 We selected the ROG Strix RTX 2080 Ti graphics card for our test today because at full tilt the fans on this thing are easily the loudest thing in an average gaming system. And also because it has a rated thermal design power or TDP of around 280 watts. Because here's the thing, while folks with empty expansion slots have been strapping CPU coolers to their graphics cards for well over a decade now, as far as we can tell, very few have attempted it with something so hot and so power hungry. So Deepcool sponsored this video and sent over their Assassin 3 CPU cooler. And in order for this modification to be successful in my eyes, it needs to accomplish three things. One, we need to see an improvement in gaming performance. Two, I want a reduction in system noise at the same time. Three, I want the whole experience to be less hassle than water cooling so that it's something we can legitimately actually recommend. And finally, four, I want our loyal viewers to save some money compared to the aforementioned water cooling. Money that they can spend on great shirts like this. LTTstore.com So our first task then is to remove the cooler from our graphics card. Your mileage may vary, but ours was extraordinarily simple to take apart, requiring only the removal of six Phillips screws on the backside of the card. Now, the only thing holding the two halves of our graphics card together is the thermal paste between the GPU die and the cooler. So it should be as simple as removing the cooler. Now, the only thing holding the two halves of our graphics card together is the thermal paste between the GPU die and the cooler, so it should be as simple as just pulling up on the cooler. Et voila! With a little bit of cleaning, now we have an open-faced 4352 CUDA core GPU sandwich. So, now that everything's clean then, we just need to remove these two plugs from the back of the board here for the fans and the RGB lighting. And then finally, we're gonna remove these four standoffs right here from the cooler. We're just gonna put those aside for now though, more on that later. Now that that's done, let's take a closer look at our card before we start piecing it back together. We actually got really, really lucky with this particular card's design, because most of the components that need cooling are covered by this heat spreader right here, which means that we don't need to go find a whack-ton of little heat sinks for every IC that's soldered to the board. In fact, there's actually only one thermal pad on the stock cooler here, and that's for the row of VRMs right back here that we are going to need to actively cool. So, to handle that, we went over to the workshop and machined this custom heat sink that we're going to attach to the PCB using some double-sided thermal adhesive tape. Now, for a permanent installation, I would probably use a lighter heat sink for one thing, and then thermal epoxy, but this will work just fine for our testing today. Now that the card's prepped, we're gonna grab those standoffs that we put aside before, as well as the screws that we took out of the back of the card, and we are going to install the standoffs once more. With all four of those mounted, now we need to make a small modification to the mounting hardware that was included with our DeepCool Assassin 3 cooler. So, basically, you've got two mounting brackets right here, and each one of them needs an extra two holes at 70mm hole spacing to match the standoffs we just installed. It's a pretty simple mod if you have a drill press, and what's really cool is that it doesn't damage your mounting brackets or your cooler in any way permanently, so if you decided to move it onto your CPU or a different graphics card later on, you would totally be able to do that. And then I'm putting that right on there, and right on there. Now that our modified mounting bracket's installed, we're coming up on the riskiest part of this whole operation. Because we're working with a bare die that doesn't have an integrated heat spreader, we need to be extra careful when we're tightening our cooler down. So we're gonna go ahead and put a small line of thermal compound onto our GPU, then we're gonna line up our tower cooler, making sure that our screw holes align with our bracket there before we start to tighten it down, and then we're gonna go nice and slow, doing at most a half a turn on each side as we tighten the thing down. Alright, let's give it a little wiggle. Yep, and it's on. That was it. Wow, this thing's kinda massive. Now all we need to do is throw a couple of fans on. You know, the crazy part is it's not even that much heavier, or even that much more sheer mass of metal than the original cooler. It's just that when fans are allowed to work more efficiently, they'll do a better job. And that's it. Now all that remains is to plug this