[weiran]

It figures that the thermal pads are applied by hand, when I replaced mine they weren't very well installed in the first place.

You'd like to think that a GPU like the 3090FE would go through QC that include some sort of stress test. It would only take seconds to see the VRAM temps would be well out of spec.

[cinntaile]

If they were out of spec you'd experience some form of thermal throttling. GDDR6X can handle very high temperatures, for example 120 degrees celcius is within spec I believe? Which is quite warm!