GoKawiilModded RTX 3060 draws all 75W from PCIe slot alone, but thermals suffer
A hobbyist in China modified an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 to eliminate its external power connectors entirely, forcing the card to run solely on the 75W supplied by the PCIe slot via a shunt resistor mod. The resulting single-slot, low-profile card uses a bare-bones blower cooler with no proper heatsink or thermal pads on the memory chips, relying on a thin metal shroud touching the core directly for cooling.
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
The experiment shows how far GPU power delivery can be squeezed below Nvidia's stock 170W design, but it also exposes the tradeoffs when cooling and power budgets are cut too aggressively for cost or form-factor reasons. It's a cautionary case study for anyone considering ultra-compact or power-constrained graphics cards, showing that removing power connectors doesn't come free.
- The mod forces an RTX 3060 to run entirely off PCIe slot power (75W) instead of its stock 170W TDP.
- Cooling is severely compromised, with no thermal pads on memory chips and a thin metal shroud as the main heatsink.
- Performance and thermals are reportedly poor, making the card impractical despite its compact single-slot design.
Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3050 Low Profile 6GB — If you want a slot-powered graphics card that actually works as designed, a proper low-profile 75W card like Gigabyte's RTX 3050 6GB is the sane alternative to a shunt-modded 3060. It draws all its power from the PCIe slot, needs no extra cables, and fits small-form-factor and office PCs where a blower mod would cook itself.
See Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3050 Low Profile 6GB on Amazon → Affiliate link — we may earn a commission on purchases, at no extra cost to you. Product picked by AI based on this article; it is not a tested recommendation.Source: tomshardware.com — Hassam Nasir, 2026-09-06
Published there as: “Single-slot low-profile 75W RTX 3060 with no power connectors disappoints in tests — GPU runs entirely off the PCIe slot, but offers severely crippled performance and frightening thermals”
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