While I am waiting to re-mod my car that has rather annoyingly un-modified itself recently I had a go at modding my Vega 56 graphics card...
I did some benchmarks back in Feb when the weather was a little cooler... 3d Mark Firestrike stress test had the GPU running at a warm 79 degrees... thats ok but the fan was noisy as heck and dropping the speed just lead to temp increases which when the warmer weather arrives doesn't give me much overhead...
The card is undervolted with a power limit increase and overclocked on the memory so the poor old reference cooler is running flat out... this also makes it very noisy so decided to do something about that...
Started with the standard card...
...pulled it apart....
Cut the heatsink in two as the one piece will fit without mods but to make the GPU side fit properly I would need to mod it...
I used a Nzxt x62 AIO water cooler setup which is a twin 140mm fan set u... tbh if I was doing it again I would use a Corsair or similar for the smaller head as the Nzxt ones are massive...
I did try to look at using the Nzxt G12 GPU bracket but this was not only naff looking I would still have to mod it quite a bit and felt that I could mod the OE one for my traditional OEM++ approach
I used the Intel CPU bracket (ironically) and modded it slightly to fit the Vega 56 card...
...and test fitted the AIO head...
The cover now needed a few mods...
Used a hole cutter the get the hole close to size (was a little smaller) and filed the rest...
Came out ok... so them refitted it back on the card...
Looks very OEM when fitted
So obviously needed to check the results of the mods... fired up 3D Mark and ran the same test but in slightly warmer ambient temps...
37 degrees with the ambient in the 12's or higher (was sunny and my office heats up quick on sunny days) is pretty awesome... I think the ambient was around 5 degrees when I did the original stress test...
CPU is a little warmer too but that now on a single 140mm AIO (Nzxt x42) and clocked to 4ghz all cores so is going to run a little warmer anyway
In conclusion... I am a serial moddist and will mod anything... plus watercooling your GPU is actual cool
As a real world test I played BF for a round of conquest and the GPU temps sat at 34 degrees
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