This was an older project of mine that I completed about two years ago; I always meant to post it but never got around to it until now.

I love doing secondhand builds, and I especially love making them my own and pushing them to the limit. Really happy how clean this came out, and how well it performs!

EDIT: since people were (rightly) concerned about the VRAM and VRM heatsinking, I added a pic in the album highlighting this in case someone that wanted to do the same thing stumbled upon this post.

Nice, cpu coolers are really down in price so it's an attractive option

Beats buying an aftermarket cooler if you're willing to spend hours of planning and building and risking your expensive components in the process

I like it, nice clean finish. I want to Water Cool my newest card (prev was) but errrg the effort.

Thank you, I try. Yeah, it's a lot of effort; IMO it's honestly not worth it unless you're overclocking hard, or (like in my case) your stock cooler is bad lol.

The cpu of the gpu is cooler but the memory is going to run hotter since the new heat sink doesn't touch it. It does get air from fan but I doubt it's as effective as it was. You could use a wider and longer heat sink they are pretty cheap and will cool the gpu a lot better.

Yeah previous card for me was a 1080ti with the snot clocked out of it. So far this card stays cool n quiet and isn't really being taxed by anything I play atm. So yeah, no real need for water.....yet

I’d be concerned about the memory and VRMs. GPU water blocks are expensive because they’re milled to conform to those components, not just the processor.

I miss when amds reference blowers looked like this.

Nzxt makes a bracket to do this. Kraken g12

The reference RX480 VRAM and VRM modules are heatsinked to the shroud's aluminum "frame", which I kept intact. The GPU has been running fine heavily overclocked for over 2 years, so I think this worked.

Agreed that this is a big concern; it's the reason I decided to keep the fan on the GPU instead of just liquid cooling it.

EDIT: added pic

Agreed; this is why I kept their heatsinking and the fan intact. I see now that this isn't clear in the images.

EDIT: added pic

Dude I know. IMO one of the best looking GPUs ever. It's one of the reasons I decided to make this instead of buying an aftermarket heatsink lol.

Was refreshing to see an industrial design after the 290x was edgy AF. I think I still have my sapphire anime waifu blower 290.

That was my inspiration!

That bracket is amazing. My 1080ti was a blower style that should never have been made (99-100C under load even after repasting). Slapped on the g12 bracket and an AIO and voila: cooled it so much better I could OC it if I wanted to, and that's in a tiny non-optimized ITX case. Gives me even more time before I need to upgrade.