Brazilian modders brought a damaged Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti back from the brink, and later used it to break a world benchmark record.
As VideoCardz reports, this GPU went through the wringer before and after its repair, with literal holes in the PCB and a desperate need for swapped components to even get it running. And yet, somehow, it’s become one of the fastest GPUs ever built.
It’s also one of the most busted graphics cards I’ve ever seen. It has an RTX 2080 Ti taped to it, and a complicated maze of bootleg wiring. But during a near-seven-hour livestream, modders Paulo Gomes, Enzo Túlio, and their teams pushed the 5070 Ti to a Superposition score of 11,150 points in the 8K Optimized test, beating the currently listed top spot on HWBot’s rankings by 70 points.
In the 1080p Extreme test, the card scored 16,972 points, which would put it in 11th place. Neither score was officially submitted, partly because the process is laborious, so it’s not a true record, but the achievement is impressive nonetheless.
During the modification, the teams were able to fix display signal issues to have it display 1080p effectively, and soldered new wiring and grounding to reinforce power paths. Most of the modifications were designed to improve power delivery to the card’s GPU, reducing voltage loss from the donor card to the RTX 5070 Ti, which proved rather tricky with a literal hole in the PCB.
At the start of their modding and benching run, this Franken-GPU had roughly RTX 3060 performance, but by the end, it had become one of the fastest RTX 5070 Ti’s on the planet.
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It probably won’t have the longest operating life without further modification, as the team behind its creation did note some of the wires hit over 100 degrees during testing. But it’s not like Nvidia doesn’t have problems with that anyhow.
This is actually the second time that Gomes has revived this particular RTX 5070 Ti. In October, he used an AMD RX 580 as an external VRM to bring the card online, but clearly, an RTX 2080 Ti gave it more power to work with. Will we see something even more capable soldered to it in the future? Considering what’s been achieved here, I wouldn’t doubt it.
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Jon Martindale
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Jon Martindale is a tech journalist from the UK, with 20 years of experience covering all manner of PC components and associated gadgets. He’s written for a range of publications, including ExtremeTech, Digital Trends, Forbes, U.S. News & World Report, and Lifewire, among others. When not writing, he’s a big board gamer and reader, with a particular habit of speed-reading through long manga sagas.
Jon covers the latest PC components, as well as how-to guides on everything from how to take a screenshot to how to set up your cryptocurrency wallet. He particularly enjoys the battles between the top tech giants in CPUs and GPUs, and tries his best not to take sides.
Jon’s gaming PC is built around the iconic 7950X3D CPU, with a 7900XTX backing it up. That’s all the power he needs to play lightweight indie and casual games, as well as more demanding sim titles like Kerbal Space Program. He uses a pair of Jabra Active 8 earbuds and a SteelSeries Arctis Pro wireless headset, and types all day on a Logitech G915 mechanical keyboard.
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