YouTube enthusiast TrashBench replaced the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960’s factory cooling system with a CPU cooler. The result exceeded all his expectations, as the temperature dropped by as much as 13 degrees, and he managed to set a new world record for this video card in the 3DMark Fire Strike test.
Initially, TrashBench simply attached the cooler to the graphics card using cable ties, but poor contact with the crystal only made the situation worse: the temperature increased by 10 °C. Then the modder printed a custom mount on a 3D printer, achieved a tight fit of the cooler and immediately saw the result: the processor became cooler, and the performance in the benchmark improved.
The GTX 960 graphics card paired with the Intel Core i5-12600KF scored 7642 points in Fire Strike, exceeding the previous maximum (7458). In addition to the record, TrashBench noted that the cooling system became quieter than the original, despite using a cheap fan at minimum speed.
It turned out that the heavy CPU cooler (470 g versus 270 g for the standard one) dissipates heat much more effectively. However, from an engineering point of view, everything is quite logical: CPU coolers are larger, more powerful and more massive than those installed on video cards.
TrashBench is already planning to repeat the experiment with the RTX 2070 Super, and in the future, to compare the performance of standard GPU coolers and processor “towers”.