GTX 770 Twin Frozr to GTX 560 mod

[TheSLSAMG]

So I had a GTX 770 Twin Frozr that was broken, and a GTX 970 Strix with no cooler. For a while, I mounted the GTX 770 cooler on the GTX 970 and used it, but I recently got an AIO liquid cooler that I put on the GTX 970. As a result, I had the GTX 770 Twin Frozr cooler left over with no card to put it on. Except, I had a GTX 560 with a broken fan and a puny heatsink. The 92mm fan I replaced it with wasn't enough to keep temps down. So I took a look at the Twin Frozr cooler, and while the hole spacing wasn't the same, the coldplate had brackets attached to it that determine what kind of card it fits on (presumably to have a cooler that can work on either AMD or NVIDIA cards).

 

Now that I have a 3D printer, I engaged big brain mode and designed a bracket in TinkerCAD which would allow me to convert the Twin Frozr cooler's coldplate mounts to a GTX 560's 51x61 hole spacing. I intend on learning SketchUp or another 3D modelling suite, but TinkerCAD is very noob friendly for now. Through various revisions, this is what resulted:

 

Spoiler

 

 

I was originally going to figure out a way to use nuts so I didn't have to rely on 3D printed threads, but it wasn't going to work out. I could have used threaded inserts, but it's overkill for the application and I'm okay with treating the brackets as single-use since they only take an hour and a few grams of material to print anyways. The bracket is printed out of Inland/eSUN PLA+, which isn't exactly temperature resistant with a glass transition temperature of around 60-65C, but I'll remake it out of ABS or Polycarbonate once I get comfortable printing with those materials. Also, with the dual 92mm fans (one from Cooler Master and the other from a Wraith cooler), the card doesn't go past ~45C at full load. I'd show you the rest of the card but my soldering job on the fan cables looks like a blind man did it with his feet (okay not actually, but I didn't exactly cut the cables short like I should have.) The only other thing I had to sort out was VRM cooling since the stock VRM heatsinks were too tall to fit under the larger cooler and running no heatsinks made the card's PCB way too hot to touch. I ordered some 6mm tall heatsinks on Amazon and installed them. Side note: I ordered a 5-pack and Amazon sent 4, oof. It's a super-niche mod that has no broad appeal, but I figured I'd post about it because it might interest someone else.

 

Spoiler