Gonna refresh the cooler on my 1080ti. Which parts require cooling?

[yoadknux]

Now that summer is coming, and about a year since I changed the thermal paste on my GPU, I thought it would be a good time to re-seat the VRM heatsinks on my card. The cooling solution is a Kraken G12, which other than a fan doesn't have heatsinks placed on the VRMs/memory. So I bought heatsinks of my own and placed them wherever a thermal pad was present on the original cooler, but that was kinda done mindlessly. Basically, I have tiny heatsinks attached to the highlighted areas (see attached image) using themal tape.

My questions are:
1) Have I missed something, or is this fine in theory? Should I throw in heatsinks on the R22/R15 magic as well?
2) Are those tiny heatsinks effective, or just a placebo? Because frankly, I really doubt how well thermal tape conducts heat, and since the card is faced upside down, I doubt the heatsinks even apply enough pressure to draw away heat. Maybe just leaving them naked with a 92mm fan blowing on them do better. What do you guys think?

I'm fully aware that I'm trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist, the card never crashed at stock settings, and has a very respectable FireStrike/TimeSpy stable OC of 2100/6103... But if I'm changing the thermal paste, may as well check on the small heatsinks.

Wanna hear your opinions! Thanks!

 

[Zerileous]

I'm not sure about the ICs between the inductors/chokes (silver cubes) and the memory. Shorter flat square ICs just before the chokes are the mosfets, those should have HS for sure. I'm not sure about the ICs before the mosfets either. Maybe caps.

It doesn't appear to be a reference board, may be helpful to share

 

[yoadknux]

Thanks for the reply. I'm not sure which area you mean, are those silver cubes on the right side that have MAGIC R15 written in them?

 

[Woomack]

Whatever had thermal pads needs cooling (more or less). Memory chips don't really need heatsinks and if there is any airflow then should be enough but I guess you already put some heatsinks there and it's fine.

 

[Brando]

I think you're ok. If you google "vga vrm" and go to images there's tons of pictures of cards with aftermarket cooling doing it pretty much like you are.

 

[yoadknux]

Thanks for the comments guys. I still wonder about all those silver "magic" cubes. I think the cubes themselves conduct heat so putting heatsinks on them will only obscure the airflow from the 92mm fan... but frankly I'm not quite sure. Does anyone have any input on that?

 

[trents]

Have you thought about contacting Nvidia for input?

 

[yoadknux]

Have you thought about contacting Nvidia for input?

Based on your advice, I tried contacting Gigabyte since this is a custom PCB, and after a week and a half they simply replied they don't respond on those things and all the data and specifications are available on their site.

Anyway, even though I ordered some extra heat sinks, I decided not to place them. I think having a fan flow on the area + following the thermal pads is good enough. However, I did end up swapping my H75 for Kraken X41, and I found out something interesting, the temperature affects the power limit for this card. Previously when I ran FireStrike loops, the card could reach 61c on 1.093V (max stock OC voltage), and the power limit would go trigger (I see it on MSI Afterburner) and the clocks would go down for an extremely short duration then rise back up. Now with the X41 the temps stay at 55c and the power limit does not trigger at all.