Quieting a 6800xt

Bombastinator · December 12, 2022

So I put up a thread earlier and would have continued it but I couldn’t find it. It’s probably still there amongst the detritus of other posts but I couldn’t locate it without a better search than I could think of. The wages of shooting my mouth off too much. At any rate mods may have better search tools that me (or are merely better at it) and I would have no problems with this thread being attached to that one. I tried, I merely failed.

At any rate I’m thinking of trying something and I’m wondering how bad an idea it is.

anyway I was asking about heat sink layout for doing a 6800xt with no gpu block on hybrid water. It was suggested that instead I just put some decent fans on it, which I did and it improved things by many e 30%. I can live with that but the video card is underclocked and I may need it at full power in the future. The thing is I’ve got this old AIO and it fits. I tried to sell it in the classifieds, but it seems no one wants it, so I was thinking maybe set it up as just a gpu cooler instead of a gpu and cpu cooler. It’s a 240 with clips on the hoses, so all I would need to get what amounts to a 4 fan AIO on my gpu is some hose, some Pg (which I already have for other things), some fans (which I also have), and the annoying bit, a custom cut plate to go over the cpu cooler, memory, and VRM. This is probably easily the most expensive thing for me. Haven’t priced it but it might be more expensive than a new cooler. It would need to be copper or aluminum (might as well go copper. This is not a slop free thing so why not throw some more-is-better at it. It would have to be nearly half the size of the pcb, because there are vrms on BOTH sides of the motherboard that would have to be covered. (Photo)

I’m not 100% sure that those VRM bumps are actually on the same plane as the heatsink but it will be easy enough to check and I can shim what needs to be shimmed. The vapor chamber sticking up in the middle does at least seem to be on the same plane.
This is an xfx speedster SWFT which is apparently NOT the same as a merc. It is possible that a merc water cooler block would fit it anyway because there are merely fewer vrms on the “rear”(? The end with the ports on it) of the card, but those barrel shaped things which might be capacitors are I think not on the merc, so it strikes me as iffy, and I don’t want to go buy a water block to find it doesn’t fit. There has been too much waste on this build already. I measured the thermal pads at .5, 1, and 1.5, but I was told they were .5, 1.5 and 2mm as measured by someone else. It’s not impossible. I was using a fairly shitty measuring device. However those may be the numbers for a merc though so I don’t know if they are actually for my cooler. The things are nearly the same, but not exactly the same. I’m tempted to just shim if my measurements are off anyway. Soldering copper plates to copper plate is just pipe fitting, which I have done.