[mattliston]

An alternative solution is to simply use an old harddrive cooler like this one 2X GOLD 3.5" Hard Drive Disk HDD 4 Pin Cooling Fan Cooler Radiator PC SATA IDE

Then you just need to figure out what thickness thermal pads you need to use between the backplate and the PCB. If sata power is the only way you can go about things, well, you can find sata power plugs for cheap that have crimp barbs to make it nice and clean looking. Then you can use a bit of TESA or paracord sleeving tape to clean up teh appearance

I dont think the heat will travel through the copper fast enough to do better than active cooling with a fan. Though, I personally do NOT own any graphics card currently that even needs backside cooling. You folks who dropped the extra mint for 3080-up are gonna benefit the most. Dropping your ram temps by even 10*C seems to allow quite a lot more performance. Not necessarily out of getting more speed, but basically keeping the ECC from having to run (which is why the highest memory clockspeed is never actually the fastest) Today's vram ECC works so fast, many folks dont know they are even taking a hit when its doing its thing.

Heck, many of the small mom and pop PC shops that are sparsely scattered around might even stock the HDD coolers for simple nostalgia.

 

[mattliston]

You can grab thin thermal pad sheets on ebay. Look for the ones that have an actual name brand, as you can then check them out online to see if they do anything for real.

They are hit or miss, but regardless, ignore whatever thermal ratings they provide. Just like fan specs, they are given (if even honest) in specific scenarios.


a 1.5mm sheet that covers the entire back of the card, plus some cheap aluminum or copper shim form homedepot or menards, and then you can simply grab some 20 or 40grit sandpaper, and rough it up to add a ton of surface area for a fan to whip the heat away.