As the title says, I had the 3080 on a water block for about 2 months, during the hot summer days here, it thermal throttled and brought down the rig every few days. I can see the vram temp, going from under 84C in the first 2 weeks, then moving higher gradually until over 100C now, probably due to the thermal pads came with the WB had degraded faster than normal. Time for a repad.

I had some Gelid pads lying around and got lazy working with the WB, decided to give it a shot. I have been doing thermals for GPUs enough to did this one in 10 minutes.

The end result? 86C top memory junction temp. in warm room temp. and no extra fan. It has been stable and performed better than the WB sine 2 weeks ago.

Of course, if I use Gelid with the WB, it might provide even better result, but for now, I am happy with the simpler mods and will revisit using WB until next time the card needs another thermal replacement.