Gigabyte has opted to no longer use its "server-grade" thermal gel on its new RTX 5070 Ti Windforce V2 graphics card. The discovery was made by Uniko Hardware on X, who compared the product pages of the old and new Windforce cards and found that the product page for the new 5070 Ti variant lacks any mention of thermal gel.
On top of the thermal gel change, Gigabyte made several changes to the V2 model specifically to make it smaller. The card is 43mm shorter than the RTX 5070 Ti Windforce SFF model, and sports smaller 80mm fans to compensate for the smaller form factor. The card also sports different screw hole locations on the back of the card where the GPU resides, and lacks dual-BIOS functionality.
the first gigabye rtx50 that has no SERVER-GRADE THERMAL CONDUCTIVE GEL?the spacing of the socket screw holes also looks really sus, too rectangular.GeForce RTX™ 5070 Ti WINDFORCE OC V2 16GGV-N507TWF3OCV2-16GD pic.twitter.com/676CeC0VBaDecember 20, 2025
Starting with the RTX 50 series, Gigabyte began shipping many of its cards with what the company calls "server-grade thermal conductive gel" instead of thermal pads for cooling the VRAM and MOSFETs. Gigabyte claims that this upgraded gel material is more durable, lasts longer, and provides a superior surface spread compared to traditional thermal pads.
However, Gigabyte had a variety of issues with its early production cards sporting the gel. Earlier this year, multiple reports of the thermal gel leaking began to surface, specifically in systems with vertical GPU mounts. Some users' cards leaked so badly that virtually none of the material stayed on the VRAM portion, potentially causing the VRAM to overheat. We even saw one case where a customer replaced the gel with traditional thermal pads, which brought down temperatures by 7C.
Gigabyte responded to initial reports complaining about the leakage issue, claiming that the problem was caused by too much thermal gel being applied at the factory, and the leakage was purely cosmetic and wouldn't affect the card's functionality. At the same time, the GPU maker also reduced the amount of thermal gel it applied at the factory to fix the issue.
Luckily, we have not seen any reports so far of graphics cards becoming damaged from the leaking issue; however, Gigabyte never specifically addressed cases where the gel leaked completely. Either way, Gigabyte RTX 5070 Ti Windforce V2 owners won't have to worry about the gel leaking as the card takes advantage of traditional thermal pads instead. Whether Gigabyte removed the gel for cost or reliability isssues remains a mystery.
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