- Hardcore over clocking is super simple. At least that's what I
thought a couple days ago. Unfortunately, I am not
an electrical engineer and we do not have a full
blown electronics lab. So we have ended up with this mess. RTX 3090 all the safety's disabled and a hijacked voltage
controller that has what? One, two, 12 ways it
could die at any second. I'm going to show you how
to do all of these mods. And while it might look very janky this could be the fastest GPU in Canada. And this madness is
brought to you by Seasonic. Mother (bleep). We're gonna be using their
1300 watt power supply and if it can survive
this 1000 watt RTX 3090 you're gonna be fine. (upbeat music) Here's the plan. To get a GPU to go really fast, you need current and voltage. Getting enough current is quite difficult. Nvidia has very tight limits on how much current a card
will draw for safety reasons preventing us from having too much fun. We'll need to trick it into thinking it is drawing less current than it actually is using shunt mod. We'll show you that in a minute. Voltage is also tough. For the last couple of generations, Nvidia hasn't given the
users voltage control but we'll be getting it back using this. It is a neat little device that allows us to bypass Nvidia and talk
directly to the voltage control so we can tell it to give the GPU as much voltage as we want. Before we can get to that though, we need to take some baseline readings to compare and model performance to. So just running 3DMark
for all of our tests, and it should be noted this
GPU isn't exactly stock. It was repasted with conductonaut and also has K5 pro as the thermal pads. That gave us about 6% increase over stock so we're already gonna
have pretty high scores just baseline. So our baseline score is 10,411. And during that, the GPU
drew maximum of 390 watts. Once this thing's overclocked, it's gonna be brutal
along this power supply. I'm gonna run the benchmark once more so we can get an actual
score that we can upload then the madness begins. Normally removing the cooler of a GPU is the easy part of a hard mod. Although today, oh God, it is not 'cause unfortunately I
absolutely caked this thing with K5 pro. The plan was to just never
open this thing again and it would just be a fast GPU, but here we are. All of this needs to leave
because unfortunately soldering to K5 pro is
not gonna be a good time. - Oh, I don't think
that's a soap and water kind of business. - Yeah big regrets. To up the current available on our GPU we have two options, a
BIOS mod or shunt mod. If you don't have access to
an electronics rework station a BIOS mod is probably your best bet. No need to trick the controllers to allow 1000 watts of power if your BIOS just accepts it. But not everyone can use this approach. For cards that aren't
regularly used by overclockers a BIOS mod probably just doesn't exist. And if it does exist,
good luck finding it. Model built overclocking BIOS
have to originate from Nvidia. So it is risky for the authorized person to post online for just anyone to take. If you want one for your card, just try asking around on
some overclocking forums or discord servers. One might end up in your DM's. But even with a thousand watt BIOS you might run into sneaky current limits. That's why today we're going
to be increasing current the hands on way, a shunt mod. Shunts are very simple circuits to allow a device to
find out how much current is being drawn. By measuring the voltage drop
across the shunt resistor, the control calculates the
current using Ohm's law. So current equals voltage
over top of resistance. By putting another resistor in parallel with a shunt resistor, we can drop the resistance and make the controller
think that it is using less current than it actually is. In our case, we're going to be soldering a 5 milliohm resistor
on top of the existing 5 milliohm resistors, meaning in software the
GPU power that is reported will be half of what is actually drawing. There is a second method. By placing liquid metal on
top of the shunt resistors you can effectively
increase your current limit but it is difficult to
control, makes your power readings just completely unreliable, can kill your GP if it's spills, and as a bonus, it'll eat
away at the soldered joints. I didn't want to deal with any of that so we are sticking to soldering. - How much trouble do we
