 Hardcore overclocking is super simple. At least that's what I thought a couple of days ago. Unfortunately, I am not an electrical engineer and we do not have a full blown electronics lab. So we have ended up with this mess. RTX 3090, all the safeties disabled and a hijacked voltage controller that has what? One to 12 ways it can die at any second. I'm going to show you how to do all of these mods and while it might look very janky, this could be the fastest GPU in Canada. And this madness is brought to you by Seasonic. Mother we're going to be using a 1300 watt power supply and if it can survive this 1000 watt RTX 3090, you're going to be fine. Here's the plan to get a GPU to go really fast, you need current and voltage. Getting enough current is quite difficult. Nvidia has very tight limits on how much current a card will draw for safety reasons, preventing us from having too much fun. We'll need to trick it into thinking it is drawing less current than it actually is using a shunt mod. We'll show you that in a minute. Voltage is also tough. For the last couple of generations, Nvidia hasn't given the users voltage control, but we'll be getting it back using this. It is a neat little device that allows us to bypass Nvidia and talk directly to the voltage control so we can tell it to give the GPU as much voltage as we want. Before we can get to that though, we need to take some baseline readings to compare a modern performance too. So just running 3DMark for all of our tests and should be noted this GPU isn't exactly stock. It was repasted with conducto knot and also has K5 Pro as the thermal pads. That gave us about 6% increase over stock. So we're already going to have pretty high scores, just baseline. So our baseline score is 10,411. And during that, the GPU drew a maximum of 390 Watts. Once the thing's overclocked, it's going to be brutal on this power supply. I'm going to run the benchmark once more so we can get an actual score that we can upload. Then the madness begins. Normally removing the cooler of a GPU is the easy part of a hard mod. Although today, oh God, it is not. Cause unfortunately I absolutely caked this thing with K5 Pro. The plan was to just never open this thing again and it would just be a fast GPU. But here we are, all of this needs to leave because unfortunately soldering to K5 Pro is not going to be a good time. Oh, I don't think that's a soap and water kind of business. Yeah, big regrets. To up the current available on our GPU, we have two options, a BIOS mod or a shunt mod. If you don't have access to an electronics rework station, a BIOS mod is probably your best bet. No need to trick the controllers to allow a thousand watts of power if your BIOS just accepts it. But not everyone can use this approach. For cards that aren't regularly used by overclockers, a BIOS mod probably just doesn't exist. And if it does exist, good luck finding it. Moddable overclocking BIOSes have to originate from Nvidia. So it is risky for the authorized person to post online for just anyone to take. If you want one for your card, just try asking around on some overclocking forums or discord servers. One might end up in your DMs. But even with a thousand watt BIOS, you might run into sneaky current limits. That's why today we're going to be increasing the current the hands-on way, a shunt mod. Shunts are very simple circuits. Allow a device to find out how much current is being drawn. By measuring the voltage drop across the shunt resistor, the controller calculates the current using Ohm's law. So current equals voltage over top of resistance. By putting another resistor in parallel with the shunt resistor, we can drop the resistance and make the controller thinking is using less current than it actually is. In our case, we're going to be soldering a five million ohm resistor on top of the existing five million ohm resistors. Meaning in software, the GPU power that is reported will be half of what it is actually drawing. There is a second method. By placing liquid metal on top of the shunt resistors, you can effectively increase your current limit. But it is difficult to control, makes your power readings just completely unreliable, can kill your GPU if it spills. And as a bonus, it'll eat away at the solder joints. I didn't want to deal with any of that, so we are sticking to soldering. How much trouble do we get into if we kill a 3090? What did you guys do to this poor bit? It's got like goop all over it. Shame, man. I'm using it. I know what happened to that. That's dead resistant juice on there, man. Look how much solder is in the, in the, in the. What the hell? Gotta clean your tips. It's a tech tip right there. Do we have solder wire here? Not dog poop stuff? You don't want to just cover it in flux? Uh, no, I'm good. It's probably not going to work anyway, so it doesn't really matter. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah, it seems too high. Yeah, yeah, for sure. How do you go down? This is a lot of inspiring confidence that we know what we're doing. Nah, I got it. No, you have to hold that and enter. Six, nine, I guess. All right, I'm going to get a proper wire. You have the resistors, right? There we go. Yee-bwee. That's why you guys were in it like 800 degrees Celsius is because it just doesn't have enough heat. Yep. Flux. Uh, no. No. Oh, what have I done to that resistor? I am so sorry. While you went to get the flux, I figured out that we'd gone done goofed. These three shunts. Yeah. Are the ones that are connected to the ground pins. So good thing that we have to go get flux because that would have been fun. Send it. Oh, boy. Oh, it's making bubbling noises. Ah, just that game. Woo. Oh, woo-hoo. Ah, it's such a bad soldering iron. Alex. This isn't too bad of a soldering iron. Kyle's just complaining a lot. Is this on? It is. Yeah. Dude, it's on. I'm not joking. Why is it so crap? Yeah, so the soldering iron is at max, like 220 degrees. Oh, that's like 15 degrees lower than what it needs. Like actually freaking mild