They definitely are cheaping out. I bought a Powercolor Hellhound 7900 XTX last month, and it was running 60°c while totally idle. I got a Thermal Grizzly Kryosheet for it and when I opened the card, there was already significant thermal pump-out in the paste with completely bare spots on the die. That card was brand new with less than 8 hours use when I opened it. After installing the Kryosheet, all temps dropped 20°c.

It’s total horseshit that even top end GPUs made by “reputable” manufacturers are shipping with cheap shitty paste.

9000M. Unless you’re designing a new laptop or SFF PC, you’ll never need to buy one direct.

I just swooped my first AMD card to upgrade my 8 year old Nvidia card. The prices even on 40 series Nvidia cards are complely insane. I’m done with Nvidia.

I’ve been running Manjaro for the last 4 months and it’s been incredibly reliable and smooth. I haven’t done any serious tweaking beyond installing a realtime audio kernal. I run updates every few days and I haven’t had a single issue so far.

Edit: what’s up with the down voting? If there’s something incorrect with recommending Manjaro in this context, I’d love to know why, since I’m still relatively new to Linux.