Gotta be honest, 3080 is too much gpu for me. I had such a hard time keeping my house cool last summer, and have no desire for a 320W card like the 3080. Though to be fair last summer was the hottest summer ever recorded in my area (San Antonio, Tx). Though at $420 I probably would have jumped and just undervolted and power limited the hell out of the card once May rolls around I guess (will probably still do that in the summer with my 6700 XT if this summer is even half as bad as last one was).
No joke. I was a GPU Hunter during the Mining Wars of 2020-2022 and brought down two trophy 3080's on our forum here for not stupid prices. One for a cousin in Washington, the other for a local friend. Local guy has an office that is maybe 8*12. Maybe. He upgraded from a 580 8GB and immediately got to invest an additional ~$60 in new 14cm fans as his old school Antec hotboxed the card.
Then, that PC hotboxed his office, and he now can sauna and game at the same time. He plays 4k native on TV monitor and that thing is running full tilt all the time. He's got little ones so he prefers to keep the door shut if he can.
Another really good friend of mine that is a bachelor in his own house put in a split unit for his similarly sized office, and it's not to heat it. While I am jealous on the one hand, that's also crazy commitment to the bit on the other. PC gaming is his thing though.
That brought me back to the days of my 290X making me sweat and I realized that I don't need that in my life either. It might be a silly line in the sand, but I prefer my GPUs under 200W, and CPU under 100W at the same time is a nice limit too.
The last card I -had- to do something about was my HD4850. I don't know what kind cheap **** TIM the OEM had used, but the result was after 1.5-2 years the TIM had turned into literal dust. I couldn't understand the extreme temperatures I was seeing, so I decided to to pull the cooler off and check. Good thing I did. A good reapplication of new TIM solved things straight away, and it ran fine for a couple of years after.
Perfect justification for GPU surgery, imo.
Early in my PC tinkering days I killed a beautiful Ti 4400 with an errant slip of a screwdriver. I realized then that the most dangerous thing to a GPU was my tools, static discharge and my own potential lack of attention to detail, so I just don't tempt fate without justification.
I am all about using some canned air to keep the heatsink relatively clean, however. Usually I will just carry the whole PC outside for that exercise even.
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