If you've ever looked at that old graphics card sitting at the back of the shelf and thought, man, I wish that thing took up four PCIe slots and could dress up as a CPU, the good news is all you need is a 3D printer and a screwdriver.
As YouTuber TrashBench shows us (via a now-removed Reddit post), with just such tools, you can put a CPU cooler on a GPU instead of its normal cooling setup and actually improve your thermals.
TrashBench unscrews the shroud and cooler and first attempts to affix the Cooler Master heatsink and fan to the GPU with zip ties, but this "looked dumb, ran hot, and nearly rattled itself apart."
The graphics card in question was a GTX 960 (what a card!), and in 3DMark Fire Strike it reached 40 °C with the default cooler and shroud. After being stripped of this default setup and zip tie jerry-rigged with a CPU cooler, it hit 50 °C, so not a great result.
So, the tech YouTuber used a 3D printer to make a "proper bracket", ie, one that fits the screw holes already there in the PCB, and used it to screw in and mount the CPU cooler on top, with thermal paste betwixt the two, of course. The result was 28 °C, a resounding success.
This solution isn't very practical, of course, if you have, well, just about anything below the GPU. The cooler shoots down to the bottom of the motherboard.
I suppose it might fit in a case, but good luck working with anything on the motherboard below the graphics card.
Still, it's a little surprising how simple it is to pull off something like this these days—3D printers really have done the DIY world a service. And if you don't have one of those but do happen to have some zip ties (and if you don't mind worse thermal performance), you can always try that method.
The zip tie cooler idea is new to me, but my colleague Andy said he and his step-brother used to do the very same thing with graphics cards of times of yore. Why not? It half makes me tempted to dig the ol' GTX 1070 out of the cupboard.
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