The penny-pinching antics have been confirmed PC Gamer which found many builds had rubbish thermal paste which had been poorly applied.

All four RTX 40-series cards in the PC Gamer office (RTX 4080 Super, 4070 Ti, and two 4070s) have pretty high hotspots -- the highest temperature recorded by an individual thermal sensor in the die.

The 4080 Super's temperature is around 11°C higher than the chip's average temperature.

“I took it apart to apply some decent-quality thermal paste and discovered a similar situation to that found by Igor's Lab. In the space of a few months, the factory-applied paste had separated and spread out, leaving just an oily film behind and a few patches of the thermal compound itself. I checked the other cards and found that they were all in a similar state.”

Igor's Lab examined the thermal paste used on a brand-new RTX 4080 and found it thin due to large quantities of cheap silicone oil and zinc oxide filler.

There was lots of ground aluminium oxide (the material that provides the actual thermal transfer), but it was pretty coarse, leading to the paste separating quite easily.

Removing the factory-installed paste from another RTX 4080 graphics card, Igor's Lab applied a more appropriate amount of a high-quality paste and discovered that it lowered the hotspot temperature by nearly 30°C.