**The Challenging World of Soldering**
Gotta clean your tips. That's a tech tip right there. As it turns out, our soldering iron was covered in flux, which is not good for the tip. "You don't want to just cover it in flux?" Yeah, no kidding. It's probably not gonna work anyway so it doesn't really matter what.
We decided to go with option three: checking our largest tip on the end of our soldering iron for maximum thermal mass and setting the temperature to 900 degrees. This gave us an instant of flowing solder and a bunch of boiling flux. "It looks terrible." With the current limits doubled, the next thing we need to do is gain control over the core voltage.
Unfortunately, since Kepler and Nvidia hasn't given the user voltage control, ensuring our GTX customers get the highest quality product that runs quiet, cool, and fits in their PC. Oh, and if one of their partners like MSI or ASUS gives the user that control, the card can't be sold with a warranty. Nvidia controls the creation of GPU BIOS to an absurd level.
As far as I know, like the way it works is you log into like an Nvidia server, make your BIOS, then you have to get permission from them so like actually get the file. Fortunately, we do have a solution for this. We have this. The Elmer Labs enhanced voltage controller or EVC-2SX.
It works by connecting to the I2C bus, a communication bus that allows all the different components of your GPU to talk to each other to keep everything running as smoothly, and the EVC uses that bus to talk directly to the voltage controller. Most high-end GPU's these days use digital voltage controllers but before you get an EVC, make sure your GPU is compatible. On most GPU's there will be open I2C solder pads that were used for debugging during production. Simply solder a header onto one of those and you can use the EVC.
Once connected to the GPU, we can directly access the voltage controller through the Elmer Lab software and set the voltage to just whatever we want. There's no way we killed it. Right? Yep. It's totally fine. Yep. Do you wanna hit the power supply? Yep. We got it. She works.
Yay. The soldering iron is now under our control, and we can continue with the project. But for those who are new to this, let me just say that soldering can be a bit tricky. You need to have the right tools and a good understanding of how they work. And sometimes, even with the best equipment, things don't go as planned.
For us, it was all about trial and error. We tried different techniques, tested different components, and learned from our mistakes. And in the end, we succeeded in soldering our GPU using an EVC-2SX voltage controller. But I hope this article has given you a better understanding of the challenges involved in soldering and the importance of having the right tools and knowledge.
The Elmer Labs enhanced voltage controller or EVC-2SX is a device that can be used to control the core voltage of your GPU. It works by connecting to the I2C bus, which allows all the different components of your GPU to talk to each other. This allows you to set the voltage to just whatever you want.
The EVC uses this communication bus to talk directly to the voltage controller on your GPU. Most high-end GPU's these days use digital voltage controllers, but before you get an EVC, make sure your GPU is compatible. On most GPU's there will be open I2C solder pads that were used for debugging during production.
Simply solder a header onto one of those and you can use the EVC. Once connected to the GPU, we can directly access the voltage controller through the Elmer Lab software and set the voltage to just whatever we want. There's no way we killed it. Right? Yep. It's totally fine. Yep. Do you wanna hit the power supply? Yep. We got it. She works.
Yay. The soldering iron is now under our control, and we can continue with the project. But for those who are new to this, let me just say that soldering can be a bit tricky. You need to have the right tools and a good understanding of how they work. And sometimes, even with the best equipment, things don't go as planned.
For us, it was all about trial and error. We tried different techniques, tested different components, and learned from our mistakes. And in the end, we succeeded in soldering our GPU using an EVC-2SX voltage controller. But I hope this article has given you a better understanding of the challenges involved in soldering and the importance of having the right tools and knowledge.
The DerBauer video that inspired us to try soldering our own GPU was incredibly informative. Watching him mod his shunt, we might think that's a pretty easy task. But let me tell you, it took us hours to get everything just right. And in the end, it was all worth it.
We learned so much from watching DerBauer and trying to replicate what he did. We learned about the different components we needed, how to solder them together, and how to connect them to our GPU. And we learned that sometimes, even with the best equipment and a good understanding of how they work, things don't go as planned.
