Your graphics card has more than one temperature sensor on the chip. The number you normally see — GPU temperature, or "core" — is roughly an average across the chip. The hotspot (also called junction temperature) is the single hottest spot the chip can find at that moment.
The hotspot is always higher. The difference between the two is the delta, and that is the number worth watching, because it tells you how well heat is actually getting out of the chip and into the cooler.
A small delta means the thermal paste, the pads and the cooler mounting are all doing their job. A large delta means heat is piling up in one place — usually because the paste has dried out, was applied badly at the factory, or the cooler is not sitting flat on the chip. Cards slow themselves down based on the hotspot number, so a bad delta costs you performance even when the core temperature still looks fine.
Each block is one reading, stacked into 2 °C buckets. Taller column means more owners reported a delta in that range.
Over half of all readings land in this band. A gap on its own is not a fault — every card has one. It only becomes a problem when it is much larger than this.
The 5070 Ti has the worst median gap (18.1 °C) and 10 of the 13 worst readings in the whole thread. The far more expensive 5090 has the tightest median at 14.3 °C.
Founders Edition cards had the smallest median gap of any brand with a real sample. Gigabyte was the worst of the well-sampled brands at 18.2 °C across 18 readings.
Cards that were repasted or given a phase-change pad sit at an 11.0 °C median against 17.4 °C on factory paste. Undervolting only moved the gap from 17.0 to 15.8 °C, because it lowers both numbers at once.
Put in the two numbers from HWMonitor, HWiNFO or GPU-Z and see where you sit against everyone else here.
Sorted worst to best by median gap. Readings where the owner never said which brand they had are left out.
The same chart, grouped by which GPU you bought rather than who made the cooler.
Specific boards where at least two different people posted a reading. Two readings is still almost nothing — this is a list of cards worth checking, not a verdict.
Every reading that included both numbers. Each dot is one card.
All 85 readings split by one variable at a time. Bars are medians; sample sizes are small on the right-hand groups, so read these as hints rather than proof.
Click any column to sort. Open a row to read what the owner actually wrote. A star on the core number means it was worked out from a stated hotspot and gap, not posted directly.
| Notes |
|---|