Nuts and Volts

Making a "Poor man's Classified" Project | GTX 680 FTW | Part 1: Broken Vapor Chamber

Recently I purchased a GTX 680 FTW for some more fun with Kepler. Seeing that the FTW shares very a similar VRM to the classified I thought it would be fun to start a project on turning it into a "Poor man's classified".

I'm talking voltage control for core, memory and PEX, unlocked BIOS etc. Right now that can all wait as I run some baseline tests on the stock cooler. One small problem...

After thoroughly cleaning the card and reassembling it: repasted the core, however left the pads since I'm out at the moment, and they were in good enough condition.
I noticed that the core temps were particularly bad even for a blower. Running even a light workload such as GPU-Zs render test would make the card shoot up to 80c within 20 seconds (Room ambient was 17c). Thinking it was a bad mount I removed the heatsink to check if it had bad contact. Nothing as such, fairly even pressure across the die. Reapplied just in case and tried again. Same issue. 

Suspecting the cooler was at fault and not the thermal paste nor spread, checking the vapor chamber revealed that part of the solder near where the chamber is filled was cracked and had a hole. Giving how much dirt and dust had built up around the vapor chamber near the blower fan, I suspect that it got corroded enough to where the solder cracked and failed. Bit of a shame but let's be honest, the stock cooler wasn't going to be staying on for long after I get voltage control.

In the meantime I'll be buying a freeze mod VGA block for the card so that I run it with the baseplate still attached for extra cooling on the memory and VRM.
The Heatkiller block doesn't clear the baseplate and metal clips for the shroud hence a new block.

Still got some quick results out of the card in FireStrike before it ended up overheating. Memory chips are Hynix (MFR) and seem to do around 1800-1825MHz.
The core however is a potato. ASIC of %75 and can only do 1190MHz at stock voltage. Core can def run higher clocks however it crashes late into GT2 after temps get up to around 80c when set to high.

Scores if anyone cares - FireStrike (GPU) Score, FireStrike Score.

Stay tuned for future updates as I get this card up to acceptable speed and maybe even deserve the classified title.