But that's all part of the process. Soldering can be frustrating at times, but it's also incredibly rewarding. There's nothing quite like the feeling of accomplishment you get when you finally get something working after hours of trial and error.
So if you're new to soldering, I would highly recommend giving it a try. It may seem intimidating at first, but with the right tools and knowledge, you'll be soldering like a pro in no time. And who knows, you might just discover a new passion.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: en- Hardcore over clocking is super simple.At least that's what Ithought a couple days ago.Unfortunately, I am notan electrical engineerand we do not have a fullblown electronics lab.So we have ended up with this mess.RTX 3090 all the safety's disabledand a hijacked voltagecontroller that has what?One, two, 12 ways itcould die at any second.I'm going to show you howto do all of these mods.And while it might look very jankythis could be the fastest GPU in Canada.And this madness isbrought to you by Seasonic.Mother (bleep).We're gonna be using their1300 watt power supplyand if it can survivethis 1000 watt RTX 3090you're gonna be fine.(upbeat music)Here's the plan.To get a GPU to go really fast,you need current and voltage.Getting enough current is quite difficult.Nvidia has very tight limitson how much current a cardwill draw for safety reasonspreventing us from having too much fun.We'll need to trick itinto thinking it is drawing less currentthan it actually is using shunt mod.We'll show you that in a minute.Voltage is also tough.For the last couple of generations,Nvidia hasn't given theusers voltage controlbut we'll be getting it back using this.It is a neat little device that allows usto bypass Nvidia and talkdirectly to the voltage controlso we can tell it to give the GPUas much voltage as we want.Before we can get to that though,we need to take some baseline readingsto compare and model performance to.So just running 3DMarkfor all of our tests,and it should be noted thisGPU isn't exactly stock.It was repasted with conductonautand also has K5 pro as the thermal pads.That gave us about 6% increase over stockso we're already gonnahave pretty high scoresjust baseline.So our baseline score is 10,411.And during that, the GPUdrew maximum of 390 watts.Once this thing's overclocked,it's gonna be brutalalong this power supply.I'm gonna run the benchmark once moreso we can get an actualscore that we can uploadthen the madness begins.Normally removing the cooler of a GPUis the easy part of a hard mod.Although today, oh God, it is not'cause unfortunately Iabsolutely caked this thingwith K5 pro.The plan was to just neveropen this thing againand it would just be a fast GPU,but here we are.All of this needs to leavebecause unfortunatelysoldering to K5 pro isnot gonna be a good time.- Oh, I don't thinkthat's a soap and waterkind of business.- Yeah big regrets.To up the current available on our GPUwe have two options, aBIOS mod or shunt mod.If you don't have access toan electronics rework stationa BIOS mod is probably your best bet.No need to trick the controllersto allow 1000 watts of powerif your BIOS just accepts it.But not everyone can use this approach.For cards that aren'tregularly used by overclockersa BIOS mod probably just doesn't exist.And if it does exist,good luck finding it.Model built overclocking BIOShave to originate from Nvidia.So it is risky for the authorized personto post online for just anyone to take.If you want one for your card,just try asking around onsome overclocking forumsor discord servers.One might end up in your DM's.But even with a thousand watt BIOSyou might run into sneaky current limits.That's why today we're goingto be increasing currentthe hands on way, a shunt mod.Shunts are very simple circuitsto allow a device tofind out how much currentis being drawn.By measuring the voltage dropacross the shunt resistor,the control calculates thecurrent using Ohm's law.So current equals voltageover top of resistance.By putting another resistor in parallelwith a shunt resistor,we can drop the resistanceand make the controllerthink that it is usingless current than it actually is.In our case, we're going to be solderinga 5 milliohm resistoron top of the existing5 milliohm resistors,meaning in software theGPU power that is reportedwill be half of what is actually drawing.There is a second method.By placing liquid metal ontop of the shunt resistorsyou can effectivelyincrease your current limitbut it is difficult tocontrol, makes your powerreadings just completely unreliable,can kill your GP if it's spills,and as a bonus, it'll eataway at the soldered joints.I didn't want to deal with any of thatso we are sticking to soldering.