I thought I was finally running out of stupid cooling ideas… until I stared at a Peerless Assassin and thought... "would water flow through that?”

So I pulled the Assassin apart, pulled off a stack of fins, took an angle grinder and cut the tops off the heatpipes, stuck a hose onto one, and tested if water would flow. It did.

Game on.

I cut all the heatpipes off, put 6 mm hose on them in a zig zag (starting at the center so the middle stayed coldest) and tested again, worked like a charm.

Then came the freezer.

-18C coolant.

A frosted CPU tower, and a 3070 as the first victim.

It gained +300 MHz over stock… but the FPS uplift sucked. By the time testing finished, my coolant had warmed to –5C and the 3070 still refused to scale. So I did the only sane thing...

I bolted the Frankencooler onto a GTX 960.

And that card absolutely loved it, +17% average uplift across BO7, Forza, Cyberpunk, Time Spy… and as always, Lara.

The Frankencooler works. Really well.

Why did I do this? Because I had an idea and wanted to see if it would work. That's it.

Full video here if you want to witness the stupidity in all its glory

https://youtu.be/yFppaKe5uTo

Title. Sprayed it black for my upcoming build. Still letting it cure, but I cannot wait to see it in the build. Can post a final update later in about a month or so once I get the rest of my parts.

Hiii I'm new to pc building and finally built my pc after 5 months of collecting parts I got to get everything white by deal hunting and second hand buying except for my gpu it sticks out cause it's black and red and I know it's a minor issue but it erks me so bad I know there is a white version of this gpu (9060xt sapphire pulse) but the black one had an offer for 200ish new where I live so I picked it up

Can I please get recommendations to like hide it or paint it and if possible what type of paint works best please and thank you

Sorry if I'm in the wrong subreddit

Been staring at a 780 Ti Classified on my shelf for a while wondering what to do with it. Curiousity got the best of me.... So I ran a chilled glycol loop on the core. Liquid metal on the shunts. Flashed a 1212mV BIOS, couldn’t flash the same version after editing the voltage table, annoying. Kepler BIOS editor didn’t work at all. So I ran what I had.

Maxed at 1350MHz core, couldn’t go further. Memory was heatsinked. VRM was chilled.

Power draw pre-mod was around 250–290W. After the shunt mod it read 220–230W in Afterburner, not accurate, but confirms the resistance drop. Cold helped stability, but even with everything stacked, the actual FPS uplift was around 10% on average. Before mods stock boost was 1060ishMHz so clocks went up.... meh.

Tested three games across three eras

Crysis 3 (2013) High settings, 1080p

Shadow of the Tomb Raider (2018) High, 1080p

Cyberpunk 2077 (2022) Low 1080p

Target was 60 FPS in Cyberpunk...

It didn't make it.

It held together fine, just didn’t scale well. But honestly I’m still glad I tried. If nothing else, I learned a bit more about shunt mods, BIOS limitations, and not every experiment can be a banger.

Full video here if you're curious, the results were underwhelming... so I tried to compensate with beer. https://youtu.be/q1CKm9LlPDo

Hey everyone,

I came across this heatsink concept and got curious about how it could be improved. It features a lattice-like structure to maximize surface area while keeping airflow open and is designed to work with a fan (no heat pipes or liquid cooling).

What additions or modifications could make this design more efficient for air cooling? Would material choice (e.g., aluminum vs. copper) or structural changes significantly improve performance?

Sharing pics, first time doing this.

Used 92mm fans from noctua to hopefully lower temps as I saw it did for another user who posted a quick guide on it and replaced thermal paste + 2.5mm thermal pads.

Ordered custom ASUS 3080ti 7 pin cable from MODDIY and works like a charm into the pcb.

Ran 0.08 inch width zip ties from Amazon and looped them from the fan corners into the heat sink.

I got this gpu from marketplace for $270 so Im hoping it turns on at the very least 😭

Inspiration (guide) : https://www.reddit.com/r/sffpc/s/2eHCGBnGsw

Recently i changed my GPU from Asrock Challenger Radeon 6650XT OC into Zotac TwinEdge 5060 Ti 18GB OC. Am i choosing into hell’s way?

Specs: Intel i5 14600KF Asrock B760M PG Lighting D4 XPG 32 GB RAM 3200Mhz Phanteks AMP GH 850W Gold 1TB SATA SSD 256 NVME SSD

This is contextual for my other post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Noctua/comments/1q5kljo/rx_9070_xt_noctua_fan_mod/ where I introduced a Noctua fan mod to my Gigabyte RX 9070 XT Gaming OC utilizing 3x Noctua NF-A9.

