Messing with my memory a bit more and have it back to 1800/3600. A few timings, especially relating to writes, seem to be the main limiting factor.
I pulled the stock fans and shroud off entirely, exposing the heatsink fin stack. A slot further down (I can't mount it flush cause the card plus bare heatsink is almost 2.5 slots thick), I have this holding three of these, blowing at the card.
If I flash higher power firmware, I'll probably mount three Noctua 92mm fans directly to the GPU heatsink.
If I recall correctly the MSI 3080 Suprim already has pads behind the memory and VRM, so there probably isn't much to be gained by swapping them out. TIM performance here is less critical than with the interface to the main cooler.
That said, if you don't already have pads on your backplate, adding them should knock off at least a few degrees, even without underfil, but that will depend on the gap to the backplate, what the backplate is made of, and if there is any airflow over it. A significant portion of the GDDR6X's cooling comes from the PCB it's mounted to, cool that and you cool the memory. Good putty is ideal, but there are some pretty soft pads in the 3-6W/mK range that will also work well enough. Ideally you want to use something compressible/conformable (rated for at least 30% elongation and no more than ~40 on the Shore 00 Hardness scale, if possible), due to all the surface mount components on the back of the PCB. I recommend cutting small squares of about 15mm*15mm, of half a mm thicker than the distance you want it to fill, and putting one behind each memory IC, then a small strip behind the VRM power stages. Using too much surface area is redundant and makes it harder to concentrate pressure on the pads.
I pulled the stock fans and shroud off entirely, exposing the heatsink fin stack. A slot further down (I can't mount it flush cause the card plus bare heatsink is almost 2.5 slots thick), I have this holding three of these, blowing at the card.
If I flash higher power firmware, I'll probably mount three Noctua 92mm fans directly to the GPU heatsink.
If I recall correctly the MSI 3080 Suprim already has pads behind the memory and VRM, so there probably isn't much to be gained by swapping them out. TIM performance here is less critical than with the interface to the main cooler.
That said, if you don't already have pads on your backplate, adding them should knock off at least a few degrees, even without underfil, but that will depend on the gap to the backplate, what the backplate is made of, and if there is any airflow over it. A significant portion of the GDDR6X's cooling comes from the PCB it's mounted to, cool that and you cool the memory. Good putty is ideal, but there are some pretty soft pads in the 3-6W/mK range that will also work well enough. Ideally you want to use something compressible/conformable (rated for at least 30% elongation and no more than ~40 on the Shore 00 Hardness scale, if possible), due to all the surface mount components on the back of the PCB. I recommend cutting small squares of about 15mm*15mm, of half a mm thicker than the distance you want it to fill, and putting one behind each memory IC, then a small strip behind the VRM power stages. Using too much surface area is redundant and makes it harder to concentrate pressure on the pads.
![[VR] optimal_909](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/109/109067.jpg?1553781733){kind=avatar}