- How much trouble do weget into if we kill a 3090?What did you guys do to this poor bit?It's got like goop over it.Chain man- (Beep) using it.- I know what happened to that.That's dead resistor juice in there, man.We got many solders in the-(laughter)Gotta clean your tips.That's a tech tip right there.Do we have solder oil here?Not dog poop stuff.- You don't want to just cover it in flux?- No, I'm good.It's probably not gonna work anywayso it doesn't really matter what-Oh, wow okay.- Yeah. It seems too high.- Yeah. Yeah for sure.How do you go down?This is not inspiringconfidence that we knowwhat we're doing.Nah, I got it.Now you have to hold downinto six nine, I guess.All right. I'm gonna get a proper wire.You have the resistors right?- There we go.- Ye boy.That's why you guys were init like 800 degrees Celsius.It's 'cause it justdoesn't have enough heat.- Yep. Flux.- No, no.Oh what have I done to that resistor?I am so sorry.While you went to get the fluxI figured out that wegone and done goofed.These three shunts.- Yeah.- Are the ones that Iconnected to the ground pins.So good thing that we had to go get fluxbecause that would've been fun.Should do it.Ah, bull.Oh, it's making bubbly noises.I just, okay.Woohoo. It's such abad soldered iron Alex.- This isn't too bad of a soldering iron.Kyle's just complaining a lot.- Is this on?- It is.- Dude. It's on. I'm not joking.- Why is it so crap?Yeah. So the soldering ironis at max like 220 degrees.- Oh that's 15 degreeslower than what it needs.Like actually freaking mild solder.Ah (dog barking)Okay, so I'm not an angry person.- Typically.- I just like to shout at things- Watching a DerBauer video,you might think thatshunt mods are super easy.I certainly was fooled.The problem is that our 70wat Hakko soldering ironreally wasn't designedfor something like this.Nvidia did a great job designing this PCVto dissipate heat, whichmeans unfortunately,our 70 watt soldering ironjust cannot heat it up enough.There are a couple of ways around this.First you can buy abettering soldering ironand get the results we saw from DerBauer.Ultimately you can heat up the GPU.So stick it in a toaster ovenyou'd never plan on using it again.- You could set it on bake settingand set the bake temperatureto like 75 or 100.- Bake it until ourwhole PCV reaches around100 degrees Celsius and thenyou can start soldering.Or you can put the GPUon top of a toaster.In the end, we used option three.Checking our largest tip onthe end of our soldering ironfor maximum thermal mass andjust setting the temperatureto 900 degrees.That gave us an instant of flowing solderand a bunch of boiling flux.- It looks terrible.- With the current limits doubledthe next thing we needto do is gain controlof the core voltage.Unfortunately since Kepler and Nvidiahasn't given the user voltage controlto ensure our GTX customersget the highest qualityproduct that runs quiet,cool and fits in their PC.Oh, and if one of their partnerslike MSI or ASUS givesthe user that control,the card can't be sold with a warranty.- Nvidia controlsthe creation of GPU BIOSto like an absurd level.As far as I know, like the way it worksis you log into like an Nvidia server,make your BIOS, then youhave to get permissionfrom them so like actually get the file.- Fortunately, we dohave a solution for this.Where is our solution for this?Oh, here it is.We have this.The Elmer Labs enhancedvoltage controller or EVC-2SX.It works by connecting to the I2C bus,a communication bus allowsall the different componentsof your GPU to talk to each otherto keep everything running as smoothly,and the EVC uses that bus to talk directlyto the voltage controller.Most high-end GPU's thesedays use digital voltagecontrollers but before you get an EVC,make sure your GPU is compatible.On most GPU's there willbe open I2C solder padsthat were used fordebugging during production.Simply solder a header onto one of thoseand you can use the EVC.Once connected to the GPU,we can directly accessthe voltage controllerthrough the Elmer Lab softwareand set the voltage tojust whatever we want.There's no way we killed it.- Yep.- Right?- Yep.- It's totally fine.- Yep. Do you wanna hit the power supply?- Yep. We got it. She works.- Yay.