RIP BATTLE: Modded RTX 3090 Overclock & Optimus Water Blocks (#RIPPAUL, #RIPJAY)

so now that paul and jay have gone tryhard mode with their sli 3090 configs it's time for us to put something together and for our next venture into rip jay and rip paul we need to go really really big this time and use some of these on the 30 90s before that this video is brought to you by squarespace squarespace is what we've been using for years to manage our own gamer's nexus store and we've been incredibly happy with the choice squarespace makes ecommerce easy for those interested in starting stores but it also has powerful tools to build all types of websites photo galleries for photographers resume and portfolio sites and small business sites are all easily done through squarespace having built a lot of client websites the old way before running gn full-time we can easily recommend squarespace as a powerful fast solution go to squarespace.com gamersnexus to get 10 off your first purchase with squarespace so as a reminder if you haven't seen the previous rip series challenges we've done the whole point of it originally was jay and i wanted to push ourselves and do things that were out of our comfort zone with working with hardware and with overclocking so last time we did this challenge i learned about chilled water dry ice and eventually got into liquid nitrogen overclocking and jay took a similar path using some different methods he went more for dry ice and we didn't try that until much later but we each took different paths to achieve competitive scores this time because we've already done the chilled water stuff i decided i wanted to try and improve by learning how to hard mod a card and so one of the better ways to do that initially is to just solder some shunt resistors on top of the other shunt resistors i learned this from high cookie in taiwan recently and now it's time to apply that knowledge and try and do it without the oversight of a pro overclocker one of the other things i'd like to try and do hard mods for this time would be potentially a volt mod or something similar to that so this is going to be a good learning exercise uh jay has been considering doing some mods as well so this is kind of the the path we're going to take this time since we've already exhausted a lot of the chilled water and exotic cooling solutions and v-bios is an easy way to get more power but shunt resistor mods are just more accessible to everybody because you don't need access to a specialty bios so plan today a couple things we're going to do a shunt mod on the 3090s on the f2w3s i actually behind the scenes i already did this once on this card and then we had an issue where it was not booting and i was worried it was because of that but it wasn't it was because of an entirely unrelated issue which is now resolved but that ate about six to eight hours or so of troubleshooting uh but the card works and so we're gonna shunt modded again except this time on camera i need to do this twice i'll show you how you check which shunts you would short i'm not like a a pro at this and my soldering works terrible but i know which shunts to short and we've actually also shorted the fuses which you should not do because the fuses are there for a specific reason but we did it to get around another unrelated issue that i'm not going to go into today so we're going to piggyback shunt resistors on top of these five uh we will be using eight milliohms shunt resistors as opposed to previously we've used five for some mods we've used three but the problem is if you change the resistance too much so you go down to like five or three then what you're going to do is reduce the effective power target that's visible or that's reported to you so like take gpu z for example if you run five and five piggyback shunt resistors you might end up with let's just pull some numbers out of the air here maybe 75 percent power target as read by gpuz whereas natively you would see 100 power target if you do five and eight you might see something like 80 power target or 85 power target or whatever the case may be dependent on uh the baseline power that you're multiplying against so our plans do five and eight that's going to be a bit safer than five and five just from the perspective of not creating a scenario where it gets stuck into 2d clocks we can always reverse the mod but ideally we get it right the second time so 5 and 8 should bypass any issues where the gpu will go into a safety mode if you tamper with the power too much and you'll not be able to boost above with 350 megahertz or something like that so it's very obvious when it doesn't work and then you reverse it at that point so that's our plan today some soldering and then new cooler assembly okay so first i'm going to show you how we check which shunts are going where this we've shown this several times we show this in most of our tear downs uh at one point or another anyway and it's pretty simple we're just gonna do a you can do resistance and then check one leg of the shunt and then check one of the 12 volt lines and if you don't know which ones are 12 volts just like a pcie pin out we also have them conveniently on our mod mats on store cameras access dot net if you would like to look there instead so for example we can take this shunt down here and uh these have obviously have worked on them already that's why they're a mess i'm not good at soldering let me make that extremely 100 clear i don't do this very much just done a couple shunt mods in the past unlike the titan rtx's so check one leg there and then i think this one probably goes up to to this power connector so we're gonna hit the 12 volt if you look at the multimeter to my right you'll see that these are connected so that shunt will go to that one we're going to short the only thing i'm checking right now is to make sure i'm not shorting any shunts that go to the pcie slot so if you short one that goes to the pcie slot that's not a good idea the slot can't really take