NVidia EVGA 1070 / 1080 GTX owners
www.evga.com/thermalmod/ trip report
I own an EVGA GeForce GTX 1070 SC ACX 3.0 ("superclocked") that I purchased sometime soon after they became widely, easily available. So, it was covered by all the issues listed at the thermalmod URL. Today, I flashed my BIOS to latest version and applied the VRAM and backplate thermal pad mods. BIOS flash was trivial, of course, no problem.
This involved completely taking apart the graphics card. Pretty much every screw, and a couple connector pins. The included instructions on how to take stuff apart and install the thermal pads were decent. My particular model of card had 5 smaller screws underneath the backplate, connecting the PCB to heatsink, that are not pictured or mentioned on the instructions; that was a bit of a gotcha because it's easy to miss them. One other thing I'd nitpick is that they have plastic on two sides and it's not symmetric -- one side is stickier, and the instructions don't actually specify which side should face which direction. So I put the sticky side on whatever I was immediately attaching the pad to. Seemed to work fine. I used sterile non-stick pads (like you buy for wounds) and 90% isopropyl alcohol (both from CVS) to clean the heat sink and GPU, then the non-stick pad to spread the new heat goop in a thin, even layer on the GPU before re-attaching the heat sink. I was actually pleasantly surprised that the thermal paste job by EVGA seemed like it wasn't ****ty. They had a reasonable amount of paste spread evenly on the GPU when I removed it. My VRAM chips already had thermal pads on them, but the new ones are larger (cover multiple chips in one pad) so I guess it'll be better. The new backplate/baseplate thermal pads probably matter more. EVGA does mention that if you accidentally screw up during thermal pad install, they'll replace your card with cross-shipping anyway. Installation took maybe an hour, I was doing it with NFL in the background and am anal about cleaning stuff.
After finishing, I put the GPU back in my machine. GPU core temperature and benchmark score under the "Valley" benchmark were unchanged from pre-modifications. Seems fine. I probably added some life to the card. Could've done the EVGA cross-ship just to get a replacement card, but I kind of wanted to take the card apart myself. I'd say it was worth the experience.
tl;dr EVGA support seems appropriate, my card probably would have continued to be fine without the new pads too, but vOv. install can be done for the cost of a bottle of IPA and an hour of your life.