- She has the video title,\"We did not kill a 3090at this point in time\".- With full control over GPU,how much can we improve performance?Well, with an air cooler,the results were worse than baseline.The card was drawing 600watts and the cooler justcould not keep up.So we needed some assistance.Who better to help withhardcore overclockingthan the man behind actuallyhardcore overlocking himself,Buildzoid.- Fromambient, you're basicallynot gonna get much pastthe stock voltage settingsof these cards 'cause theyjust run insanely hot.So if you keep raising the voltage,the internal temperatures rise fasterthan you gain stabilityfrom extra voltage.- We have a couple of options.The one that you mightbe thinking we would useis the chilled hastrophythat's right here.The problem is, is that thephase change block that I madedoesn't seem to work as good as we hopedand needs a little bit of a redesign.Instead, and I'm really sad to say this,we're going to have to use this.Yeah, I don't even knowwhat to describe it asother than just like acomplete piece of (bleep).We made a video aboutmaking this chiller nicerand in the process of making it nicer,it just got so much worse.It's in a box and it'shard to see what's leakingand if it's leaking ondomains, voltage or whatever.Hopefully it works. I don't know.To hopefully make everythingwork a bit better,I grabbed a bunch of spray foamand the plan is tobasically just (blowing air)just cover the whole thing in it.Hopefully that'll stop someof the condensation issuesinternally.Oh. And also it is super heavybecause I made it out of welded steelso I could get our welder setup for doing the Pyramid PC.The back half of yesterdaywas super productive.All of the electronics have been moved outand zip tied slash gafftaped to the outsideso that water will notdrip on them hopefully.All of the shunts have also been modded.You can see right here thatthere's another resistoron top of all of them.It was just as painful asbefore given our soldering iron.Finally, we need towater cool this bad boy.Water blocks for it do existbut I would be concernedabout condensationthat I wouldn't be able tosee forming on the inside.So instead we're just goingto use a generic VGA coolerwhich means unfortunately weneed to modify the VGA cooler.The problem is that thedesign of it's really stupid.So if you look in here, thedimension of the steel pieceis what gets you yourclamping force on this O-ring.Super critical for this O-ring workingand you not gettingwater all over your GPU.That unfortunately means thatI'm going to have to makesomething completely different.We're gonna hack something upwith an angle grinder and call it a day.Goodbye. Our CPU mounting plate is done.'Cause I like you guys Ieven polished this side.I just have to remove a bunch of K5so we can install thesecute little heat sinksthat are gonna be goingon the memory modules.It will hopefully keep them nice and cool.For thermal paste we're going to be usingThermal Grizzly Kryonaut.We don't have a heat spreaderso if there's a spot that's not coveredit might get hot and die.Last thing to do beforethis goes back togetherhopefully some nice cheap insurance.I'm sorry,It's so I don't kill it.- I know, but like why?- This poor GPU, it didn'tdeserve any of this.I really hope I don't kill this card.I know I've said that a lot,but like I wanna do morehardcore overclocking.Chiller just ate 16 liters of water.If this thing doesn'tleak, I will be so happy.That'll take half a while to cool downbut oh, there we go.So far so good.Is the air conditioner working?Oh, oh. oh it is.The real question is the pump.Holy crap. It just worked.We have water coming out of here.Is this leaking?I don't see any leaks here.Oh, that's definitely leaking.(bleep) what's that?- Looks like your sprayfoam didn't do its job.So I think what's leaking is right here.Oh, that's gross.I need gloves for this.This has to be what's leaking.Oh my God, that's gross.Oh, this got out of hand something fast.Where is the drain port?I know that I included one.This is a mess, Brandon.You're not wrong there.I believe there was a drainport on the bottom somewhere.Yeah. Let's get a bucket in there.Of all the ways that this wasgoing to go horribly wrong,this is not the way thatI expected it to happen.I'm sorry, viewers, thatyou need to watch this.Oh, oh, where's the drain port.Okay. I see it.Everything's fine.I have a lot of water down my sleeves.- I bet you do.