Hello,
I'm a watercooling enthusiast and I have some leftover thermal pads. I was thinking to buy EVGA GTX 1080 FTW ACX 3.0, but the recent news made me doubt it.
If I buy it, I can put thermal pads on VRMs and use the card like that. Is it safe to buy it despite the recent problems? Are there any problems other than the lack of VRM thermal pads?
Or should I forget about this card and go look for another brand? Thanks.

I bought one without knowing about any of this. Now that I have educated myself on this issue it appears to me that catastrophic failure may have been due to bad MOSFETS. I think the statement EVGA has given about the card being perfectly fine to use even without the pads is true. So if you put pads on the heat will not be an issue. Also, the Micron memory issue affecting many brands of 1070/1080 models has been fixed in bios updates as far as I know. You should be safe to buy one. Also remember you are getting a 3 year warranty instead of 1 year with Founders Edition. (Although I know none of us enjoy doing an RMA)

kj6ythgfg
I bought one without knowing about any of this. Now that I have educated myself on this issue it appears to me that catastrophic failure may have been due to bad MOSFETS. I think the statement EVGA has given about the card being perfectly fine to use even without the pads is true. So if you put pads on the heat will not be an issue. Also, the Micron memory issue affecting many brands of 1070/1080 models has been fixed in bios updates as far as I know. You should be safe to buy one. Also remember you are getting a 3 year warranty instead of 1 year with Founders Edition. (Although I know none of us enjoy doing an RMA)

EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 FOUNDERS EDITION

• 1607MHz Base Clock
• 1733MHz Boost Clock
• 257.1GT/s Texture Fill Rate
• 8192MB GDDR5X Memory
• 10000MHz Memory Clock
• 320GB/s Memory Bandwidth

Warranty: 3 Years

UmutC
Hello,
I'm a watercooling enthusiast and I have some leftover thermal pads. I was thinking to buy EVGA GTX 1080 FTW ACX 3.0, but the recent news made me doubt it.
If I buy it, I can put thermal pads on VRMs and use the card like that. Is it safe to buy it despite the recent problems? Are there any problems other than the lack of VRM thermal pads?
Or should I forget about this card and go look for another brand? Thanks.

If you are going to water-cool I believe and quite frankly hope, you will be OK with a FTW water block.

You will be having contact cooling across all of the heat effected areas. :D

This issue, as I , a layman and enthusiast believe is involved in the cooling of the simple plate spreader?

That part of the ACX 3.0 is replaced entirely with the likes of the EK block... I do however question adding more pads between the card and back plate?

Also, EVGA I have read is close to the full copper water block edition coming out, if you can bare to, waiting for that may be worthwhile.

The thermal pads aren't required. Yes, it's safe to buy.

Salem13

UmutC
Hello,
I'm a watercooling enthusiast and I have some leftover thermal pads. I was thinking to buy EVGA GTX 1080 FTW ACX 3.0, but the recent news made me doubt it.
If I buy it, I can put thermal pads on VRMs and use the card like that. Is it safe to buy it despite the recent problems? Are there any problems other than the lack of VRM thermal pads?
Or should I forget about this card and go look for another brand? Thanks.

If you are going to water-cool I believe and quite frankly hope, you will be OK with a FTW water block.

You will be having contact cooling across all of the heat effected areas. :D

This issue, as I , a layman and enthusiast believe is involved in the cooling of the simple plate spreader?

That part of the ACX 3.0 is replaced entirely with the likes of the EK block... I do however question adding more pads between the card and back plate?

I generally use my EK universal VGA blocks with my cards, because full-covers are hard to sell after the card gets outdated. I can use these VGA blocks forever.
Evga cards have a full-cover plate heatsink above their pcb, and has an opening for the gpu. That makes it easier to use with an universal VGA block.
I cool the heatsink plate with a seperate fan. I may consider a hydro copper version this time though. But do gtx 1080 hydro copper FTWs have the same problem?

Sajin
The thermal pads aren't required. Yes, it's safe to buy.

Lies. Seriously if you think this is a proper answer to your question then by all means risk yourself to burning the rest of your pc and probably your house as well.

mikenogo

Sajin
The thermal pads aren't required. Yes, it's safe to buy.

Lies. Seriously if you think this is a proper answer to your question then by all means risk yourself to burning the rest of your pc and probably your house as well.

That a few instances of SMD components failing is not going to burn down your house. You can't find a single example of damage to a PC other than the GPU failing. As far as we know, the issue of the VRM/Memory area running a bit warmer than other models is not even related to the issue of a couple failing components on the back of the GPU.

mikenogo

Sajin
The thermal pads aren't required. Yes, it's safe to buy.

Lies. Seriously if you think this is a proper answer to your question then by all means risk yourself to burning the rest of your pc and probably your house as well.

They're not really lies. As far as we know, the cards to run fine without thermal pads.
Do they run hotter than the competition? Yes. 
Is it correlated with some cards failing? We don't know. Probably not.
 
Just as an example, the VRMs on Zotac cards run even hotter and nobody is hearing about their cards going up in flames. So that just makes us believe the cards that did fail had some flawed components.