Finger Cot Found Under Nvidia 3090 Founders Edition Thermal Pad

I daresay that many of you reading this would jump at the chance to own an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card. It is, after all, about one of the best money can (sort of) buy at the moment. Just how good is the build quality though? Well, questions are being asked as following a report via Videocardz, a gaming consumer stripped their model down in order to replace the thermal pads (a fairly common practice among enthusiast owners) and upon doing so, they found something very unusual indeed.

Finger Cot Found on Nvidia 3090 Thermal Pad

Now, we should note that the finger cot wasn’t next to the thermal pad nor indeed just loosely lying within the graphics card. No, this one was found directly on the thermal pad inside the Nvidia 3090. – Given that this is pretty much the most critical component in terms of heat transfer, this was clearly something of a problem and the user likely managed to safe their GPU from overheating thanks to this discovery.

Given that I can already see many of you scratching your heads, however, I’ll explain what a ‘finger cot’ is. Basically, think of it as a condom for your fingers to prevent you from transferring any grease (from your hands), or, indeed, fingerprints onto the PCB. It’s an exceptionally common piece of equipment found and used in electronic manufacturing centers around the world. It’s hard to deny though the concern that one was not only accidentally left behind in this Nvidia Founders Edition graphics card, but that it was located in such a critical part of the design.

This is, almost literally, the equivalent of installing a CPU cooler and forgetting to take the contact plate’s protective plastic cover off!

What Do We Think?

While this is almost certainly just an isolated incident, it has clearly raised more than a few concerns among the community. Not only that this ‘finger cot’ was discovered, but the fact that it was found in one of Nvidia’s own ‘Founders Edition’ models. – With the discovery, and change of thermal pad, now giving the user a drop from 110C to a far more reasonable 86C, however, while it’s unclear as to whether they replaced the thermal pads directly due to temperature concerns, it seems that the effort here was clearly well worth it!

What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!