solder. Ah. Woof, woof. I, piece of shit. Woof, woof. Woof. Okay. So I'm not an angry person. Typically. I just like to shout at things. Watching a Der Bauer video, you might think that shunt mods are super easy. I certainly was fooled. The problem is that our 70 watt HAKO soldering iron really wasn't designed for something like this. Nvidia did a great job designing this PCB to dissipate heat, which means unfortunately, our 70 watt soldering iron just cannot heat it up enough. There are a couple of ways around this. First, you can buy a better soldering iron and get the results we saw from Der Bauer. Alternately, you can heat up the GPU. So stick it in a toaster oven you'd never plan on using again. You could set it on bake setting and set the bake temperature to like 75 or 100. Bake it until a whole PCB reaches around 100 degrees Celsius and then you can start soldering. Or you can put the GPU on top of a toaster. In the end, we used option three, checking our largest tip on the end of our soldering iron for maximum thermal mass and just setting the temperature to 900 degrees. That gave us an instant of flowing solder and a bunch of boiling flux. It looks terrible. With the current limits doubled, the next thing we need to do is gain control of the core voltage. Unfortunately, since Kepler, Nvidia hasn't given the user voltage control to ensure our GTX customers get the highest quality product that runs quiet, cool and fits in their PC. Oh, and if one of their partners like MSI or Asus gives the user that control, the card can't be sold with a warranty. Nvidia controls the creation of GPU BIOSes to like an absurd level. As far as I know, like the way it works is you log into like an Nvidia server, make your BIOS, then you have to get permission from them so like actually get the file. Fortunately, we do have a solution for this. Where is our solution for this? Oh, here it is. We have this, the Elmer Labs enhanced voltage controller or EVC 2SX. It works by connecting to the I2C bus, a communication bus that allows all the different components of your GPU to talk to each other to keep everything running nice and smoothly. And the EVC uses that bus to talk directly to the voltage controller. Most high-end GPUs these days use digital voltage controllers, but before you get an EVC, make sure GPU is compatible. On most GPUs, there will be open I2C solder pads that were used for debugging during production. Simply solder a header onto one of those and you can use the EVC. Once connected to the GPU, we can directly access the voltage controller through the Elmer Labs software and set the voltage to just whatever we want. There's no way we killed it. Yep. Right? Yep. It's totally fine. Yep. Do you want to hit the power supply? Yep. We got it. She works. Here's the video title. We did not kill a 3090 at this point in time. With full control over GPU, how much can we improve performance? Well, with an air cooler, the results were worse than baseline. The card was drawing 600 Watts and the cooler just could not keep up. So we needed some assistance. Who better to help with hardcore overclocking than the man behind actually hardcore overclocking himself, Bill Zoid. In ambient, you're basically not going to get much past the stock voltage settings of these cards because they just run insanely hot. So if you keep raising the voltage, the internal temperatures rise faster than you gain stability from extra voltage. We have a couple of options. The one that you might be thinking we would use is the chilled astrophys. That's right here. The problem is, is that the phase change block that I made doesn't seem to work as good as we hoped and needs a little bit of a redesign. Instead, and I'm really sad to say this, we're going to have to use this. Yeah, I don't even know what to describe it as other than just like a complete piece of. We made a video about making this chiller nicer. And in the process of making it nicer, it just got so much worse. It's in a box and it's hard to see what's leaking. And if it's leaking on domains voltage or whatever, hopefully it works. I don't know. To hopefully make everything work a bit better, I grabbed a bunch of spray foam and the plan is to basically just, just cover the whole thing in it. Hopefully that'll stop some of the condensation issues internally. Oh, and also it is super heavy because I made it out of welded steel so I could get our welder set up for doing the pyramid PC. The back half of yesterday was super productive. All the electronics have been moved out and zip tied slash gaff taped to the outside so that water will not drip on them, hopefully. All of the shunts have also been modded. You can see right here that there's another resistor on top of all of them. It was just as painful as before given our soldering iron. Finally, we need to water cool this bad boy. Water blocks for it do exist, but I would be concerned about condensation that I wouldn't be able to see forming on the inside. So instead we're just going to use a generic VGA cooler, which means unfortunately we need to modify the VGA cooler. The problem is that the design of it's really stupid. So if you look in here, the dimension of the steel piece is what gets you your clamping force on this O-ring. Super critical for this O-ring working and you're not getting water all over your GPU. That unfortunately means that I'm going to have to make something completely different. We're gonna hack something up with an angle grinder and call it a day. Oh, oh. Goodbye. Our CPU mounting plate is done because I like you guys even polished this side. I just have to remove a bunch of K5 so we can install these cute little heat sinks that are going to be going on the memory modules. They will hopefully keep them nice and cool. For thermal paste, we're going to be using thermal gristly cryo knot. We don't have a heat spreader. So if there's a spot that's not covered, it might get hot and die. Last thing to do before this goes back together, hopefully some nice cheap