YouTube channel Trashbench, known for its unorthodox experiments with PC hardware, has published a new video showing him strapping an RTX 4090 cooler to an RTX 3060 to boost the RTX 3060's GPU performance. The video shows how the YouTuber was able to modify a GIGABYTE RTX 4090 graphics card cooler to make it work with a GIGABYTE RTX 3060.
To do this Trashbench had to saw off and pry off numerous parts of the RTX 4090 cooler's mounting solution, cooling fins, and heat spreaders for the power delivery system to make the RTX 3060's PCB compatible with the cooler without any of the components interfering with the heatsink. Despite the redneck engineering involved, the end result looked clean enough to fool someone into thinking the RTX 4090 cooler was made for the RTX 3060.
However, the cooling performance of the RTX 3060 with its oversized RTX 4090 cooler showed a negligible improvement in performance. Temperatures with the RTX 4090 cooler dropped by 9C from 59C stock to 51C, and performance improved by a virtually indistinguishable amount from the temperature drop alone.
Overclocking didn't help much between the RTX 3060's stock cooler and the RTX 4090 cooler. With the stock cooler, the YouTuber was able to achieve 2,250MHz on the GPU with the fans blasted to 100%. But the RTX 3060 was only able to gain around 50MHz more clock speed with the same overclock and maxed-out fans on the RTX 4090 cooler. Performance-wise, the overclock only translated into a 2FPS difference across several games the YouTuber tested between the stock RTX 3060 cooler and the RTX 4090 cooler.
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The performance results demonstrate why NVIDIA's AIB partners stick with the cooler sizes they use for NVIDIA's mid-range GPUs. These smaller GPUs don't produce enough power to make ginormous coolers from more powerful GPUs necessary, even for improving overclocking headroom. NVIDIA's partners have learned over the years how to get the most out of NVIDIA's boosting algorithm and develop coolers that get their GPUs close to the physical limits of the silicon itself (usually). For instance, TrashBench was able to hit his RTX 3060's 1.1v voltage limit on the stock cooler through overclocking. That said, it is cool to see a ginormous RTX 4090 cooler attached to an RTX 3060 purely for the aesthetics.
