I've seen a dude saw off PCI-e lanes here and have the card still work
and I have seen someone install a cpu cooler on one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iegpwo9SqSg just to make it quiet and then there is the penny ram heatsink done by Afrotech mods (not sure if that mod is still online)
What ridiculous / weird mods have you seen done or have yourself done to GPUs?
Volt modded 8800 GS's. People did this to the 8800 GT, GTS, and GTS 512 too. These got some seriously impressive clock rates for the time.
I used to have a EVGA GTX465 with a reference cooler. Those things are notoriously power hungry, loud and nuclear meltdown hot. It would crash if it touched 80C even though most people could run at over 90C (translation: crashed all the time), so I endlessly experimented with cooling mods.
I replaced the thermal paste.
I added a Noctua side case fan blowing directly on the GPU.
I bent up the fins by twisting a screwdriver in the gaps and roughed them up with sandpaper.
I chopped off the end of the shroud and bent the fins apart to get more airflow out of the case.
I replaced the PCI slot covers with ventilated ones.
I drilled the shroud full of holes, duct taped half a plastic bottle to the shroud and screwed a fan on the end of the GPU, blowing into the bottle that blew onto the side of the GPU. That didn't really work.
Finally I just screwed a fan over the squirrel cage fan (after taping up all the holes I made) and that sort of worked. I called it the Double-Turbo cooler.
All of that only dropped temps by 5C, but it didn't crash anymore.
When I got a GTX660 I gave the 465 to my brother but his PSU couldn't handle it, so it was probably good that he never got it to work.
I currently have 2x660 SLI running @65C on the same 700W PSU I needed for one 465 @80C.
Not a gpu mod, but I made something identical to this. It's pretty awesome.
my gtx670
The feeling you get when you log into a forum for one the first times go look at something and someone has linked a thing you have done... I made that PCI-express "mod" more than 2 years ago. Internet is weird.
The interwebs never forgive, never forget and always will trolololo =)
quite some nice (getto) mods; like them. I had a open frame case way back.. but sadly no image and physical evidence lasted through the decade :(
Cutting the PCI 1x slot on the motherboard open in the back would also have worked I assume?
Actually no, there components in the way on that particular board, thus a 16x would never had reached the bottom of the connector. This of course varies by motherboard, but if one is to attempt a mod like this, the likelihood of the GFX-card being the least expensive part to mod rises.
that has to be my favorite :)~
Ahem... Once upon a time I made a custom water loop for my GPU, as you can see in the picture. However... I overlooked a tinsy tiny detail... the voltage regulators need to be actively cooled... So after putting the water block on and realizing this, I had to have a way to cool it until the tiny, rectangular heatsink I frantically ordered came in the mail. Why not just put the stock cooler back on until it arrives? I didn't have enough thermal paste to put the stock back on, then cleanly put the waterblock back on. So I scrapped the old paste off the stock cooler I hadn't cleaned yet and added it to the rest of the paste I had left to cover the voltage regulators and used 2 zipties and a broken pencil to hold down pieces of an old CPU heatsink I broke off. It worked, keeping it cool enough till the heatsink and double sided thermal tape arrived in the mail.