thing in and see how it runs. But, as you guys can plainly see, this monstrosity won't fit in just any old case. Come on in, guys! Ah! Safety first, I like it. Nice belts. Thanks, guys. Alright, so after plenty of test fitting, we landed on the Corsair 900D as our case. It sports 10 PCI Express slots at the back, which is important because, as you can see, this here tower cooler makes our card a bit of a thick boy, both in terms of height and in terms of its length. So, it's worth pointing out, by the way, guys, that you are by no means obligated to use such a large tower cooler for the mod. If you've got a more reasonable size case, you're just gonna wanna check the height dimensions of the cooler and make sure that it's gonna fit into your case. Now, of course, because we have the luxury of using whatever case we want, we decided to go full Assassin 3 beast mode, but that is by no means an obligation. I knew this was going too smoothly. It wouldn't be an LTT video without some snafu. Obviously, it would be better for our case airflow if we had the fans blowing this way, so we just need to rotate our bracket 90 degrees. That makes so much more sense. Hmm. Well, I give up trying to put these thumb screws in. There's no way that's happening. But something that's really cool is we actually went and cut a piece of acrylic to act as, like, a GPU support. We were gonna be like, yeah, well, this does add a lot of weight, but, hey, if you just, you know, go and put something like this in your case, then your GPU will be fine. Yeah, you know what? The heatsink rests right up against the PCI slots underneath. Look at that! We finally came up with a solution for GPU sag. Problem solved. To start with, we've pre-configured that fan header that we plugged both of these fans into with a pretty aggressive profile, and then what we're gonna do is tune it down from there until we reach both the level of performance and silence that we are hoping for. With that out of the way, then I think that's it! It's time for us to start our benchmarking. Sorry I made you cut this acrylic thing. Turns out this idea was more genius than either of us could have possibly known. Your time, your money. You sound like Jake. You hear that? It's the sound of silence. I like it. There's a song about that, you know. So to start with, our GPU is running at a chilly 28 degrees at idle. That's pretty much about what we'd expect. Now we're gonna go ahead and run the built-in benchmark in Shadow of the Tomb Raider and see how it holds up. Here it is! Average FPS, 119. So guys, the results are in for all of our tests, and while from a performance standpoint, there isn't a huge jump or anything, a few frames here or there, there are definite gains in the cooling department. Check this out! We're at 55 degrees! So the stock cooler's fans run in excess of 3000 RPM, while our tower cooler maxed out at just 30% of that. And while fan RPM and noise aren't exactly tied at the hip, a bigger, slower fan in general is a quieter fan, and our results back that up. Not to mention that, like, I can barely hear this thing. My mic's right here. It's super quiet. So then, our performance is as good or better. It's as quiet as it can be, given the coil whine that's present on some of these high-end cards. And compared to water cooling, we've not only saved a whack of time, we've also saved a whack of money, which only leaves us then with ease of use. Now compared to something factory finished with all the holes pre-drilled in it, like a GPU water block, this was admittedly slightly harder to install. But compared to setting up the rest of a water cooling loop that you would need to go with your GPU block, I would make the argument that this is actually more approachable. Not to mention that if something does go wrong, it's less likely to be catastrophic because there's no water to leak all over the rest of your components. So, should you actually do this? Honestly, it's a great mod, especially if you're a silence freak, or you have a dead or dying GPU fan that you want to replace on the cheap. With that said, I would probably dial things back a little bit from the way that we did it. I mean, the Assassin 3 definitely has got the performance chutzpah, but by stepping down a little bit to a 120mm variant or something, we would have saved a lot of space improving our case compatibility quite a lot. Oh yeah, one last thing guys, if you're not adept at making heatsinks, you can get little things like this that have pre-applied adhesive on like DLX Dream and AliExpress and that kind of stuff. So, don't worry about that. Anyway, that was it. Thanks for watching. If you guys enjoyed this video and you enjoy other sketchy cooling mods, check out the link to one of our sketchy cooling videos. We're going to have that down in the video description. See ya!