You kinda need thermal pads on the thermal pads of the GDDR6X memory of your new GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, or GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card -- but two Redditors have discovered the lack of thermal pads on their new cards.
One of them was the ASUS GeForce RTX 3080 Ti TUF Gaming OC graphics card which Reddit user 'kamaloo922' saw his 12GB of GDDR6X memory running at up to 110C. He put some thermal pads down on the GDDR6X memory modules and the temps dropped down to 80C.
Another Redditor found that the GDDR6X memory modules on his NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition were misplaced, as well as the thermal pad on the GPU itself -- the GPU temps dropped from 76C to just 61C.
You shouldn't have to rip apart your multi-thousand-dollar graphics card, that has come off the assembly line, with thermal pads not on the card -- or even a finger cot inside. It's weird how all of these cases are coming out now, when FAR LESS graphics cards are being sold due to shortages, than ever before.
But I don't remember writing about thermal pad issues and finger cots a few years ago.