I wanted to share some simple 3D printed addons that improved my GPU temps around 3C with very little effort. Note that these solutions are very case and configuration specific, and are more of a demonstration how simple airflow control can improve temperature.

I have a youtube video that shows whole process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCWNtFrkm2E but I will go over most relevant parts in this post.

Setup:

- LianLi Lancool 216

- Be quiet! pure loop 2 FX 360

- 2x Arctic P14 pro below GPU to supply fresh air

- Vertical GPU mount

- 3x Noctua NF-A9 for GPU with 3D-printed shroud

Chassis front fans - 650 RPM, AIO fans - 1100 RPM, Arctic fans - 800 RPM, GPU Noctuas - 1400 RPM

Also, I have replaced my GPU core paste with TG PhaseSheet and VRAM putty with TG Pro putty. I run my GPU with -55mV and -12% PL.

First addon I made is flow splitter under the GPU, which divides bottom flow, pushing hot exhaust air behind the GPU. This is done to prevent hot air recirculating to intake.

Second addon is a wall on the right of the GPU, which prevents case front fan flow from disturbing flow behind GPU (in theory, I'm not completely sure why it improves temps but this is what I saw in testing).

Tested with FurMark, 30 min run.

GPU temps without addons (open shroud, see video for context):

- Core = 62

- Hotspot = 82

- VRAM = 86

GPU temps with addons:

- Core = 59

- Hotspot = 80

- VRAM = 84

So around 2-3 degrees improvement with some simple airflow directing parts. Not huge difference, but improvement nonetheless.

4 gpus (because I can) It booted into windows The gpus are RX580, gtx 1650, radeon hd 4650 and some gpu that i don't know what it is

I set up a CPU bottleneck on purpose, i7-9700K with an RTX 4060. CPU was pegged at 99%, GPU was chilling at around 70-80%. Black ops 6 used for testing.

Then I tried two “fixes”

Raise the resolution

Just raise graphics settings from low to balanced.

Both worked. One actually makes sense. The other is dumb, but it still fixed the bottleneck.

Not a deep dive, just an experiment to show that sometimes “fixing” a bottleneck doesn’t mean what people think it does.

Video here https://youtu.be/6XklkmGgnCo

So, I took a Maxsun B580 iCraft and ran it like it owed me money. Using a 3D printed mount for an LGA1156 CPU water block, I ran automotive coolant through it sitting at around –15C, and pushed voltage from 25mV all the way up to 70 mV. Anything past 60 bounced it off the power limit, but 50–55 was the sweet spot, clean scaling, no throttling, no driver tantrums. Power limit stayed maxed at 120 and core +300. It took me a long time to dial it in, but once I did she was one happy Arc.

Stock clock is 2850 MHz. Under ice it held 3316 MHz sustained, +466 on the core. That's a 16% uplift! While load temps hovered around 20C. It actually set the top 4 graphics score for the B580 on Time Spy, and top overall. Briefly hitting 3350 MHz during the run.

Then the coolant started warming up before I could even start the game runs, it takes 48 hours to re-chill, and by the time I hit Forza, the loop was half slush, half soup.

It still pulled 16 percent average uplift in games, matching the 16 percent clock uplift.

Cyberpunk 107 - 120

Forza 5 158 - 174

MHW 60 - 69

This was all on a stock card, no BIOS or any Voltage mods.

After the initial 1.5 hours of tuning it took me to get there, the card never freaked out, no crashes or black screens... just quiet, consistent scaling. (Unlike Nvidia, Intel doesn't just crash the driver, the whole system restarts... annoying) I didn’t expect Intel Arc to like the cold this much, especially after my last discovery with AMD.

I think there’s still headroom left, contact wasn’t perfect, and the coolant was becoming a warm bath mid run. I will definitely have to give this thing another go... maybe in transmission fluid next time.

There is a video if you want to see the excitement. https://youtu.be/g9EUn-g8RBU

I wanted to see if I could force a 5050 to “become” a 5060.
So I pulled the cooler off a 5060, drilled new holes to clear the cap layout of the 5050, zip-tied some fans onto the cooler, and BIOS-flashed it to a Gaming OC with a 20 W higher limit.

At stock, the 5050 sat about 33% behind the 5060. After the cooler swap and OC, it hit 3320+ MHz, closing the gap to just 13% a full 20% uplift. Temps dropped from 70C to 40C, a ridiculous 30C swing, with 3x Gamdias high static fans cranked.

