Building Our Own Nvidia/AMD Hybrid
Victor Frankenstein, I am not. But you might say that it's a little disrespectful to put an AMD heat sink and fan on a half-naked Nvidia card. In this case, though, it's better to get some answers than it is to match the right colors together. And because Nvidia's partners didn't launch with a single slot model of their own, we felt it was necessary to take that extra step and show it could be done. One of the readers on the Tom's Hardware U.S. forum called our last dalliance “Frankenmod”, and that's not far from the truth.
The first step is to remove the small heat sink with its axial fan from AMD's FirePro V3900 and clean it. Why are we using this cooler, specifically? None of the other single-slot solutions we looked at would fit because Nvidia's reference PCB employs some fairly tall capacitors. This was the only heat sink and fan combo in arm's reach that'd honor the height of one expansion slot.
Although this was the only cooler that fit, it still presented us with a unique issue. As you can see in the picture, its power lead is short. It also happens to be on the wrong side to work easily with a GeForce GTX 750 Ti. So, we had to fashion an adapter that'd make it possible for the card to control fan speeds.
In Passively Cooling Nvidia's GeForce GTX 750 Ti...With An AMD Sink, we explained in detail how we were able to make heat sinks from AMD cards fit on Nvidia graphics cards, despite different screw hole spacing. If you haven't already, check out that piece for the step-by-step of how we enlarged the holes on our GeForce board. For those who already read it, the pictures below are there to refresh your memory.
As they say, no pain, no gain. Without enlarging the screw holes, you won't be able to transplant the heat sink from AMD's FirePro V3900. To be honest, though, even an experimental kid could do this without messing anything up. Just be careful not to hurt yourself!