that much power to begin with these cards are kind of borderline to over drawing already oh there it is okay so this one down here uh jay if you're watching here's how you do this mod i think jay might have an unlocked v bios which we've done in the past too it's definitely easier but i haven't gotten that and i think this would be fun so this one is going to the middle power connector so i'm going to use a board pre-heater i've got a fan we talked about all this stuff in our side channel video i've got a fan just to pull fumes away and we're going to shove a thermocouple in here that's going to give us board temperature and then we're gonna set the board heater based on that that's quick my understanding is that flex helps the joints bind i don't know if it heats it up or what but it helps it binds together lewis rawson's got a really good short video on it like i was having trouble heating that up a second ago and melting it and now it's working a little better so i think that's partly why not really sure i don't know what i'm doing ah okay so we're done doing the chunt resistor mods they're all piggybacked on there now i did a quick test with just a liquid nitrogen pod on it using liquid nitrogen not for the competition just for seeing if the mod worked and it does get the power limit as we expect so we're seeing like uh 60 to 80 percent range of power utilization instead of 100 previously which means we've expanded the amount of power that the card can take significantly and that's without getting a v bios pro or a v bios to flash onto it i think jay might have one of those like a fully unlocked v bios we don't but the end result is about the same with the shunt resistor mod uh and it's technically something you can reverse obviously v-bios is always a lot easier so if you can't find one then awesome but if not you could go the same route we just did and do a shunt resistor mod so we're gonna be adding water blocks now this time we reached out to optimus i actually haven't worked with optimus blocks before so optimus makes everything in chicago and this is the first time we're working with them these blocks are basically prototypes we got some of the first samples that they've made for the ftw3 they were really uh really wanted to make sure we said that the way they were shipped and packaged is not how you all would have to work with them if you got one of the optimus blocks so for example because i was pushing them on timelines a bit they said where they would normally laser cut a sheet of thermal pad to make it easy for a user to install or have it pre-installed on the block what they shipped us instead was a big thermal pad that i will have to cut and install on the block so i'm looking forward to that half hour but you won't have to do that from where i understand uh if you buy it once it's actually a finished product so we got early samples in um they look pretty good so here's the blocks the it's a massive piece of acrylic optimus was keen to tell us that this should not be easily cracked by even hand tools although we would need to see it subjected to the josta ponzi bearded hardware test to really know if that's true for every human or actually i don't know if he's a human so maybe it's true for every human but not whatever he is the water block for so the micro fins on this are very densely populated and a lot of open loop coolers you'll see larger micro fins that are more spaced the closed loop solution actually we have one back here it's kind of kind of nasty and like oxidized but it still gets the point across so this is from a closed-loop liquid cooler typically the approach they take for these is skiving and we have shots of like if you look apart how a water cooler has made factory tour video where we visited deep cool and cooler master you'll see it but typically closed loop stops made with skiving where a machine pushes the metal and bends it and bends it straight and it does that for every single one of these takes forever they can only make normally a couple of these cold plates per hour per machine which is a large part of the cost of close loop cooling solutions this is not made with skiving from what i understand but it's denser and the space between the bottom of the block so the actual contact patch the cold plate and the microfins should be reduced versus some of the other manufacturing methods like what we saw at bits power when we did a factory tour there where you have it you end up with a thicker cold plate and more distance to travel to get to where the actual microfins are and that increased distance is sub-optimal you have you always want to get to your ultimate cooling solution as fast as possible with as few interfaces as little distance as possible so this should be really high performing our understanding is that this is still a prototype but they've done some initial testing and they were happy with the results the reason this works the way it does is because the whole back plate is used to tension the whole block onto the cart so rather than just having the screws where the gpu is uh we should get pretty even tension across the whole thing what i'm gonna do is actually when i mount it i'm gonna take a torque driver check the torque at whatever screw i'm happy with for the uh the mounting pressure and then i'll apply that same torque across all of them so that we can make sure we get even mounting but uh you could also check by just making sure that pcb is not bending at all because the quote kingpin if it's a pcb bending like a banana then there's probably a mountain problem this back plate will end up with a huge thermal pad let me find that so here's the thermal pad this is a i think three millimeter thick fuji poly pad and i'm gonna try and break it free without cutting the pad itself okay so our instructions from uh optimus when they said you know hey this is a prototype but here's how to do it our instructions for them were to literally just cover the whole back plate so easy enough what i'm