One of the worst things about hardware is quality, especially when we find ourselves cutting corners in areas crucial to the health of the product. This is something that affects users negatively, since they end up with products with lower performance and useful life. An example is cooling on some graphics cards with NVIDIA GPUs. The solution? It seems to be the use of copper wedges in the RTX 30. Does it work?
Currently, the biggest bottleneck in advancing graphics card performance is video memory. The reason for this is that this type of hardware requires the use of very fast video RAM. And what happens? Very fast data transfers mean high energy consumption and consequently a high temperature in the memory chips. Especially with the higher bandwidths. Well, while the rumor mill has no hesitation in talking about speeds of 32 Gbps per pin for the next generation, the physical reality at present is that GDDR6X, even using PAM4 encoding, which allows it to have a lower clock speed, reaches temperatures close to the limit on many models of graphics cards.
This has caused many users of the NVIDIA RTX 30, especially the more advanced models, to end up using tricks to reinforce the cooling of their graphics cards, especially in the video memory. Although until now the most basic solution has been the placement of higher quality Thermal pads.
Copper to cool the GDDR6X of an RTX 30
The modification we are talking about is not a custom version of this graphics card. The idea of using copper in the NVIDIA RTX 30 to cool its hot VRAM has been floated by a user named dandyworks. Specifically, he has in a RTX 3070Ti, which we remember uses GDDR6X memory on a 256-bit bus, having an advantage in this regard over the No-Ti model. Specifically, the changes have been made in an ASUS TUF RTX 3070 Ti where ccopper nails on top of your GDDR6X VRAM
And the result could not be more positive, since it has achieved thereby reduce the temperature of the GDDR6X from 110°C to 64°C with only the Thermal Pads for copper wedges. Which can be done on any RTX 30, regardless of graphics card brand and model. However, the creator of the mod recommends using copper wedges on an RTX 30 0.2mm thinner if there is a cold plate on top of the GPU and memoryin the event that it does not exist, their thickness can be the same as that of the Thermal Pads used.
Since the modification has been executed on the VRAM and this is the same in many cards. It is also possible to do it on other models, such as an RTX 3080, as can be seen in the image above. In any case, this is not an extremely expensive modification, since we can get two dozen copper shims for less than $13 on the market. Of course, this modification cancels the guarantee of the graphics card.
