DIY Single Slot GTX Titan Mod!
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
1,647 words · ~8 min read
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motherboards these days can have so many expansion slots for adding new
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functionality that most people don't even know what to do with them all at
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least in theory because thanks to Modern
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graphics cards ballooning thermal output almost none of them are available with
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single slot coolers meaning that if you want to run a single graphics card you
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take up two of your expansion slots you want to run two boom you just took up
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four of your expansion slots now the solution to this used to be very simple
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you take your graphics card you rip that cooler off of it and then you go ahead and you put a water block on it so that
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you can actually install something in the slot right next to it without
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compromising the cooling well not if NVIDIA or AMD have anything to say about
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that check this out here's a couple of modern cards you see the problem they
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have connectors in the next slot over so we're going to show you guys how to take
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care of that and uh single slot ay a modern
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GPU
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tunnel bear is the easy to use VPN service that lets you browse the web as
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if you're in one of 20 different countries check out the link in the
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video description to learn more so I'm actually going to start with a A
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pre-water cooled card the purpose of this video is not to be a comprehensive
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guide on how to water cool your graphics card because we've actually done that
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before you can check out that video right around here no this one is just
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intended to address the difficulties
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associated with water cooling a card that has IO that's in the slot next to
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it you know whether you're trying to just increase the number of slots that
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you have access to or whether say for example there's a particular type of
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slot that's being covered that you need well this should help you and then again
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last thing to be clear I'm not necessarily recommending that you do
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this because while we will be taking what I believe will be the appropriate
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precautions to ensure that our card still works at the end of this your
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mileage may vary considerably and this is not the kind of guide that you will
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find anywhere on you know I don't know AMD or NVIDIA's
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website so the first step is to find yourself the appropriate cutting wheel
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so we're just going to be using one of the standard cutting discs and not or
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reinforced cutting discs rather and not the uh nubbing of a one that was on
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there four step number two is to remove
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the rear IO plate from the card this
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will subject the card itself to less
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metal shortage uh all over the place than if I
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were to try and cut this while it was attached there we
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go but before doing that we are going to
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mask off any exposed PCB parts of the
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card as well as we possibly can can to
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avoid any metal splinters or shards um
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causing shorts on the board by just getting lodged into places and bridging
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contacts so I have this handy dandy bag that's exactly the size of a video card
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that I'm going to try and use for that with a water block on it a video card is
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no longer exactly the size of a video card that's okay we'll just take it
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together mask off the
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Bo okay so the last thing to consider before the point of no return which we
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are about to Embark upon is whether or not you need this connector so this is a
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DVI D whereas this is a dvii so that
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actually leaves us with DVI VGA though not at the same time although I think
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there are split I'm not actually sure don't quote me on that one DVI or VGA
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HDMI and DisplayPort on this particular card so as long as we don't need dual
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DVI then we should be pretty much good to go now in theory this should work
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because a disconnected connection is still a disconnected connection whether
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it's here at the connector or whether it's here at the well we sought it off
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there so um I guess without any further stalling
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it's dremeling time let's get our vacuum
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cleaner in position you know it's called a vacuum
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cleaner but you would never use it to clean a vacuum I mean by this logic a
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car wash should use a car to wash something be up to the editor whether
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that gets left in or
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not wow that's
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uh that's a little uh that's yeah that's steel that's a little tougher than I was
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hoping I think we're going to bring out the big guns
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here a crap
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I cut my damn
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vacuum now I didn't cut it much I only cut it a
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little cool oh
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wow so there you have it our DV D
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connector has been cleanly sheared off I
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don't know exactly what difference this will make
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but my sort of Common Sense would
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dictate that you want to take these uh these connector wires here and separate
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them so none of them are contacting each other what's left now is to do our PCI
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back plate now with many cards in the past it was possible to buy these single
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slot back plates that just had the io cutouts on the one side and and nothing
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no ventilation slots on the other side but nowadays because there's IO here no
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one really sells those anymore so we're just going to have to uh we're just
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going to have to make do and just kind of eyeball it here it's really not as
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tight as I'd normally like something like this to be
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held okay in theory a single
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slot bracket I need a file though the are
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really
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sharp ow okay so now all that's left then is
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to reassemble our GTX Titan oh you can see
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it is a really good thing that we masked
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off our video card there you can see those metal shards that were're flying
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around also we're going to be careful now then to keep this video card
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oriented this this way so that those don't fall out towards the car so we're
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going to use a little technique that I call alcohol bath washes away our
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problems all right so now we can put our freshly modded back plate on there ah
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there we go a
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yes oh no I dropped all the
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screws there you go look at that it almost looks natural if you ignore
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this the last thing left now is to make
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sure that our card still
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works boom let's go get some
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water okay Moment of Truth time let's find out if the sucker Works post code
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55 what does that mean oh I don't have time for this right
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now these fans are not plugged in okay let's try
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it again postcode 55 what are you so it
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seems like it may be RAM related so I'm
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going to go ahead and pop one of these sticks out come on video card yeah woo I
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mean there's no real reason this shouldn't have worked I shouldn't be that excited but there you go it works I
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mean oh I guess what I haven't shown yet is installing a card next to it let's
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say we wanted a PCI press SSD oh what the heck it's PCI
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e2x okay I need a 1x card where am I going to get a 1x card okay so let's say
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you needed a TV tuner look I don't have to have a good
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reason for doing these things sometimes it's just because I
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can boom TV tuner installed let's get it
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uh booted up into an operating system now
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cool well I'm kind of stoked on this if
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no one else cares I mean what's the point of these fancy motherboards with
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all these slots if you can only use half of them right so I think that pretty
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much wraps it up then guys thank you for watching if you disliked this video then
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I must have done something interesting
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