- GPU's going on the test bench.Block's fine. GPU's not leaking.That's all great.Water temperature's at 14degrees, which is awesome.It's sub ambient, but not so coldthat we're going to havecondensation issues.It's time that we boot her up.You already know thisbut don't do anything that we'vedone in this video at home.It's all a bad idea.Like I've done somepretty jank stuff beforebut this is primo jank.Yes. GPU is not dead.So GPU temperature iscurrently at 11 degrees.You're not getting condensationbut you are getting nice and cold.All of our powers look good.Do we have VRM temperatures on here?Everything right here seemsto be working pretty well.As long as you justdon't look back past it.It's boosting high memoryis getting kind of hotbut it still is doing just fine.So VRM temperature inthe last run, 54 degrees.GPU temperature, 33.Fricking awesome.Memory's getting a little bit hot.We saw 96 degrees.We can probably coolthose down a bit better.On that last run we drew 360 watts,which is half of what we actually drew,which means we did what? 720 watts.And the GPU is at two gigahertz.This thing is freaking fast.It's finally time to do some overclocking.So I think we're gonnabe pretty easily ableto get around 21, 2200megahertz on this GPUalthough that doesn't really matter.Nvidia does this thingcalled clock stretchingso if the core voltage drops a little bit,to keep the GPU stable,they will for a couple ofcycles drop the frequency downand just not report itin the software at all.So even though we might belooking at 2200 megahertzor whatever, the thing thatreally is going to tell usif it's good or not, is the 3DMark score.Now for those scores,our baseline was 10,000.If we can get 11,000,I'm going to be happyand if we can get 12,000were like top 10 in theworld with this GPU.Let's fricking do it.Here's our first overclocked run.So this is plus 50 megahertz on the core.And our plan is to basicallyjust add 25 megahertz,see if it's stable.If it crashes, we add some more voltage.We just keep on going like thatuntil either the thermalsor the VRMs or somethingjust can't take it anymore.Go away Brandon.I'm gonna over clockthis for the next whileand see if we can get a record.Okay. 10,900.I think that's slightlymore than we had baseline.Actually that's deadly close to 11,000.So we're just gonna keep on going.Let's see how far we can push it.So CPU it's at 5.5 gigahertzand I had to open the door back thereso that it wouldn't keep onthermal throttling on us.Anyway, GPU, isn't quiteas fast as I wanted.We are getting like 11,500 for our scores.Sometimes 11,700.That is a 12% increase over stockand stock was already6% faster than stock.So like this is a lotfaster than a normal 3090.Problem is, that doesn't get usonto the 3DMark leader boards.I think it's just simplya case of Silicon lottery.Like no matter what I do,can't get more than plus100 megahertz on the core.So was all of this worth it?I guess it depends onwhat you're trying to do.For a 12% performance increase?Like that is measurable.But at the same time you're risking a cardthat's infinite dollars'cause you can't buy one.Yeah, there we go.11,706. So that is obscenely fast.Our poor stupid chiller canbarely keep up with our 3090.It's outputting so much power.I don't think we're gonna beable to get better than that.That said, I had fun.Is that a goodconstellation prize Brandon?My leak bin filled upso I put a leak binunderneath my leak bin.I guess I thought going into thisthat this was going to be super simple.Just, you know, chuck someresistors onto the boardand bippity boppity youhave a super fast 3090.Turns out it's not that easy.There's no good reason to do thisbesides you have fun makingyour scores get nice and high.What's also a lot of fun is Seasonic.They sponsored this videoand I'm honestly shocked thatI was able to use a single power supply.I brought two of them over herethinking that I have torun both of them becauseCPU's drawing 400 watts,card's drawing a pretty consistent 800,that's like 1200 watts.I kind of thought it was gonna conk outand it didn't so excellent job Seasonic.This is a real stresstest of your power supplyand you passed.They also have a 12 year warranty.I run it in my system at homeand they're just highquality of power suppliers.What else more do you want?So if you like this videohit like, get subscribed.Do you wanna see morehardcore overclocking stuff?I kind of want to.6.9 gigahertz CPU.I wouldn't mind doing that.And if you wanna watch something else,maybe watch when we sub zeroedthe alien where Area 51 M.That was ridiculous.\n"