insurance. I'm sorry. It's so I don't kill it. This poor GPU, it didn't deserve any of this. I really hope I don't kill this card. I know I've said that a lot, but like I want to do more hardcore overclocking. Chiller just ate 16 liters of water. If this thing doesn't leak, I will be so happy. That'll take half a while to cool down, but oh, there we go. So far so good. Is the air conditioner working? Oh, it is. The real question is the pump. Holy crap, it just worked. We have water coming out of here. This leaking. I don't see any leaks here. Oh, that's definitely leaking. What's that? It looks like your fray foam didn't do its job. Oh, I think what's leaking is right here. Oh, that's gross. I need gloves for this. This has to be what's leaking. Oh my God, that's gross. Oh, this got out of hand some fast. Where is the drain port? I know that I included one. This is a mess Brandon, you're not wrong there. I believe there was a drain port on the bottom somewhere. Yeah, let's get a bucket in there. Of all the ways that this was going to go horribly wrong, this is not the way that I expected it to happen. I'm sorry viewers that you need to watch this. Oh, where's the drain port? Okay, I see it. Everything's fine. I have a lot of water down my sleeves. I'm ready to do this. GPU's going onto the test bench. Block's fine, GPU's not leaking, that's all great. Water temperature's at 14 degrees, which is awesome. It's subambient, but not so cold that we're going to have condensation issues. It's time that we boot her up. You already know this, but don't do anything that we've done in this video at home. It's all a bad idea. Like I've done some pretty jank stuff before, but this is primo jank. Yes, GPU's not dead. So GPU temperature is currently at 11 degrees. You're not getting condensation, but you are getting nice and cold. All of our powers look good. Do we have VRM temperatures on here? Everything right here seems to be working pretty well. As long as you just don't look back past it. It's boosting high, memory is getting kind of hot, but it still is doing just fine. So VRM temperature in the last run, 54 degrees. GPU temperature, 33. Frickin' awesome. Memory's getting a little bit hot. We saw 96 degrees. We can probably cool this down a bit better. On that last run, we drew 360 watts, which is half of what we actually drew, which means we did what, 720 watts. And the GPU is at two gigahertz. This thing is fricking fast. It's finally time to do some overclocking. So I think we're gonna be pretty easily able to get around 21, 2,200 megahertz on this GPU, although that doesn't really matter. Nvidia does this thing called clock stretching. So if the core voltage drops a little bit, to keep the GPU stable, they will, for a couple of cycles, drop the frequency down and just not report it in the software at all. So even though we might be looking at 2,200 megahertz or whatever, the thing that really is going to tell us if it's good or not is the 3D Mark score. Now for those scores, our baseline was 10,000. If we can get 11,000, I'm going to be happy. And if we can get 12,000, we're like top 10 in the world with this GPU. That's where we're gonna do it. Here's our first overclocked run. So this is plus 50 megahertz on the core. And our plan is to basically just add 25 megahertz, see if it's stable. If it crashes, we add some more voltage. We just keep on going like that. Until either the thermals or the VRMs or something, just can't take it anymore. Go away, Brandon. I'm gonna overclock this for the next while and see if we can get a record. Okay, 10,900. I think that's slightly more than we had baseline. Actually, that's deadly close to 11,000. So we're just gonna keep on going. Let's see how far we can push it. So CPU is at 5.5 gigahertz. And I had to open the door back there so that it wouldn't keep on thermal throttling on us. Anyway, GPU isn't quite as fast as I wanted. We are getting like 11,500 for our scores, sometimes 11,700. That is a 12% increase over stock. And stock was already 6% faster than stock. So like, this is a lot faster than a normal 3090. Problem is that doesn't get us onto the 3D Mark leaderboards. I think it's just simply a case of silicon lottery. Like no matter what I do, can't get more than plus 100 megahertz on the core. So was all of this worth it? I guess it depends on what you're trying to do. For a 12% performance increase, like that is measurable. But at the same time, you're risking a card that's infinite dollars because you can't buy one. Yeah, there we go. 11,706. So that is obscenely fast. Our poor stupid chiller can barely keep up with our 3090. It's outputting so much power. I don't think we're gonna be able to get better than that. That said, I had fun. Is that a good consolation prize, Brandon? My leak bin filled up. So I put a leak bin underneath my leak bin. I guess I thought going into this that this was going to be super simple. Just, you know, chuck some resistors onto the board and bippity boppity, you have a super fast 3090. Turns out it's not that easy. There's no good reason to do this besides you have fun making your scores get nice and high. What's also a lot of fun is, see Sonic, they sponsored this video. And I'm honestly shocked that I was able to use a single power supply. I brought two of them over here, thinking that I'd have to run both of them because CPU is drawing 400 Watts, card's drawing a pretty consistent 800. That's like 1200 Watts. I kind of thought it was gonna conk out and it didn't. So excellent job, see Sonic. This is a real stress test of your power supply and you passed. They also have a 12 year warranty. I run it in my system at home and they're just high quality power supplies. What else more do you want? So if you liked this video, hit like, get subscribed. Do you want to see more hardcore overclocking stuff? I kind of want to. 6.9 gigahertz CPU. I wouldn't mind doing that. And if you want to watch something else, maybe watch when we sub zeroed the Alienware Area 51M. That was ridiculous.