get into if we kill a 3090? What did you guys do to this poor bit? It's got like goop over it. Chain man - (Beep) using it. - I know what happened to that. That's dead resistor juice in there, man. We got many solders in the- (laughter) Gotta clean your tips. That's a tech tip right there. Do we have solder oil here? Not dog poop stuff. - You don't want to just cover it in flux? - No, I'm good. It's probably not gonna work anyway so it doesn't really matter what- Oh, wow okay. - Yeah. It seems too high. - Yeah. Yeah for sure. How do you go down? This is not inspiring
confidence that we know what we're doing. Nah, I got it. Now you have to hold down
into six nine, I guess. All right. I'm gonna get a proper wire. You have the resistors right? - There we go. - Ye boy. That's why you guys were in
it like 800 degrees Celsius. It's 'cause it just
doesn't have enough heat. - Yep. Flux. - No, no. Oh what have I done to that resistor? I am so sorry. While you went to get the flux I figured out that we
gone and done goofed. These three shunts. - Yeah. - Are the ones that I
connected to the ground pins. So good thing that we had to go get flux because that would've been fun. Should do it. Ah, bull. Oh, it's making bubbly noises. I just, okay. Woohoo. It's such a
bad soldered iron Alex. - This isn't too bad of a soldering iron. Kyle's just complaining a lot. - Is this on? - It is. - Dude. It's on. I'm not joking. - Why is it so crap? Yeah. So the soldering iron
is at max like 220 degrees. - Oh that's 15 degrees
lower than what it needs. Like actually freaking mild solder. Ah (dog barking) Okay, so I'm not an angry person. - Typically. - I just like to shout at things - Watching a DerBauer video, you might think that
shunt mods are super easy. I certainly was fooled. The problem is that our 70
wat Hakko soldering iron really wasn't designed
for something like this. Nvidia did a great job designing this PCV to dissipate heat, which
means unfortunately, our 70 watt soldering iron
just cannot heat it up enough. There are a couple of ways around this. First you can buy a
bettering soldering iron and get the results we saw from DerBauer. Ultimately you can heat up the GPU. So stick it in a toaster oven you'd never plan on using it again. - You could set it on bake setting and set the bake temperature
to like 75 or 100. - Bake it until our
whole PCV reaches around 100 degrees Celsius and then
you can start soldering. Or you can put the GPU
on top of a toaster. In the end, we used option three. Checking our largest tip on
the end of our soldering iron for maximum thermal mass and
just setting the temperature to 900 degrees. That gave us an instant of flowing solder and a bunch of boiling flux. - It looks terrible. - With the current limits doubled the next thing we need
to do is gain control of the core voltage. Unfortunately since Kepler and Nvidia hasn't given the user voltage control to ensure our GTX customers
get the highest quality product that runs quiet,
cool and fits in their PC. Oh, and if one of their partners like MSI or ASUS gives
the user that control, the card can't be sold with a warranty. - [Buildzoid] Nvidia controls
the creation of GPU BIOS to like an absurd level. As far as I know, like the way it works is you log into like an Nvidia server, make your BIOS, then you
have to get permission from them so like actually get the file. - Fortunately, we do
have a solution for this. Where is our solution for this? Oh, here it is. We have this. The Elmer Labs enhanced
voltage controller or EVC-2SX. It works by connecting to the I2C bus, a communication bus allows
all the different components of your GPU to talk to each other to keep everything running as smoothly, and the EVC uses that bus to talk directly to the voltage controller. Most high-end GPU's these
days use digital voltage controllers but before you get an EVC, make sure your GPU is compatible. On most GPU's there will
be open I2C solder pads that were used for
debugging during production. Simply solder a header onto one of those and you can use the EVC. Once connected to the GPU, we can directly access
the voltage controller through the Elmer Lab software and set the voltage to
just whatever we want. There's no way we killed it. - Yep. - Right? - Yep. - It's totally fine. - Yep. Do you wanna hit the power supply? - Yep. We got it. She works.
