we selected the rog strix rtx 2080 ti 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 expansion slots 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 deepcool sponsored
this video and sent over their assassin 3 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
two 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 ltdstore.com
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 die and the cooler so it should be as simple
as just pulling up on the cooler
et voila 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 going to 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 card's
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 whack
ton of little heat sinks for every ic that's 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 heat sink for one thing and then
thermal epoxy but this will work just fine for our testing today now that the
card's 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 3 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 the
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 onto your CPU or
a different graphics card later on you would totally be able to do that
and then putting that right on there and right on there
now that our modified mounting bracket's 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 going to go ahead and put a small
line of thermal compound onto our GPU then
we're going to line up our tower cooler making sure that our screw holes align
with our bracket there before we start to tighten it down
and then we're going to go nice and slow doing at most a half a turn on each side
as we tighten the thing down all right let's give it a little wiggle
yep and it's on that was it
wow this thing's kind of massive uh 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 mass of metal than
the original cooler it's just that when fans are allowed to work more
efficiently they'll 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
all right so after plenty of test fitting we landed on the Corsair 900d as
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 size case you're
just going to want to check the height dimensions of the cooler
and make sure that it's going to 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 too
smoothly it wouldn't be an LTT 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 and you're gonna be like
yeah well this does add 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 fi yeah 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 um 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
you sound like Jake ah you hear that
it's the 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 going to 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 department check this out we're at
55 degrees so the stock coolers fans run in excess
of 3 000 RPM while our tower cooler
maxed out at just 30 percent 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 mic's 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 wine 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 water block
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 hutzpah 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 heatsinks you can get little things like this that
have pre-applied adhesive on like deal extreme 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 see ya