>>714021050I had been playing the same games for years on end and they all suddenly started to run badly, awful framerates, sometimes I'd get black screens, I'd have to restart my PC often to fix bad performance.
After changing the paste, all of these issues ceased, so my logical conclusion was that the issue wasn't with other parts of the PC. I had the same parts for a while with the new AMD GPU, so I'm quite sure it was the 1080ti, with the old crusty paste.
There's this paste cleaning liquid that smells like candy, comes in two bottles, first one to clean the gunk, second one to prepare the surface for new paste. Cleaning and reapplying was quite easy, despite having never done it before. First time opening a GPU too.