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Out of the box card was throttling after 10-15 minutes (overclocked, of course) and hashrates dropped from 89-92 to 72-75Mh/s. It took me a while but eventually I found a post on Reddit where pictures with exact pad sizes were shown. So I ordered Thermalright 12.8 Wm/k pads and changed everything. It turned out not all information was correct so I replied with my corrections on Reddit and decided to also publish it here for future reference. Pictures and my corrections are below.

Front with heatsink: https://imgur.com/nzbkJcq (https://imgur.com/nzbkJcq)

Front without heatsink: https://imgur.com/5DMGkuU (https://imgur.com/5DMGkuU)

Back of pcb: https://imgur.com/w3OFOMi (https://imgur.com/w3OFOMi)

My comments:

Front with heatsink: 66x12 1.5mm (I'm changing to 2mm), 100x10 2mm (I'm changing to 3mm as it barely touches), 10x47 3mm. The pad attached to your main radiator (100x10mm, 2mm thick) wasn't touching and I ran out of 3mm pads, so just added another 1mm strip on top of it.

Front without heatsink: changed the one on inner radiator to 300 or it wasn't touching.

Backplate: My card has 0.5mm thermal pads covering capacitor rows. I've changed these strips to 1mm.

After 2 days of testing: card sits in a rig, PL70 mem+1050, core -500, 92.5 Mh/s, 238W, fans at 75% and the rig itself has extra fans. Core temp is 56C which is a bit higher than I expected, probably MX4 paste isn't that great, Zotac Trinity sits next to it with same settings and runs 3C cooler. Thermal pads I used were Thermalright, 12.8 wm/k. Can't check mem junction temperature as I run Linux system.
Note: I live in tropics and day temperatures are quite high.
UPD: managed to get it to 100MH/s with PL70, core 1100, mem 10550 (absolute readings), fans 80% 238W. No throttling so far, core is 50C.

Congratulations on your progress.
The Asus company congratulates you on the fact that you are deprived of the official warranty for the video card
On RTX3080 video cards, only Palit Gaming is perfectly mineable without replacing thermal pads.
Your thermal pad manufacturer has a good Thermalright TF8 that is better than the MX-4.
https://aliexpress.ru/item/33010425469.html

Sarcasm detected LOL I don't care much for warranty on this one as it was bought abroad. Besides, instead of creating RMA and wait for months during current global shortage it makes more sense to repair a card at independent technicians. Saves lots of time.

As for Palit - yeah, I heard they're good, but never had one. What I do have though is Zotacs and they behave just fine. From what I read around it's rather MSI and Gigabyte that have thermal issues, the rest is either OK or 50/50.

Yeah, MX4 turned out to be not as good as I always thought of it.

One of my ZOTAC 3080 HOLO have trhortlle. Needs to have ~30C to work nice.

When i started mining some years ago, i tried few different thermal pastes with GPUs, the worst ones were MX-3/MX-4 and Noctua - dries too fast and migrate. After that i dont use MX/Noctua pastes anywhere - bad choice and dangerous for GPUs, ok for CPUs. At least these are results i got with hot Radeons.

You did everything right. There is a lot of information on the Internet that video card manufacturers use low-quality thermal pads. Perhaps this is a conspiracy of video card manufacturers against mining, which buyers of video cards refuse from the manufacturer's warranty :)
You solved the problem and I'm happy for you. And I myself try to use proven solutions, because I have good experience in returning video cards for warranty cases and receiving compensation.

Out of all cards I've opened so far Colorful had the worst padding. That El Cheapo blue-greenish stuff you can buy in bulk for peanuts. Quite surprising for such a reputable manufacturer.


I wish I had experience as nice as yours. In my case it had always involved lots of time and unpleasant conversations.

I need to do it on my iChill X4 3090. It is like lottery for Inno3d cards, some throttle and some don't.

If you have done it on iChill, plz help me out.

3mm... it is really thick thermal pads. The most thick i saw - it was 2.5mm in some gigabyte model, if i remember correct - it was 1080ti. Buy Palit and be happy. Or may be top ASUS and MSI. But reward for the best cooling - palit.

Here's a photo of Ichill 3080 pads, it will give you rough idea of pad location and size. https://file.bodnara.co.kr/logo/insidelogo.php?image=%2Fhttps%3A%2F%2Ffile.bodnara.co.kr%2Fwebedit%2Fhardward%2Fgrp%2Finno3d_rtx3080_ichill_x4%2Fimg_4077.jpg  

Then order good quality pads of various thicknesses (i'd go with 1, 1.5 and 2mm) and thermal paste for GPU and get to work  :) Note that 3090 has memory chips on both sides of PCB so you may need more pads. There's nothing overcomplicated in this if you know how to hold a screwdriver.

Thanks! May be I will give it a try in a few days.

I'm not mining ETH on this card anymore.

Each country has its own nuances for the return of goods under warranty. The cost of video cards is very high, and after a few years or earlier they will be returned back to stores and demanding a refund of the money paid.
If a video clip cost $ 500, then such cases were interesting only for beginner lawyers for experience.
But when the cost of a video card or laptop is from 2 to 5 thousand dollars, good lawyers will deal with such cases :)

Can you please let us know how many packs of which size you ordered?  Thank you much!!

I was ordering a lot for quite a few cards. All sizes and thicknesses are given, size per pack is known. I don't think it's that hard to calculate yourself. ;)