A DIY PC enthusiast and modder by the name of FanlessTech recently posted their endeavours at passively cooling an RTX 4060. And by passive, they stuck a massive 2.5kg aluminium heatsink right onto the GPU core.
The design of the heatsink isn’t anything extraordinary. It’s basically a tall block of machine-cut aluminium with equally huge heatsink fins. The gaps between each fin are huge as well, and cut as such to allow warm air generated by natural convection to rise through time.
The obvious downside here is that the weight of the aluminium heatsink cannot be sustained by the PCB of the RTX 4060, so FanlessTech has resorted to an open case setup. Also, while the pictures don’t show it, they seem to have made use of a vertical GPU mount as well, or so they claim.
Sadly, FanlessTech didn’t provide details on how their passively cooled RTX 4060 performed in writing. However, if you head over to their Bilibili page, they show the card running what is clearly the remastered version of Diablo 2 in the background. In the metrics they use, you can see that the card is running at a stable 58°C overall, with the GPU hotspot hitting 71°C and holding.
Once again, the concept of DIY modding and GPU cooling isn’t exclusive to FanlessTech. Over the years, there have been many projects. Last year, we reported on TrashBench, an overclocker and extreme modder, who broke the overclocking records with a now ancient NVIDIA GTX 1060, pushing it to run at 2.2GHz, well beyond its default boost clock of 1.7GHz.
TrashBench did this by literally clamping copper heatpipes onto the GPU, along with a waterblock and pump right onto the PCB of the card too. For their effort, the heavily modified card scored 2,000 points more than it would in its default air-cooled state.
(Source: Videocardz, FanlessTech, X)
