidentally using too much thermal goop once or twice; given that the gel seems to be non-conductive, it does appear to be largely a cosmetic fault. Still, it creates a goopy mess that could cause problems if it were to clog up the PCIe slot. Gigabyte should probably replace these cards for the affected, and launching a "V2" card without the vaunted thermal gel seems like a tacit admission of fault.
Thanks to Unikoshardware for the spot.
