My Graphics Card Is Now My Computer

I think we can all agree that the size of modern graphics cards has gotten a little bit out of control it's not uncommon for the graphics card to be the deciding factor in how big your computer case needs to be so that got me thinking what if instead of putting a graphics card into a computer I rather put a computer into a graphics card well at least into a graphics card enclosure I kind of forgot about this idea for a few months and then the other day when I was browsing principles I found this cool money box it's designed to look like an RTX 3080 it's obviously partially hollowed so that's perfect to put a small single board computer into I downloaded the model files and then imported them into Tinker CAD to make the modifications required to fit a Raspberry Pi into it the Money Box model is scaled down from a full sizee 3080 so you need to scale it up to 142% to be size for size this exceeds my print bed size by a few millime so I scaled it up to 130% I oriented the Raspberry Pi in the back end of the 3080 so that the HDMI ports are in the same general area as the the original display port we also have a power input here which unlike the 380 can run on a USBC power adapter rather than requiring a small Power Station the USB and ethernet ports then extend out the side of the GPU which I actually think looks pretty cool I added some supports and holes to accommodate some brass inserts into the base to mount the Raspberry Pi onto and lastly we need to think about cooling I initially wanted to use an actual fan in place of one of the 3D printed fan covers but the Fan's on the P side of the card underneath the pie which means that the GPU would need to be lifted off the desk to get air flow to it and it also gets in the way of mounting the P so I decided to instead mount a more appropriately size 30 mm fan onto the inside of the housing and have a draw air in through the fin stack on the side this required a fan cut out to be added to the side and a few cutaways to the surrounding heat sink paths to make room for it with that done we've got the 3D model complete and ready for printing I also noticed that another user had made fans for the 380 money box that were a bit more accurate to the original design so I decided to go with this fan design for the top fan the bottom one I left is original as it was better suited to holding the supports that were needed for the brass inserts to mount the power into I then printed out the components using gray for the main body and black for the heat sinks fan and back plates I colored the text in white so that it stands out better and looks a bit more like the original card now we can move on to assembling and installing the pie into it first we need to add some m2.5 Bross inserts into the bottom fan piece we just melt these into place using a soldering iron next we can add some m2.5 by 4 mm brass standoffs to mount the power into I didn't have 4 mm ones so I cut the top off some 6 mm ones to shorten them I'm not going to mount the power into the standoffs until we've partially assembled the card so let's snap the components into place we can push the bottom fan and heat sink pieces into place first then add the back plate and finally add the top fan plate before we add the side heat sinks we need to mount the fan this is just held in place with four M3 button head screws and is oriented to pull air into the enclosure now we can mount the P into the brass standoffs and secure it with some m2.5 screws then plug the fan into 5 volts and ground and lastly having forgotten about the micro SD card we can remove the P gain then add our card with the OS image and then put it back in and close up the top cover plate then we just need to snap the side heat sinks into place and that's my GPU computer complete now let's plug it in and try it out so my graphics card is booted up and I now have a fully functional graphics card computer I'm running a bunto on the PA this does seem to be a bit more resource intensive than raspberry pios but it still runs reasonably well I've also overclocked the P to 2 GHz my graphics card computer actually has a lot of benefits it's still able to Output 4K and it does so using just 3 to 5 wats which is almost 100 times less than a real 3080 wood as you can see I can even run it from a power bank it also takes up a fraction of the desk space that a fullsize desktop computer would it's also got no motherboard to fall out of during shipping or transport and lastly I can still game on it although granted the gaming quality and frame rate is quite a bit lower than what you'd get from a 3080 [Music] let me know what you think of my improved RTX 3080 gaming graphics card in the comment section below and let me know if you've got any suggestions on how I can further improve on it thanks for watching please remember to like this video If you enjoyed it and subscribe for more Tech in electronics projects tutorials and reviews [Music]

Channel: Michael Klements

Views: 5,263

Keywords: Nvidea, RTX3080, RTX, Graphics Card, Graphics, Raspberry Pi, SBC, Pi Case, Linux Gaming, Ubuntu, Super Tux Kart, The Battle For Wesnoth, Doom, Pi Gaming, PC, Mini Pc, 3D Printing

Id: LVZm9i_kEG4

Length: 8min 3sec (483 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 01 2023