A hole in the PCB didn't stop this RTX 5070 Ti from setting a world record

A Hole in the PCB Didn't Stop This RTX 5070 Ti from Setting a World Record

This story seems crazy, but it's absolutely real. A Brazilian team of modders and repair specialists, led by YouTuber Paulo Gomes, turned a practically destroyed graphics card into a world record holder.

It all started when a GeForce RTX 5070 Ti with catastrophic damage arrived at their workshop — its printed circuit board literally had a huge burnt hole, completely destroying the power subsystem in the upper corner. The team decided not to throw the card away, as the GPU and memory remained intact.

The role of a "life support machine" was initially played by a legendary AMD Radeon RX 580. The modders connected the boards with a bunch of wires, forcing the AMD VRM to power the NVIDIA core. The card came back to life but worked unstably.

For serious benchmarks, the power from the RX 580 wasn't enough. Then Paulo and his colleague Enzo Tulio went further. They replaced the donor with a board from an ASUS RTX 2080 Ti. This "Frankenstein's monster" received a powerful power delivery system, a bunch of additional shunts, and kilometers of wires.

In the end, the masters managed to overclock the chip to 3.23 GHz and the memory to 34 Gbps, which ultimately allowed the graphics card to match overclocked RTX 5080s in the Unigine Superposition benchmark on the 8K Optimized preset. In this test, this mutant scored 11,150 points. The results of overclocked RTX 5080s in it range from 11 to just over 12 thousand points, while a stock RTX 5080 doesn't even reach 10,800 points.