A modder has managed to drastically cool the temperature of his Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card by rigging an AIO cooler and eight fans up to it. This caused the GPU temperature to drop by up to 33°C, although the impact on gaming performance was minimal.
YouTuber TrashBench has come up with yet another unusual mod, this time slapping as much cooling as possible on an RTX 3080 without replacing the original fin-stack. TrashBench started by maxing out the original fans’ speed, but with no changes to clock speeds. This helped drop the GPU temperature by 8°C, from 70°C to 62°C.
The first physical modification involved swapping this original fan setup with three 120mm Arctic fans – similar to those found on the Freezer 36-S CPU cooler – locked in place using zip ties. This simple modification reduced the temperature by another 10°C, down to 52°C. Next, TrashBench swapped the Arctic fans for another, faster and louder set, which further cooled the setup by another 2°C, resulting in a 50°C temperature.
To further improve this contraption’s cooling ability, TrashBench applied tape around the edges of the card to avoid air leakage and force all the air through the fin stack, but this didn’t work well, causing temperatures to rise to 54°C. So, instead, the modder added five tiny Arctic server fans that spin up to 15,000rpm, while making a horrible amount of noise. Once more, these didn’t improve temperatures at all, with the GPU remaining at the last best result of 50°C.
The same happened after adding a fan to blow air onto the backplate. However, since the backplate was clearly hot to the touch, TrashBench decided to bring out the big guns and installed a full 360mm AIO liquid cooler on it, after drowning the PCB in thermal putty. And bam, another 9°C drop.
As a result of this whole setup, which contains 11 fans when you include the AIO cooler, the GPU temperature dropped by a whopping 29°C in the Heaven Benchmark, and 33°C in Tomb Raider. Basically, thanks to this modification, the GPU now sits at 34°C in Tomb Raider. Meanwhile, the GPU hotspot temperature dropped by 19°C, while the VRAM temperature dropped by 28°C.
Unfortunately, this massive temperature drop didn’t translate into much in the way of extra performance, as TrashBench measured a negligible 2fps increase over stock conditions. Even overclocking didn’t do much, netting an extra 7fps, which was just a 5% uplift over stock speeds.
While fitting a liquid cooler directly to the GPU die would have likely netted better cooling results, this wasn’t the subject of the video. TrashBench’s YouTube channel is all about ridiculous mods that no one would usually undertake, such as the dual CPU tower cooler mod on an RTX 2060.
The important takeaway here is the amount of heat load going through the back of the GPU and PCB. No matter how much air you blast through a fin stack, there are no gains to be had once you get beyond a certain threshold.
