I just rewatched that Linus video yeh the piece i got from AliExpress definately didn’t have rough edges or air bubbles or damaged edges like the one they showed looked like the more expensive one they showed. I guess mine came in bubble wrap and envelope and was lucky during shipping i think Moddiy put it in a cardboard box. At the end of the day it melts at 45C so good either way.

I can understand where you are coming from but i can’t say i am unhappy with my purchase. RTX 4090’s have been having alot of problems with melting power connectors and Nvidia especially where i live are considerably more expensive. I can only imagine if Nvidia had no competition from AMD you would have to sell a kidney just to play video games. Cheapest major brand 4080 in Australia is 1900$AUD/1236$US where the Merc 7900XT was 1349$AUD/878$US.

Yeh the XFX 7900XT max is 355watts would be fun to have more headroom or an XTX but budget didn’t allow for it. Be nice if XFX released a new firmware with a power upgrade aswell.

Yeh the XFX card has pads on vram and they ended up tearing so replaced them at 1mm which im pretty sure is right. Theres alot of pads on backplate and some other ones of various sizes that didn’t tear. Long story short last time i opened card i was going to replace them all but hard to know how compresed they were and what size originally. The blue looking one looked like it was 2-3mm and was very soft didn’t want to run into mounting pressure problems so just left them. Have ordered some u6 pro putty but as my temps ok not sure if ill use it straight away. I should really ask XFX Support for the sizes. Curious if putting 21W pads on backplate will help temps aswell.