Graphics card modder shows AIB vendors you really can have a dual slot RTX 4080

pcgamer.com:

If you love the performance of Nvidia's latest RTX graphics cards but hate the fact they're all flipping huge, then you're not alone. One inventive Reddit user decided to take matters into their own hands (and a CNC miller) to make their dream of a svelte, dual slot RTX 4080 come true.

The one thing the majority of Ada Lovelace graphics cards have is the size of the heatsink—they're absolutely massive, especially on the top-end models, like the RTX 4070 Ti, RTX 4080, and RTX 4090. It makes sense with the latter, as it can easily use 450W or more during gaming, but the other two have much lower power figures.

The RTX 4080 has an official TGP (total graphics power) of 320W but there are plenty of third party models on the market that sport RTX 4090-sized coolers. If it's not using anything like the same power, there's no real need for the heatsink to be that large.

So Reddit user TechTaxi took matters into their own hands by performing some nifty surgery, transplanting the cooling system from a Gainward RTX 4070 Ghost OC card onto the circuit board of a Gainward RTX 4080 Pheonix GS.

Sounds simple, yes? Definitely not, as the cooler from the smaller card didn't quite fit the bigger PCB. Mounting holes all nicely lined up, but there wasn't quite enough room underneath the heatsink for some of the components.

Cue a spot of milling with a small CNC unit and bingo–one RTX 4080 with an RTX 4070-sized cooling system. TechTaxi then used a PTM7950 thermal pad on the GPU die and Upsiren UX Pro thermal putty on the VRMs and VRAM to improve heat transfer. Using a smaller heatsink invariably means higher temperatures but his figures were more than acceptable–just 70C for the GPU, 81C for the chip's hotspot, and 65C for the VRAM.

Now,