This Frankenstein-ed RTX 5070 Ti with a hole in it has just set a world record benchmark score and it's the most cursed-looking graphics card I've ever seen
We reported late last year on the resurrection of an RTX 5070 Ti with a literal hole in it, thanks to the efforts of YouTuber Paulo Gomes and his team. The GPU was saved by wiring in the VRMs of an AMD Radeon RX 580 donor card, creating a monstrous hybrid GPU that looked ridiculous, but appeared to work surprisingly well.
Well, far from resting on their laurels, the team has since taken their efforts one step further (via Videocardz). Thanks to the addition of an Asus GeForce RTX 2080 Ti PCB as its base and some clever power tweaking, the GPU-with-a-hole has managed to set a world record: the top spot in Unigine Superposition's online rankings for an RTX 5070 Ti, running the 8K optimized preset.
Over the course of a seven-hour+ live stream, the team fought against a litany of issues to convince the Frank-o-card to perform properly, including an early problem with low-resolution-only output and voltage drops under load.
A rat's nest of wires, the judicious use of yellow tape, and the odd cutting tool were used to reduce conductor resistance and voltage loss between the two cards—although it still seems to have the odd quirk worth looking into.
Like a claimed 50 °C to 80 °C thermal spike, which is said to have occurred in roughly one second. Oof. One of the 12 V wires also appears to hit a near-100 °C temperature during the benchmark runs, which is the sort of toasty figure that gets any hardware enthusiast nervous.
Despite the issues, the card appears to have achieved a 3.23 GHz clock speed, with the memory bandwidth reaching 34 Gbps. Voltage drops are also claimed to have been reduced from ~400 mV to ~30 mV, which just goes to prove that yellow sticky tape fixes everything.
Okay, so it was solved with clever wiring hacks and power balancing. The end result is far from pretty, but there's something wonderful about watching a team of enthusiastic hardware tweakers reach over each other in a frenzy of hackery to bring it back into the land of the living.
The final Unigine Superposition score topped out at 11,150, which was enough to secure the top spot in the rankings for an RTX 5070 Ti. Although whether you can call it one at this point is debatable, I guess. Still, cheers all round for the effort, and bonus points for creating the most cursed-looking graphics card I've ever seen.