going to do is cut it to size we'll cut this end off since it bleeds over there i guess i'll shift it probably shift it to this part of the card maybe to cover more of the actually let's look at this okay so there's a little bit of an indent here that would be for where the led previously was on the evga card but i intentionally removed one and then i accidentally melted the other one with the board heater so it is no longer with us but that's where that would go if it didn't melt and uh so what i'm going to do is take the access thermal pad and shove it up here and probably down here and that'll be where the inductors and the mosfets are so not that it'll at that point do a whole lot but a little bit of extra contact between the pcb and the back plate where the vrm is will do us the most good if out of all the options so as a reminder here's what the card looks like on the back we've got memory modules and the back of the gpu socket in our teardowns we always advocate for more thermal pads on the back some of the cheaper cards you'll see a back plate sometimes even a plastic one like the old gigabyte stuff that literally does nothing and can even trap heat if there's nothing to transfer it so in this instance the backplate is being used to sync heat and uh and then we'll have fans on it to actively dissipate so that will get the maximum usage out of it we're going to make sure there's contact for the memory and for most of the vr app i'm going to do is just apply pressure we'll cut out the holes where the where the standoffs are for the screws so these holes we're going to drive longer screws through into the plate and then these will screw in through the pcb so pcb sits on top of it like this uh we'll have some hex screws that go through here to hold those the pcb on the back plate together and then the block will go this isn't the correct orientation but the block will go on top and and then the longer screws will hold that on this thermal pad's ridiculous three millimeter thick fuji poly pad is not cheap i'm not sure what they pay but i know what i would pay retail and i think they're actually planning to ship this with the block too so definitely the way to get the best uh use out of all your surface area even if it it isn't like finned like a back plate often isn't but also expensive so let's line this up i think the board where was that dent i've covered it i think it was over here on the on this side so oh yes if you haven't noticed among the things i've learned in this rip jay challenge talking about using it as an opportunity for us to each learn uh soldering burns one of the many things i've learned we're going to remove all these thermal pads these are the original evga ones so i'm going to carefully peel these and then that's there's hair on that one and then i'm going to scrub this thermal putty off of the inductors let's just cut this like right before that bend and then the rest of this one will go over where the vrm is oh that's just through a hole okay so that's what we're gonna do next is uh go through each of these on this side is that reflecting the camera you see yourself go through each of these and make sure there's a path for the screw all right so we're going to grab a what is this a 1.5 from the gn toolkit 1.5 millimeter allen and i think some of this might be like pre-assembled or it'll certainly have instructions and stuff for the retail model but um this is you know i received the prototype so this is how we're working with it just screws straight from the supplier these are 1.5 ml hex heads assuming that's what they end up using in the retail model i'm just going to get them all in place and then we'll tighten them down more thoroughly after make sure they're all accounted for i think there should be five or six for the back plate okay is it bending like a banana no it's pretty even okay cool so i'm just looking along here uh looks like we're good to go pretty even spacing contact's good so now i'm just going to remove these thermal pads and then we'll do the pad installation on the block side i'm gonna clean off the blocks one more time if they need it and uh and that'll be it for setting up for water cooling okay so got the cards done we're picking up now a couple days later between all the other stuff we've been doing and this is the start of the test bench for the actual rip j benchmarking now that we've got the cards water blocked and everything so this was problem we had before was i was using a test bench next to a test bench and the test bench was to uh use pcie risers to separate the cards and get them the right spacing for nvidia's four slot sli bridge for whatever reason nvidia in its infinite wisdom decided to do a four slot spacing for its only first and only nv link bridge there will be more later but that's the first one that came out and for my board partners tell us they sell boards nine to one for three slot spacing versus what this is which is four slot spacing we look through our own inventory and we have one board other than the x299 stuff that we don't want to use that has four slots so anyway we're doing risers and in order to get some more stability this time versus what we did last time what we used was patrick went and pulled this panel out from a case labs sm 800 sma-8 whatever it's called the massive case labs case that we previously reviewed so case labs out of business these days unfortunately but this this uh construct from them is still serving us today and it's just the motherboard tray and the back panel from the case that can be pulled out separately so we've done that we've pulled it out so we're using this to give some stability and rigidity to the cards problem i had with the previous setup was there was nothing really securing them and now that we're adding water blocks that are as heavy as these are i'm a little bit worried about things kind of moving around or also just becoming more difficult to relocate things if i need to so this bench will fix that i have