It’s no secret that small form factor PC builders have a hard time fitting Nvidia GeForce RTX 4000-series GPUs into their rigs. The newest generation of team green graphics cards might have underwhelmed somewhat on the performance-to-cost front, but there’s no denying they’re pretty massive, thanks in part to the huge heatsinks on higher-tier models. Enter Redditor TechTaxi, who’s shown Nvidia and its AIBs how it’s done by modding an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 to achieve a much smaller size without compromising performance.
The smallest Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 available on the market is the Asus 4080 ProArt OC. While small compared to its Nvidia peers at 300 x 120 x 50mm, it’s hardly what you’d call dainty, and being 2.5 slot means it’s incompatible with dual slot cases.
TechTaxi decided to make their “own dual slot ‘Gainward 4080 Ghost GS’ by modifying and heatsink swapping to get the most powerful card that can fit in a Velka 5”. And from the wealth of benchmarking data they’ve provided in the Reddit thread, it looks like they’ve achieved that with just a 0.53% decrease in the card’s performance on average in OC benchmarks.
Although it was hotter on average than other RTX 4080 cards, the Gainward 4080 Ghost GS still managed to stay at around the 70 degrees mark for the GPU, which is within the acceptable range.
And they’re not going to stop there. TechTaxi pledges to attempt a “dual slot, single fan” Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti next time around, which could be a real boon for tiny custom PCs intended to output a decent amount of power.
While we don’t view the RTX 4080 as the very best graphics card on the market, an AIB releasing a dual slot RTX 4080 onto the market could certainly make it somewhat more appealing, especially for custom builds where space is at a premium.
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