wheneva14 wrote:


Is this normal? Because the past few cards ive owned never had these high VRM temperatures.

• CPU: 18° MIN, 57° MAX, 36.7° AVG
  
• Motherboard: 23° MIN, 39° MAX, 33.3° AVG
  
• GPU (Core): 20° MIN, 71° MAX, 52.6° AVG
  
• GPU (VRM): 23° MIN, 100° MAX, 72.5° AVG
  

MarshallR@ASUS wrote:
Compared to most components heat won't affect the chokes so much in the long run as they are environmentally sealed, non-moving parts. Compared to capacitors that are 'wet' inside, which is why we use the high quality 105C, 10s of thousands of hour life-span Japan made variety. It's more important here than your motherboard. What really kills stuff is humidity+heat. But, again, being environmentally sealed they won't suffer as bad as other parts can do. The old-old-old chokes that were exposed to air would oxidise and/or vibrate, but that's no longer the case. I don't want to quote our marketing because it seems to take away from a technical discussion, but the "super alloy" part is genuinely an upgraded alloy from the low-profile or low-cost chokes on reference cards, which is part why DCII is a bit more expensive than reference.

As for the PCB itself getting hot - it's also meant to as it's unavoidable as the solder joint is a better conductor than any thermal paste. It's mitigated as part of the PCB design: the tracing and layers. You can remove/replace/add thermal components that will lower the temperatures certainly, which is why after market cooling has always existed. The thermal pad might not be the 'best' solution but it's the most long-lasting. You can replace it with thermal paste and maybe every 6 months have to replace it. As a company we can't ask our users to do that. You could run it under water with everything at 30C and it would last ... 20 years! Will you still be using it in 20 years though?

There's always a cost/benefit on our side to doing lots of things: continually adding more thermal mass; the quality of components; expected lifespan of the card and making sure it sees out warranty; and being price competitive all weigh in. No company will(or, should) cost save to the point of increasing your RMA numbers above the inevitable few %age points, because it's grossly uneconomical and you don't rebuy next time.