temporarily uh screwed in this dual pump so i'd like to use d5 pumps because they should be a little bit better for this but dual ddc is the best i have immediately available and i just took a radiator screw and shoved it into the motherboard tray to support it enough to keep it in place anyway and then this is uh masterfully secured to the table so you you won't see many people doing this but that's because it's um moving on so we've got that running down to the huge radiator this is a mora 3 radiator and the mora 3 has served us through several of these rip challenges before we'll probably be putting it in an ice bucket soon enough i want to start with just water and see if we can beat the scores that they've posted with only water but we'll see and let's see i don't even know where i've got everything running so that's coming out of the pump into the rad and then the red will spit it out to the video cards up here we're going to do uh this card will be first in the loop this will be second and then there's no cpu in this loop where it's taken with an arctic 360 clc for the cpu because that's good enough for now and it'll reduce the amount of heat that's getting cooled by the same liquid cooler which will make it'll give me some extra headroom reduce things a couple degrees potentially and pull another 200 something watts out of this loop and put it in its own discrete loop so that's the plan i think i'll probably mount i don't know 200s i guess maybe four 200s to the mora three we could also do nine 140s i think it is but we'll probably go with four 200s and see how that does so let's get the cards so here's the cards uh this is they've got a little bit of water in them but still needs to be filled my weakest point is going to be the qdcs these are quick disconnects we have these to make the cards easily removable from the loop removing the cpu from the loop also means we're going to be dealing with fewer qdcs these impede flow and that's going to be our weak point now for the fittings we're using stuff that can accommodate these large diameter zmt hoses so these are i think it's zero maintenance tubing is what it stands for but these are zmt tubes we found these work the best for chilling things below ambient because uh they will take longer to build condensation and also the wider internal diameter will help with flow but bigger thing is just reducing condensation risk so that we don't have to insulate quite as much so installing these won't be super fun i actually i had this on a board heater that's why there's some condensation in there because i was trying to heat up a couple droplets of water that ended up in the pcb so i put that on the board heater to heat that out so it's kind of still a little hot but let's see that's going to go on the first slot these are so heavy these blocks okay so the cardboard i have down is just in between the cables so that they're not like stabbing each other too hard so that we uh we don't have to worry about like piercing the underlying one with the weight and the spikes in the pcie slot for the other one so there's the hard socketed uh just need to connect the tubes now and see if everything works and i guess i guess this will be hopefully this will be as high performing as i think with these blocks on the capacitor or the shunt mod rather because i'd really like to not go to chilled right away all right so we had some water movement those are connected and i'm going to connect this to the radiator so the coldest water will hit the gpus right away which will be useful if we go to children a bit i see if they flood they're not flooding so we're good cool well for all of you who have posted asking us to look at components made in the u.s this is about the most america build you can get because we've got optimus blocks from chicago and then the case labs uh bench what's left of case labs anyway so we'll see see how the blocks do they're not leaking that's good and now we're just going to need to fill water turn the pump on run the pump for a bit and hopefully hopefully if everything is leak-free we can just throw fans on the radiator and get going i lost the cap for this somewhere so this is how we're doing it the tape is just to keep stuff from falling into it not to keep the water in to be clear pretty sure that won't help this needed power so we're plugging power in and now plug this in and turn power on is it not going i guess i'll wait anyway okay power test see if the water goes i might need to lower the pump that's so annoying i need to get the water above the pump this loop always takes forever to fill with the massive radiator i'm probably have to put like a gallon of water in here and as you can see there's a lot of air bubbles in the loop so i'm just trying to get it into the pump i don't remember what the lion and lion king is but i feel like i should say it you can boost andrew's audio for that it's not really working oh there it goes all right sure why not finally got some water movement wow that's some very rapid water movement nice just gotta saturate the loop fully uh something just fall in there no don't go through the hell is that that was in there ew i don't know what that is what the hell is that there's an alien growing in our water is there more of that in there is that it i think that was it so there's still a lot of air bubbles in the loop as you can see in the blocks but that'll work out and i will kind of let it run and see if there any leaks develop or anything like that but in the very least that'll get it started and then kind of refill if we need to i'm going to get a proper cap for that thing though we'll steal it off of another one so loop order is i will just start here so this block water comes in from the radiator the bottom of it comes out here goes in there comes out here and then that'll go into [Music] the um it's a little murky at the top but whatever it's not gonna be built that long comes into the reservoir and then out here into the pump out of the pump