Following a small controversy over the use of thermal conductive gel in its GeForce RTX 50 series graphics cards, Gigabyte appears to have quietly dropped the grey goo from new ‘V2’ designs. This isn’t the only change the manufacturer has made in crafting the new SKUs, but this one has proven the most curious as the brand hasn’t explained the reasoning behind the move.
For those out of the loop, here’s a quick refresher. Back in April 2025, owners of current generation Gigabyte graphics claimed that excess thermal gel was leaking out towards the PCIe interface. The manufacturer promptly responded with an official statement, claiming that early batches used a higher volume of gel which it had since reduced, and that any leakage presented no danger to a card’s lifespan.
Fast forward to today and Gigabyte has released two ‘V2’ models, namely the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Windforce OC V2 and the GeForce RTX 5050 OC V2 sans any gel. Pull up the product pages for the original designs they replace, Windforce OC SFF and Windforce OC, respectively, and all mentions of “server-grade thermal conductive gel” are MIA.
The cards also feature different shrouds, swapping hawk fans for the ‘Windforce cooling system’. Gigabyte has also made minor changes to the aesthetics and size of each card too. Despite these amendments, there are no changes to core or memory clocks, so application performance should remain identical across the designs.
The question of thermal performance, however, remains an open question. Not to mention whether Gigabyte plans to release V2 versions for other SKUs and models, both GeForce and Radeon.
From my experience, Gigabyte’s thermal gel did a solid job at keeping Nvidia’s latest GPUs cool. Both the GeForce RTX 5080 Aero OC SFF and GeForce RTX 5050 Windforce OC I tested kept a cool head under load, with no signs of leaking gel in the short time I had with each sample.
I don’t think the arrival of these V2 SKUs without gel is cause for concern. All the same, I’ve reached out to Gigabyte, requesting it clarify the reasoning behind its change in approach. Should the brand provide a response, I will update this story to include it.
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