YouTuber and modder TrashBench has shown a novel way to reduce your GPU temperature by a massive 35°C. In this unconventional creation, the modder attached a pair of dual-tower coolers to an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 GPU. The idea behind this experiment was to measure how much heat is transferred through the graphics card’s back side, and then see how far you can lower your GPU temperature using proper back-side cooling.
To do so, TrashBench went step by step, measuring the impact/benefit of each cooling setup before upgrading to a better one. With its stock cooler, the Asus RTX 2060 Dual card managed to maintain a stable 74°C core and 92°C hotspot during a 10-minute run of Unigine Heaven Benchmark 4. That’s at a 27°C ambient temperature, and it’s not a bad result
The first step in improving the card’s cooling consisted of simply slapping two basic aluminium blocks on top of the backplate, which only improved temperatures by 1°C. Removing the backplate entirely dropped temps by another 4°C on the core, but the hotspot didn’t change much. Connecting the aforementioned aluminium blocks directly to the back side of the PCB, using copious amounts of thermal putty, netted the best results yet. With this setup, the GPU temps maxed out at a 64°C core and 82°C hotspot – a 10°C drop compared to stock conditions.
This isn’t surprising, since nearly all modern chips use a flip-chip design, which mounts the silicon die face-down on the package substrate. This means its transistors are closer to the PCB than the heatsink, which results in a significant thermal transfer through the back/pin side of CPUs/GPUs.
With these non-radical upgrades out of the way, TrashBench brought in the big guns and swapped the original cooler for what looks like a $43/£40 Thermalright Peerless Assassin 140 Black CPU cooler. With two dense fin-stacks and two large fans pushing air through them, the GPU core temperature moved down to a fresh 47°C – 27°C lower than stock, with a hotspot far within a comfortable range at just 61°C. In the meantime, ambient temperatures dropped by 1°C, which isn’t a huge amount, but we need to account for it.
But that’s not all. If one Peerless Assassin is this good, surely two are better? Well, yes, but the cost may not be worth the gains. Using this dual cooler contraption, which no standard PC case will support, the GPU core temperature dropped by 31°C compared to the stock cooler, resulting in a fantastic 43°C core and 57°C hotspot.
Now, if you don’t want to risk damaging your graphics card, especially in current market conditions, TrashBench found that simply positioning another fan to blow air over the card’s side improved temperatures by 13°C core and 14°C hotspot. That’s great for a mod that won’t void your warranty. Overall, these results are so impressive, I wonder if immersion cooling – which involves non-conductive liquids directly contacting every nook and cranny – could do better.