- Yay. - She has the video title, "We did not kill a 3090
at this point in time". - With full control over GPU, how much can we improve performance? Well, with an air cooler, the results were worse than baseline. The card was drawing 600
watts and the cooler just could not keep up. So we needed some assistance. Who better to help with
hardcore overclocking than the man behind actually
hardcore overlocking himself, Buildzoid. - [Buildzoid] From
ambient, you're basically not gonna get much past
the stock voltage settings of these cards 'cause they
just run insanely hot. So if you keep raising the voltage, the internal temperatures rise faster than you gain stability
from extra voltage. - We have a couple of options. The one that you might
be thinking we would use is the chilled hastrophy
that's right here. The problem is, is that the
phase change block that I made doesn't seem to work as good as we hoped and needs a little bit of a redesign. Instead, and I'm really sad to say this, we're going to have to use this. Yeah, I don't even know
what to describe it as other than just like a
complete piece of (bleep). We made a video about
making this chiller nicer and in the process of making it nicer, it just got so much worse. It's in a box and it's
hard to see what's leaking and if it's leaking on
domains, voltage or whatever. Hopefully it works. I don't know. To hopefully make everything
work a bit better, I grabbed a bunch of spray foam and the plan is to
basically just (blowing air) just cover the whole thing in it. Hopefully that'll stop some
of the condensation issues internally. Oh. And also it is super heavy because I made it out of welded steel so I could get our welder set
up for doing the Pyramid PC. The back half of yesterday
was super productive. All of the electronics have been moved out and zip tied slash gaff
taped to the outside so that water will not
drip on them hopefully. All of the shunts have also been modded. You can see right here that
there's another resistor on top of all of them. It was just as painful as
before given our soldering iron. Finally, we need to
water cool this bad boy. Water blocks for it do exist but I would be concerned
about condensation that I wouldn't be able to
see forming on the inside. So instead we're just going
to use a generic VGA cooler which means unfortunately we
need to modify the VGA cooler. The problem is that the
design of it's really stupid. So if you look in here, the
dimension of the steel piece is what gets you your
clamping force on this O-ring. Super critical for this O-ring working and you not getting
water all over your GPU. That unfortunately means that
I'm going to have to make something completely different. We're gonna hack something up with an angle grinder and call it a day. Goodbye. Our CPU mounting plate is done. 'Cause I like you guys I
even polished this side. I just have to remove a bunch of K5 so we can install these
cute little heat sinks that are gonna be going
on the memory modules. It will hopefully keep them nice and cool. For thermal paste we're going to be using Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut. We don't have a heat spreader so if there's a spot that's not covered it might get hot and die. Last thing to do before
this goes back together hopefully some nice cheap insurance. I'm sorry, It's so I don't kill it. - [Brandon] I know, but like why? - This poor GPU, it didn't
deserve any of this. I really hope I don't kill this card. I know I've said that a lot, but like I wanna do more
hardcore overclocking. Chiller just ate 16 liters of water. If this thing doesn't
leak, I will be so happy. That'll take half a while to cool down but oh, there we go. So far so good. Is the air conditioner working? Oh, oh. oh it is. The real question is the pump. Holy crap. It just worked. We have water coming out of here. Is this leaking? I don't see any leaks here. Oh, that's definitely leaking. (bleep) what's that? - Looks like your spray
foam didn't do its job. So I think what's leaking is right here. Oh, that's gross. I need gloves for this. This has to be what's leaking. Oh my God, that's gross. Oh, this got out of hand something fast. Where is the drain port? I know that I included one. This is a mess, Brandon. You're not wrong there. I believe there was a drain
port on the bottom somewhere. Yeah. Let's get a bucket in there. Of all the ways that this was
going to go horribly wrong, this is not the way that
I expected it to happen. I'm sorry, viewers, that
you need to watch this. Oh, oh, where's the drain port. Okay. I see it. Everything's fine. I have a lot of water down my sleeves. - [Brandon] I bet you do. - GPU's going on the test bench. Block's fine. GPU's not leaking. That's all great. Water temperature's at 14
