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we selected the rog strix rtx 2080 ti graphics card for our test today because

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at full tilt the fans on this thing are easily the loudest thing in an average

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gaming system and also because it has a rated thermal design power or TDP of

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around 280 watts because here's the thing

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while folks with empty expansion slots have been strapping CPU coolers to their

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graphics cards for well over a decade now as far as we can tell very few have

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attempted it with something so hot and so power hungry so deepcool sponsored

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this video and sent over their assassin 3 CPU cooler and in order for this

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modification to be successful in my eyes it needs to accomplish three things

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one we need to see an improvement in gaming performance

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two i want a reduction in system noise

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at the same time three i want the whole experience to be

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less hassle than water cooling so that it's something we

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can legitimately actually recommend and finally four i want our loyal

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viewers to save some money compared to the aforementioned water cooling money

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that they can spend on great shirts like this ltdstore.com

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so our first task then is to remove the cooler from our graphics card your

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mileage may vary but ours was extraordinarily simple to take apart

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requiring only the removal of six phillips screws on the back side of the

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card now the only thing holding the two halves of our graphics card together is

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the thermal paste between the GPU die and the cooler so it should be as simple

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as just pulling up on the cooler

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et voila with a little bit of cleaning now we have an open faced 4352 cuda core GPU

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sandwich so now that everything's clean then we just need to remove these two

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plugs from the back of the board here for the fans and the RGB lighting and

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then finally we're going to remove these four standoffs right here from the

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cooler we're just gonna put those aside for now though more on that later now

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that that's done let's take a closer look at our card before we start piecing

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it back together we actually got really really lucky with this particular card's

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design because most of the components that need cooling are covered by this

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heat spreader right here which means that we don't need to go find a whack

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ton of little heat sinks for every ic that's soldered to the board in fact

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there's actually only one thermal pad on the stock cooler here and that's for the

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row of vrms right back here that we are

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going to need to actively cool so to handle that we went over to the

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workshop and machined this custom heatsink that we're going to attach to

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the pcb using some double-sided thermal adhesive tape now for a permanent

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installation i would probably use a lighter heat sink for one thing and then

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thermal epoxy but this will work just fine for our testing today now that the

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card's prepped we're gonna grab those standoffs that we put aside before as

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well as the screws that we took out of the back of the card

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and we are going to install the standoffs once more with all four of

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those mounted now we need to make a small modification to the mounting

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hardware that was included with our deep cool assassin 3 cooler

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so basically you've got two mounting brackets right here and each one of them

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needs an extra two holes at 70 millimeter hole spacing to match the

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standoffs we just installed it's a pretty simple mod if you have a drill

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press and what's really cool is that it doesn't damage your mounting brackets or

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your cooler in any way permanently so if you decided to move it onto your CPU or

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a different graphics card later on you would totally be able to do that

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and then putting that right on there and right on there

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now that our modified mounting bracket's installed we're coming up on the

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riskiest part of this whole operation because we're working with a bare die

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that doesn't have an integrated heat spreader we need to be extra careful

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when we're tightening our cooler down so we're going to go ahead and put a small

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line of thermal compound onto our GPU then

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we're going to line up our tower cooler making sure that our screw holes align

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with our bracket there before we start to tighten it down

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and then we're going to go nice and slow doing at most a half a turn on each side

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as we tighten the thing down all right let's give it a little wiggle

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yep and it's on that was it

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wow this thing's kind of massive uh now all we need to do is throw a

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couple of fans on you know the crazy part is it's not even that much heavier

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or even that much more sheer mass of metal than

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the original cooler it's just that when fans are allowed to work more

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efficiently they'll do a better job

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and that's it now all that remains is to plug this

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thing in and see how it runs but as you guys can plainly see this

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monstrosity won't fit in just any old case

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come on in guys

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safety first i like it nice nice belts thanks guys

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all right so after plenty of test fitting we landed on the Corsair 900d as

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our case it sports 10 pci express slots at the back which is

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important because as you can see this here

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tower cooler makes our card a bit of a thick boy both in terms of height

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and in terms of its length so it's worth pointing out by the way guys that you

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are by no means obligated to use such a

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large tower cooler for the mod if you've got a more reasonable size case you're

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just going to want to check the height dimensions of the cooler

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and make sure that it's going to fit into your case now of course because we

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have the luxury of using whatever case we want we decided to go full assassin 3

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beast mode but that is by no means an obligation i knew this was going too

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smoothly it wouldn't be an LTT video without some snafu obviously it would be

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better for our case airflow if we had the fans blowing this way so we just

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need to rotate our bracket 90 degrees

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that makes so much more sense

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well i give up trying to put these thumb

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screws in there's no way that's happening but something that's really cool is we actually went and

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cut a piece of acrylic to act as like a GPU support and you're gonna be like

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yeah well this does add a lot of weight but hey if you just you know go and put

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something like this in your case then your GPU will be fi yeah you know what

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the heatsink rests right up against the pci slots

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underneath look at that

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we finally came up with a solution for GPU sag problem solved to start with

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we've pre-configured that fan header that we plugged both of these fans into

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with a pretty aggressive profile and then what we're gonna do is tune it down

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from there until we reach both the level of performance and silence that we are

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hoping for um with that out of the way then i think

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that's it it's time for us to start our benchmarking

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sorry i made you cut this acrylic thing turns out this idea was more genius than

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either of us could have possibly known your time your money

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you sound like Jake ah you hear that

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it's the sound of silence i like it there's a song about that you

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know so to start with our GPU is running at a

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chilly 28 degrees at idle that's

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pretty much about what we'd expect now we're going to go ahead and run the

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built-in benchmark and shadow the tomb raider and see how it holds up

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here it is average FPS 119. so guys

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the results are in for all of our tests and while from a performance standpoint

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there isn't a huge jump for anything a few frames here or there there are

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definite gains in the cooling department check this out we're at

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55 degrees so the stock coolers fans run in excess

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of 3 000 RPM while our tower cooler

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maxed out at just 30 percent of that and

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while fan RPM and noise aren't exactly tied at the hip a bigger slower fan in

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general is a quieter fan and our results

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back that up not to mention that like

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i can barely hear this thing my mic's right here

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it's super quiet so then our performance is as good or better

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it's as quiet as it can be given the coil wine that's present on some of

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these high end cards and compared to water cooling we've not only saved a

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whack of time we've also saved a whack of money which only leaves us then with

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ease of use now compared to something factory finished with all the holes

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pre-drilled in it like a GPU water block

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this was admittedly slightly harder to install

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but compared to setting up the rest of a

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water cooling loop that you would need to go with your GPU block i would make

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the argument that this is actually more approachable not to mention that if

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something does go wrong it's less likely to be catastrophic because there's no

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water to leak all over the rest of your components so

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should you actually do this honestly it's a great mod especially if

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you're a silence freak or you have a dead or dying GPU fan that you want to

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replace on the cheap with that said i would probably dial things back a little

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bit from the way that we did it i mean the assassin 3 definitely has got the

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performance hutzpah but by stepping down a little bit to a

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120 millimeter variant or something we would have saved a lot of space

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improving our case compatibility quite a lot oh yeah one last thing guys

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if you're not adept at making heatsinks you can get little things like this that

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have pre-applied adhesive on like deal extreme and aliexpress and that kind of

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stuff so so don't worry about that anyway that was it thanks for watching

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if you guys enjoyed this video and you enjoy other sketchy cooling mods check

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out the link to one of our sketchy cooling videos we're gonna have that

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down in the video description see ya