back into the top of the um the radiator tubes are super long so it is definitely a lot of work for the pump to do but i wanted them to be long enough that we could get it into a tank filled with ice water later so that's the main problem we run into could add a third pump to the loop but the flow does look okay right now we just need the air bubbles to work out and this actually the water level on this side of the block has risen quite a bit since i looked at it a second ago so it's slowly starting to sort itself out the acrylic on these terminals is absolutely insane this optimus acrylic they're telling me on the phone they're like yeah you're not gonna be able to break that acrylic if you try i mean they're right i torqued the hell out of these uh these fittings and the acrylic is huge and the waterways inside are huge there's a lot of flow in this setup i hope that's enough to deal with the heat load we're gonna be dealing with but we'll find out all right so that's gonna be the end of the bench investment we'll show a shot of the system and the score but i'm really impressed with the scores that system put up so i spent probably about six hours or so doing some final tuning on well i guess i won't reveal that yet because then jay will copy it but i did some final tuning and spent a good amount of time on it ran only water no chilling no no cardboard shoot hooked up to an air conditioner into the front of the radiator the n score 29 242 points that puts jay within about five to 600 points or so of where we are as of today and he's running if you look at his 3d mark score at 17 degrees celsius so we were running at 25 c for that that is with the room ambient temperature dropped down to 18 c so that's total room temperature 18 degrees celsius and now that's getting colder outside that's much easier to achieve at night so that helped a bit but the optimus blocks i'm very impressed i've never worked with optimus before and the delta is consistently under 10 degrees above ambient which is actually kind of crazy so and that's overclocked so really good blocks one of the other tricks i had to use was waiting for the entire system to cool down not just the gpus but just leaving the system alone for two hours between runs gained me like 200 points it was ridiculous so i talked to joe from bearded hardware and his theory that's all that this is right now but both of us kind of think there's some kind of heat soak going on in the gpus where even though technically the exposed gpu sensor that we see for temperature is cooled down back to like a steady state idle uh it's still behaving as if there's some amounts of thermal strain on it so we were thinking maybe there's just maybe it's in the memory maybe there's some soap going on where you just start to lose stability over time after multiple runs as the whole board heats up obviously not just the gpu and the memory so anyway leaving it alone for about two hours and then firing off another run moved us from 29 000 dead to 29 242 and at this point i've done i think absolutely everything i can do to catch jay's score we've passed paul we've passed bps customs who has joined the battle welcome brian and now it's just jay ahead of us and to get there we need ice the good news is with the scores that we're posting now without ice or without dropping the ac to 10 15 degrees or so we have better efficiency than jay does so once we move to the same cooling solution he's on we should be able to beat his score pretty easily but he's obviously going to escalate as well so that'll be fun i started looking into doing volt mods on the card it's gonna take some dexterity that i'm not sure i have with the soldering iron yet but i am now i spoke with a couple people and my appreciation to those who shared their knowledge with me and hopefully we could do it but i'm not really sure i have the skills yet so we might try that but that's that's where you get into territory we can kill a card if you do it wrong so anyway 29242 that's officially ripped paul paul was on uh ice i think and we're on just water so uh paul back to you and in the meantime we'll start working on jay's score next we'll probably do a stream of it and uh make sure you check back to catch that stream thanks for watching a lot of fun as always learning a lot working on this the volt mods i i don't know if i'll do them but i've learned a ton about how they work in general and it's really expanding my personal knowledge for working on video cards so my hope is that we can sort of apply this going forward to reviews and things where it'll really influence our main content just by learning through this competition so that's always the point of these competitions they're fun and it's a great learning opportunity to push ourselves more so that's it for this one thanks for watching subscribe for more as always you can go to store.camerasaccess.net or patreon.com slash gamers nexus helps out directly and we'll see you all next time [Music]

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 404,239

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, shunt mod, evga rtx 3090 ftw3 review, evga rtx 3090 ftw3 shunt mod, ampere shunt mod, overclocking evga rtx 3090 ftw3, ripjay, #ripjay, #rippaul, jayztwocents, paul's hardware, overclocking competition

Id: S1EiRjZH8Xk

Length: 35min 3sec (2103 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 17 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Orgell_Evaan]

At least Optimus will be able to keep up with 30-series production...

[u/erthanas]

Those are some fancy af blocks

[u/ttko_]

I don’t know about Optimus. Have they ever released their 2080 waterblocks ? They look good but if they can’t produce them, what’s the point? I hope they follow through because I actually need a water block for an EVGA card.

[u/destiny2sk]

those blocks are probably 50-100$ more than regular blocks, not many will buy it

[u/favdulce]

Is that huge gap between the backplate and the acrylic typical for gpu blocks?