Modding

Before we take a closer look at the different modifications I will be under taking, thanks has to go out to the overclocking community for their helpfulness in testing and sharing their knowledge, which is not something that should be taken for granted.

All the hard mods in this article can be found on XS forums with special thanks to Shamino, Andre, Kinc, hipro5 and NapalmV5 in particular for their involvement in either developing and/or sharing these mods.

In the picture below you can see the mod points for adding additional voltage to both the core and the memory of the GTX 480, along with read points so we can monitor the increase with a digital multimeter.

With the vGPU mod I'll be using a plug that is commonly found on the end of a CPU fan; this gives me the ability to plug the variable resistor in or out as I test, utilizing a hard mod like a variable resistor or software from the different manufacturers without the hard mod interfering in those results.

I will also use a molex connector for my read points as it's a convenient size and shape for the probes connected to the digital mutimeter.

When soldering capacitors onto the graphics card, I prefer to add some solder first and make little "mountains" that I can then blend with the solder I have added to the legs of the capacitors to make a fast and solid connection.

With the end result looking like this.