degrees, which is awesome. It's sub ambient, but not so cold that we're going to have
condensation issues. It's time that we boot her up. You already know this but don't do anything that we've
done in this video at home. It's all a bad idea. Like I've done some
pretty jank stuff before but this is primo jank. Yes. GPU is not dead. So GPU temperature is
currently at 11 degrees. You're not getting condensation but you are getting nice and cold. All of our powers look good. Do we have VRM temperatures on here? Everything right here seems
to be working pretty well. As long as you just
don't look back past it. It's boosting high memory
is getting kind of hot but it still is doing just fine. So VRM temperature in
the last run, 54 degrees. GPU temperature, 33. Fricking awesome. Memory's getting a little bit hot. We saw 96 degrees. We can probably cool
those down a bit better. On that last run we drew 360 watts, which is half of what we actually drew, which means we did what? 720 watts. And the GPU is at two gigahertz. This thing is freaking fast. It's finally time to do some overclocking. So I think we're gonna
be pretty easily able to get around 21, 2200
megahertz on this GPU although that doesn't really matter. Nvidia does this thing
called clock stretching so if the core voltage drops a little bit, to keep the GPU stable, they will for a couple of
cycles drop the frequency down and just not report it
in the software at all. So even though we might be
looking at 2200 megahertz or whatever, the thing that
really is going to tell us if it's good or not, is the 3DMark score. Now for those scores,
our baseline was 10,000. If we can get 11,000,
I'm going to be happy and if we can get 12,000 were like top 10 in the
world with this GPU. Let's fricking do it. Here's our first overclocked run. So this is plus 50 megahertz on the core. And our plan is to basically
just add 25 megahertz, see if it's stable. If it crashes, we add some more voltage. We just keep on going like that until either the thermals
or the VRMs or something just can't take it anymore. Go away Brandon. I'm gonna over clock
this for the next while and see if we can get a record. Okay. 10,900. I think that's slightly
more than we had baseline. Actually that's deadly close to 11,000. So we're just gonna keep on going. Let's see how far we can push it. So CPU it's at 5.5 gigahertz and I had to open the door back there so that it wouldn't keep on
thermal throttling on us. Anyway, GPU, isn't quite
as fast as I wanted. We are getting like 11,500 for our scores. Sometimes 11,700. That is a 12% increase over stock and stock was already
6% faster than stock. So like this is a lot
faster than a normal 3090. Problem is, that doesn't get us onto the 3DMark leader boards. I think it's just simply
a case of Silicon lottery. Like no matter what I do, can't get more than plus
100 megahertz on the core. So was all of this worth it? I guess it depends on
what you're trying to do. For a 12% performance increase? Like that is measurable. But at the same time you're risking a card that's infinite dollars
'cause you can't buy one. Yeah, there we go. 11,706. So that is obscenely fast. Our poor stupid chiller can
barely keep up with our 3090. It's outputting so much power. I don't think we're gonna be
able to get better than that. That said, I had fun. Is that a good
constellation prize Brandon? My leak bin filled up so I put a leak bin
underneath my leak bin. I guess I thought going into this that this was going to be super simple. Just, you know, chuck some
resistors onto the board and bippity boppity you
have a super fast 3090. Turns out it's not that easy. There's no good reason to do this besides you have fun making
your scores get nice and high. What's also a lot of fun is Seasonic. They sponsored this video
and I'm honestly shocked that I was able to use a single power supply. I brought two of them over here thinking that I have to
run both of them because CPU's drawing 400 watts, card's drawing a pretty consistent 800, that's like 1200 watts. I kind of thought it was gonna conk out and it didn't so excellent job Seasonic. This is a real stress
test of your power supply and you passed. They also have a 12 year warranty. I run it in my system at home and they're just high
quality of power suppliers. What else more do you want? So if you like this video
hit like, get subscribed. Do you wanna see more
hardcore overclocking stuff? I kind of want to. 6.9 gigahertz CPU. I wouldn't mind doing that. And if you wanna watch something else, maybe watch when we sub zeroed
the alien where Area 51 M. That was ridiculous.
