GoKawiilTrashBench is back with another project that might seem deranged at first, but it actually ended up working out pretty well. Taking a grinder to the stock cooler of an Nvidia GTX 1070, he attached a fully-fledged CPU cooler with RGB fans to see if that'd cool the die better than what came from the factory. Not only did it work for the 1070, but also the 1060 and the illustrious 1080 Ti. The modification resulted in higher FPS, higher clock speeds, lower temperatures, and even lower power consumption.
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The sacrificial lamb for this project was the Asus Strix variant of a GTX 1070 that TrashBench actually mistook for a 1060 at first (since they both share the exact same cooler). The modder separated the cooler assembly from the shroud and proceeded to cut out a part of the finstack with an angle grinder. The goal was to expose the back of the metal plate touching the GPU core on the other side, so that a CPU cooler could be mounted there.
(Image credit: TrashBench on YouTube)
He attached the cooler to a 1060 with a 120mm fan zip-tied on, and despite missing a few fins, the temperature somehow dropped from 46°C to 45°C under load. TrashBench then drilled holes into the exposed metal plate and screwed a single-tower CPU cooler directly into it. The result was a graphics card 9°C cooler than before and with slightly better clocks.
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Moving on to the dual-tower cooler required a few more grinding modifications to the baseplate of the card. Once attached, the temperature dropped further by only one degree even though two fans were now dissipating the heat from those extra fins. Still, he overclocked the 1060 in this condition, and it netted 9% higher FPS in Shadow of the Tomb Raider compared to the stock cooler, while being 6°C cooler.
(Image credit: TrashBench on YouTube)
It was now time for the 1070 — the dual-tower CPU cooler ran a whole 20°C cooler than the stock configuration. It consumed 15W less and clocked higher during the test, which prompted TrashBench to push for a 2,200 MHz OC. Unfortunately, it wasn't stable at that; boosting to 2,177 MHz was the limit. That still resulted in almost 200 MHz higher clocks compared to stock and 7% more FPS in-game. The GTX 1070 was a raging success, especially impressive when you consider that the 1060 didn't elicit a large temperature differential.
(Image credit: TrashBench on YouTube)
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