Frankenstein GPU Cooling - IT'S AWESOME

we selected the RG Strix RT x20 atti graphics card for our test today because at Full Tilt the fans on this thing are easily the loudest thing in an average gaming system and also because it has a rated thermal design power or TDP of around 280 watts because here's the thing while folks with empty expansions lots have been strapping CPU coolers to their graphics cards for well over a decade now as far as we can tell very few have attempted it with something so hot and so power-hungry so deep cool sponsored this video and sent over their assassin three CPU cooler and in order for this modification to be successful in my eyes it needs to accomplish three things one we need to see an improvement in gaming performance - I want a reduction in system noise at the same time three I want the whole experience to be less hassle than water cooling so that it's something we can legitimately actually recommend and finally four I want our loyal viewers to save some money compared to the aforementioned water cooling money that they can spend on great shirts like this Ltd circum [Music] so our first task then is to remove the cooler from our graphics card your mileage may vary but ours was extraordinarily simple to take apart requiring only the removal of six Phillips screws on the back side of the card now the only thing holding the two halves of our graphics card together is the thermal paste between the GPU dye and the cooler so it should be as simple as just pulling up on the cooler a [Music] wallah with a little bit of cleaning now we have an open-faced 4352 CUDA core GPU sandwich so now that everything's clean then we just need to remove these two plugs from the back of the board here for the fans and the RGB lighting and then finally we're gonna remove these four standoffs right here from the cooler we're just gonna put those aside for now though more on that later now that that's done let's take a closer look at our card before we start piecing it back together we actually got really really lucky with this particular cards design because most of the components that need cooling are covered by this heat spreader right here which means that we don't need to go find a wack ton of little heat sinks for every I see that soldered to the board in fact there's actually only one thermal pad on the stock cooler here and that's for the row of VRMs right back here that we are going to need to actively cool so to handle that we went over to the workshop and machined this custom heatsink that we're going to attach to the PCB using some double-sided thermal adhesive tape now for a permanent installation I would probably use a lighter heatsink for one thing and then thermal epoxy but this will work just fine for our testing today now that the cards prepped we're gonna grab those standoffs that we put aside before as well as the screws that we took out of the back of the card and we are going to install the standoffs once more with all four of those mounted now we need to make a small modification to the mounting hardware that was included with our deep cool assassin three cooler so basically you've got two mounting brackets right here and each one of them needs an extra two holes at 70 millimeter hole spacing to match standoffs we just installed it's a pretty simple mod if you have a drill press and what's really cool is that it doesn't damage your mounting brackets or your cooler in any way permanently so if you decided to move it on to your CPU or a different graphics card later on you would totally be able to do that now that are modified mounting brackets installed we're coming up on the riskiest part of this whole operation because we're working with a bare die that doesn't have an integrated heat spreader we need to be extra careful when we're tightening our cooler down so we're gonna go ahead and put a small line of thermal compound onto our GPU then we're gonna line up our tower cooler making sure that our screw holes aligned with our bracket there before we start to tighten it down and then we're gonna go nice and slow doing at most a half a turn on each side as we tighten the thing down alright let's give it a little wiggle yep and it's on that was it wow this thing's kind of massive now all we need to do is throw a couple of fans on you know the crazy part is it's not even that much heavier or even that much more sheer massive metal than the original cooler it's just that when fans are allowed to work more efficiently don't do a better job and that's it now all that remains is to plug this thing in and see how it runs but as you guys can plainly see this monstrosity won't fit in just any old case come on in guys safety first I like it nice nice belts thanks guys alright so after plenty of test fitting we landed on the Corsair 900 Diaz our case it sports 10 PCI Express slots at the back which is important because as you can see this here tower cooler makes our card a bit of a thick boy both in terms of height and in terms of its length so it's worth pointing out by the way guys that you are by no means obligated to use such a large tower cooler for the mod if you've got a more reasonable sized case you're just want going to want to check the height dimensions of the cooler and make sure that it's gonna fit into your case now of course because we have the luxury of using whatever case we want we decided to go full assassin 3 beast mode but that is by no means an obligation I knew this was going to smoothly it wouldn't be an LT T video without some snafu obviously it would be better for our case airflow if we had the fans blowing this way so we just need to rotate our bracket 90 degrees that makes so much more sense well I give up trying to put these thumb screws in there's no way that's happening but something that's really cool is we actually went and cut a piece of acrylic to act as like a GPU support you're like yeah well this does out a lot of weight but hey if you just you know go and put something like this in your case then your GPU will be fun yep you know what the heatsink rests right up against the PCI slots underneath look at that we finally came up with a solution for GPU sag problem solved to start with we've pre-configured that fan header that we plugged both of these fans into with a pretty aggressive profile and then what we're gonna do is tune it down from there until we reach both the level of performance and silence that we are hoping for with that out of the way then I think that's it it's time for us to start our benchmarking sorry I made you cut this acrylic thing turns out this idea was more genius than either of us could have possibly known your time your money sound like Jake you hear that sound of silence I like it there's a song about that you know so to start with our GPU is running at a chilly 28 degrees at idle that's pretty much about what we'd expect now we're gonna go ahead and run the built-in benchmark and shadow the Tomb Raider and see how it holds up here it is average FPS 119 so guys the results are in for all of our tests and while from a performance standpoint there isn't a huge jump for anything a few frames here or there there are definite gains in the cooling Dept check this out we're at 55 degrees so the stock coolers fans run it in excess of 3,000 rpm while our tower cooler maxed out at just 30% of that and while fan rpm and noise aren't exactly tied at the hip a bigger slower fan in general is a quieter fan and our results back that up not to mention that like I can barely hear this thing my mics right here it's super quiet so then our performance is as good or better it's as quiet as it can be given the coil whine that's present on some of these high-end cards and compared to water cooling we've not only saved a whack of time we've also saved a whack of money which only leaves us then with ease of use now compared to something factory finished with all the holes pre-drilled in it like a GPU waterblock this was admittedly slightly harder to install but compared to setting up the rest of a water cooling loop that you would need to go with your GPU block I would make the argument that this is actually more approachable not to mention that if something does go wrong it's less likely to be catastrophic because there's no water to leak all over the rest of your components so should you actually do this honestly it's a great mod especially if you're a silence freak or you have a dead or dying GPU fan that you want to replace on the cheap with that said I would probably dial things back a little bit from the way that we did it I mean the assassin 3 definitely has got the performance hook spa but by stepping down a little bit to a 120 millimeter variant or something we would have saved a lot of space improving our case compatibility quite a lot oh yeah one last thing guys if you're not adept at making heat sinks you can get little things like this that have pre applied adhesive on like dealextreme and Aliexpress and that kind of stuff so so don't worry about that anyway that was it thanks for watching if you guys enjoyed this video and you enjoy other sketchy cooling mods check out the link to one of our sketchy cooling videos we're gonna have that down in the video description so yeah

