I need help finding new thermal pads for my Framework laptop 16 Radeon 7700s expansion bay. I found ants crawling out of my laptop and decided to look inside. I found holes chewed in my GPUs’ thermal pads. Does anyone know if this if covered under warranty or where I could find proper replacement pads?
You think ants ate your thermal pad? This is so odd. If it’s actual damage, it might not be covered by warranty, but it might be possible to find similar material, or you can purchase a new heat sink. this small hole should not effect the thermals very much but keep an eye on the temperatures.
I tested the thermals and they seemed normal so I think I’ll just leave it, but yes I saw the ants carrying bits of the thermal pad and pieces were scattered around the GPU.
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I shouldn’t ask, but if they come back,
please get a picture of them carrying off pieces of thermal pad!
Framework, maybe check with your supplier to see if they use any delicious peanut butter or sugar in their thermal pads.
Seriously though, googling “ants thermal pad” seems to turn up a bunch of reports, suggesting this might be a problem in general with thermal pads and some ants.
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I had not heard about this. Now I will need to check on mine that I left in the basement rec area to see if ants are eating it! 
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We’ve come full circle. It’s time to start debugging like our ancestors did.
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Fortunately, my laptop (and desktop) are ant-free. You’d think that thermal paste would be toxic, how can ants eat it and be OK? 
It could be warrantied, but that’ll probably take a while compared to redoing it yourself if you’re worried. I doubt they managed to make off with enough to cause damage though, if it’s still running fine, you might not even need to do anything.
If you can get some K5 Pro at a local computer place or from Amazon, that’ll do as a pad replacement, use a proper paste or PTM7950 for the GPU die repaste though.
For future reference, replacing the pads is more an issue of height matching the originals. Too short and you won’t have contact, too tall and you can actually push the heatsink off the GPU contact patch which will cause worse thermals. Using a viscous paste like K5 avoids that, though cleanup is messier in the future.
It’s a gray area in my view.
Lets say the user didn’t notice ants coming out of his machine with the pad pieces. If you weren’t aware of the ants, and one day found your GPU running hotter than normal, opened it and found this pad damage, what would you naturally assume occurred?
Would you think you’d damaged the GPU or that it incurred damage before you received it?
Having seen the ants doing it and coming to the forum to ask advice makes warrantying it a bit disingenuous, but at the same time, who the hell thinks that ants would be eating the insides of your laptop?
That’s why I said it’d be disingenuous.
On a warranty claim, you would not put “Ants ate my thermal pads and I need new ones”, you’d just put down, “I received the machine with damaged thermal pads” or something.
Hence why I also say it’s a gray area. If a user didn’t know about the ants doing it, they’d naturally blame FM for having shipped them the machine in that condition. They never opened it, how could they have induced this damage?
Since OP does know however, that would be pretty shitty, and it’d also be not very useful. Replacing thermal pads is easy and doesn’t require shipping the thing back, just a short trip to Microcenter for replacement pads and a few minutes watching the disassembly vids.
That, and it’s doubtful the damage shown matters. The chips are probably still in contact with the Heatsink anyway, so there’s no need to do anything, outside of keeping those ants away in the future, regardless what color they are (red ones especially).
What, you would want some new ants under warranty … 
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No, I do not want new ants.
But, it’s not just been the same since the ants got to the thermal pads. And I do feel the warranty should cover it.
They have a serious attitude problem now, don’t respond when called, have been biting me! They used to be wonderful, playful and loving little ants.
So I expect the warranty to restore my ants to how they were before ingesting whatever was in those thermal pads. Which, I might add, had no warning of containing mood altering substances, and was not in a proper safely secured container to prevent pet or child access! Detox my ants and return them to me! 
And for the love of all that is good, put are warning label on your thermal pads, and use a child-proof / pet-proof container! Don’t want this to happen to any other ant parents.
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Ants are very sensitive to fan noise. That’s why they want thermal pads instead of air conditioning in their “house”. I expect you to post a picture when they come stealing your heatsink …
Seriously, I never heard of this before. I hope you’ll get rid of the ants. I wish you all the best!
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This! 
Except bio degradable is a virtue these days!