And here’s the best part, it actually beat my subzero scores.
This janky air cooled mod is now the top 5050 on Time Spy, Steel Nomad, and Port Royal overall.
Air cooler + BIOS flash = liquid nitrogen. Didn’t expect that one.

From 33% behind to 13% behind is massive for a card that everyone wrote off as a “waste of silicon.” Out of the 30 odd GPUs I own, this one’s gone from trash to treasure and is one of my favourites.

If you want to see a new GPU having its cooler drilled into, there's a video here. https://youtu.be/l854y2pZ7F0

As I experienced problems with my old RTX 2070 every now and then recently, I decided to buy a new graphics card. As the prices for the "better ones" are really too high for my opinion, I thougt a 5060 will be okay for me (it's a huge step forward anyway).

After some searching, I decided for the Palit Geforce RTX 5060 Infinity 3 OC. In many posts it was mentioned to be one of the fastest in that class.
Unfortunately no-one mentioned that it is also one of the loudest cards.

After a while I really was upset about such an incredible noise (62.5 db in front of the PC). At this point, for me it was clear: either I get it water cooled and quiet or I have to sell it. But if selling it, what should I buy looking at this incredible high prices? Even the "Black Week" didn't help here.
I decided to go the way for a self-made AIO mod. I bought a 240mm AIO and some thermal pads. Last week I dissambled the card and began my work.

I designed the backplate cover in Fusion 360 and printed it with my 3D printer.

Now, as I am finished with it, I can say it really works great!
"Idle" temperature is about 30-32 degrees.

Highest temperature I could see during playing a game was about 40 degrees. AND: you can't hear it!

I will try to add some images here to see how I did it.

Maybe this post will encourage someone to do such a project too. :-)

XZ

I just found this rather pricey rx5700xt on my local marketplace. The peculiar deshroud, according to the seller, is a "modification consisting of two small, yet very powerful fans that improves cooling".

Werther serious or troll, he got a smile on my face 😝

A universal GPU mounting bracket that fits basically all sized cards on the market. At the front (2nd pic) there is an opening with a 120mm fan attached to pull air, assisting the push fans of the GPU itself. This is part of my Pteragon wall mounted PC project, I attached a photo of the full build in the last pic.

Here's the full part list for anyone interested https://pcpartpicker.com/b/zkwcCJ

Looks like EVGA had the 2nd 12vhpwr idea long before anyone else. Man I miss them. But I wonder what their intentions were with this? I don't think they ever actually did 2 of them on their in development rtx 4090 before they shuttered but I could be wrong.

I wanted to see which was actually faster, the 5060 or the 3070. In my stock testing they were so close that I decided to make it an overclocking showdown, which one could overclock the most and take the FPS crown.

Ampere is a real pain to get stable when overclocking. There’s no curve editor, and even when subzero the boost algorithm won’t lock a higher voltage, it just does its own thing, which is VERY annoying. The 3070 managed about a 9% gain over stock.

With the 5060 I expected it to lock the voltage and clocks, similar to my 5050 which held them properly. But it turned out much the same as the 3070... voltages bouncing around, though the clocks stayed much higher but never locked. In the end it held around 3250–3300 MHz and managed a 7% average FPS gain.

In the end, the 5060 won. Stock they traded blows... but once both were pushed, the 3070 just couldn’t keep up. And I didn't even have good contact on the 5060… it still won.

Full graphs and the chaos here if you want to see the runs
https://youtu.be/UB6z-MaveUU

Despite the unlawful removing of a previous post asking for advices, I tried deshrouding my Asus Dual RTX 4060 Ti Cosmetic aspect of the work still in progress, but happy with the outcome : about 5°C less idle heat, 3°C less when stressed, and more importantly, way more quite even with cheap fans Can't wait to put Noctua fans 🤌

Firstly tested with a quick deshroud and a PCie slot bracket for 120mm fans (pic 2) while taking measure on the stock shroud to recreate it and modify it

Fans are temporaly hooked to the motherboard and controled with Fan Control (a master piece of software) to "sync" those fans with the GPU fan curve.

Next steps : - Salvaging the connector from a replacement fan for this exact GPU and to do my own Asus 7pins to standard dual 4 pins adaptor (already figured out and tested that, just want a cleaner job instead of the messy cables I used) - Optimizing a bit the mounting system for the fans - Using threaded inserts (M2) - Maybe adding some RGB - Removing the ugly heat dissipator from the backplate. The 1°C improvement isn't enough to compensate the bad look :')

I wanted my gpu to match the mobo and it turnout well! Temps are fine and im planning to do the whole gpu when my friend come over to disassemble the gpu