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 2,216,385

Keywords: air cooler, mod, pc, cooling, hack, gaming, performance, ltt, linus, deepcool, assassin, tower cooler, graphics card, rtx, rtx2080ti, rtx2080, pc gaming

Id: m3YnpwAAHhM

Length: 10min 31sec (631 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 09 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/m3ta1head]

I mounted a Prolimatech MK-26 on my 1080ti and it's been amazing. The core temp never exceeds 60C, even with the GPU dumping out 300W+. And with the fans I'm running it's effectively silent too!

https://imgur.com/a/i8gWUjk

[u/sion21]

As someone who dont use the expansion slot at all. i will gladly buy GPU in this form factor since its cooler and quieter. i hate GPU jet engine during game

[u/Genesis2nd]

For an alternative approach in terms of the case, I'd recommend watching one of DIY Perks' builds

[u/Democrab]

Excuse the bad image quality, (Pic was taken on an old point-n-shoot in ~2010) but as cool as mounting a CPU cooler on a GPU has always been, that's not frankenstein. This is frankenstein.

Basically, I had an AGP 6800GS 512MB at the time and the original fan died completely one day, so I used some junk mail that was cardboard to fashion myself a shroud that fit over the original heatsink, put an cheap 80mm case fan where the original fan was albeit at an angle to blow air through the heatsink and then kept the whole thing together with rubber bands. I did have to cut back the cardboard to the end of the heatsink though; in the picture I had it going over the VRMs and memory (Idea being I'm forcing more airflow over them) but it was too restrictive for that cheap fan. Actually worked better than the original fan did when I'd adjusted it a tad. (Same temps, quieter fan)

[u/letsgoiowa]

I would unironically take a 4 slot cooler if it meant some serious cooling horsepower. Then again, I'd also take a 400W TDP GPU, so I'm kind of an oddball. Saves on heating costs ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[u/udgnim2]

need VRM / VRAM temp comparison

[u/N1NJ4W4RR10R_]

Would've liked to see the VRAM temp though. Wonder how well that ran.

[u/RandomStranger1776]

No overclocking results?

[u/Thotaz]

I know it's a sponsored video, but it's a shame he didn't even mention after market GPU coolers as an easier alternative to mounting a CPU cooler on the GPU.