At some point, I'll work up the courage to do this. But, in preparation, I wrote EVGA and asked about the thermal pads. Here's my question and their response:
My Question:
Do you sell a kit of all the correct thermal pads for this EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 FTW2 GAMING card (08G-P4-6686-KR)? If you don't sell a kit of those thermal pads, can you list the number and sizes required?
Their Response:
Unfortunately we dont sell thermal mod kits anymore, the thermal pad thickness for the 10 series cards is 1mm thick and all you'll need to do is cut to size, we dont have any instructions unfortuantely.
if you have any questions do let us know.
Regards,
EVGA
Unfortunately, I don't know what to believe. This thread starts out with recommendations of 1mm and 0.5mm pads. Gamer's Nexus from years ago measured the thermal pads EVGA sent out to fix the overheating problems of this card at 2mm. I've seen other threads on this forum saying that EVGA told them to use 1.5mm pads.
EVGA came back and asked for my feedback and I gave it to them. It's just upsetting that we can't buy new cards and EVGA neither stocks parts/materials for maintenance of our old cards nor has instructions to help us maintain things on our own. For goodness sakes. They manufactured these cards. They did repairs on them during their manufacturing lifetime. They've got to know EXACTLY what's needed to do basic maintenance of them.