Gadgetory

motherboards these days can have so many expansion slots for adding new functionality that most people don't even know what to do with them all at least in theory because thanks to modern graphics cards ballooning thermal output almost none of them are available with single slot coolers meaning that if you want to run a single graphics card you take up two of your expansion slots you want to run to boom you just took up four of your expansion slots now the solution to this used to be very simple you take your graphics card you rip that cooler off of it and then you go ahead you put a water block on it so that you can actually install something in the slot right next to it without compromising the cooling well not if Nvidia or AMD you have anything to say about that check this out here's a couple of modern cards you see the problem they have connectors in the next slot over so we're going to show you guys how to take care of that and single slot fi a modern GPU you cuddle bear is the easy-to-use VPN service that lets you browse the web as if you're in one of 20 different countries check out the link in the video description to learn more so I'm actually going to start with a pre water-cooled card the purpose of this video is not to be a comprehensive guide on how to water cool your graphics card because we've actually done that before you can check out that video right around here no this one is just intended to address the difficulties associated with water cooling a card that has IO that's in the slot next to it you know whether you're trying to just increase the number of slots that you have access to or whether say for example there's a particular type of slot that's being covered that you need well this should help you and then again last thing to be clear I'm not necessarily recommending that you do this because while we will be taking what I believe will be the appropriate precautions to ensure that our card still works at the end of this your mileage may vary considerably and this is not the kind of guide that you will find anywhere on you know I don't know AMD or nvidia z' website so the first step is to find yourself the appropriate cutting wheel so we're just going to be using one of the standard cutting disks and not our reinforced cutting discs rather and not the nubbin of a one that was on there before step number two is to remove the rear i/o plate from the card this will subject the card itself to less metal shortage all over the place then if I were to try and cut this while it was attached there we go but before doing that we are going to mask off any exposed PCB parts of the card as well as we possibly can to avoid any metal splinters or shards causing shorts on the board by just getting lodged into places on bridging contacts so I have this handy dandy bag that's exactly the size of a video card that I'm going to try and use for that with a lot of block on it a video card is no longer exactly the size of the video case once we can mask off the board okay so the last thing to consider before the point of no-return which we are about to embark upon is whether or not you need this connector so this is a DVI D whereas this is a DVI I so that actually leaves us with DVI VGA though not at the same time although I think they are split ok I'm not actually sure don't quote me on that one DVI or VGA HDMI and DisplayPort on this particular card so as long as we don't need dual DVI then we should be pretty much good to go now in theory this should work because a disconnected connection is still a disconnected connection whether it's here at the connector or whether it's here at the well we sawed it off there so I guess without any further stalling driveling time let's get our vacuum cleaner in position now it's called a vacuum cleaner but you would never use it to clean a vacuum I mean by this logic a car wash should use a car to wash something will be up to the editor whether that gets left in or not Oh that's a little that's yeah that's steel that's a little tougher than I was hoping I think we're gonna bring out the big guns here I cut my damn vacuum so I didn't cut it much I only cut it a little cool oh wow so there you have it our DVID connector has been cleanly sheared off I don't know exactly what difference this will make but my sort of common sense would dictate that you want to take these these connector wires here and separate them so now they were contacting each other what's left now is to do our PCI backplate now with many cards in the past it was possible to buy these single slot back plates that just had the i/o cutouts on the one side and nothing no ventilation slots on the other side but nowadays because there's i/o here no one really sells those anymore so we're just going to have to we're just going to have to make do just kind of eyeball it yeah it's really not as tight as I'd normally like something like this to be held okay in theory a single slot bracket maybe a file though these are really sharp how okay so now all that's left then is to reassemble our GTX Titan oh you can see it is a really good thing that we masked off our video card day you can see those metal shards that were flying around also we're going to be careful now then to keep this video card oriented this way so that those don't fall out towards the car so I'm going to use a little technique that I call alcohol that washes away our problems alright so now we can put our freshly modded back plate on there ah there we go oh yes oh no I dropped all his screws there you go look at that it almost looks natural if you ignore this the last thing left now is to make sure that our heart still works boom go get some water okay moment of truth time to find out if the sucker works postcode fifty five what does that mean oh I don't have time for this right now these fans are not plugged in okay let's try it again postcode fifty-five what are you so it seems like it may be Ram related so you're gonna go ahead and pop one of these sticks out come on video card yeah whoo I mean there's no real reason this should never I shouldn't be that excited but there you go it works I mean oh I guess what I haven't shown yet he's installing a card next to it let's say we wanted a PCI Express SSD I'll what the heck it's PCIe 2x okay I need a 1x card where am I gonna get a 1x card okay so let's say you needed a TV tuner but I don't have to have a good reason for doing these things sometimes it's just because I can boom TV tuner installed let's get it booted up into an operating system now cool well I'm kind of stoked on this no one else cares someone what's the point of these fancy motherboards with all these slots if you can only use half of them right so I think that pretty much wraps it up then guys thank you for watching if you dislike this video then hit that dislike button posted on our slash tech support Gor do whatever it else / cringe wherever it is that you want to talk about what an idiot I am but the reality of it of it is that it worked so there's that if you guys liked it hit that like button get subscribe to Linus tech tips the new check mark and maybe even consider supporting us whether it's by changing your amazon bookmark for the fire affiliate code instructions for which are up there by buying a cool shirt like this one or by joining our community forum and contributing some answers or becoming a contributor on the four or whatever else the case may be thanks again for watching end if you guys are done doing all that stuff and you're kind of wondering gee what should i watch next maybe check out the video where I must have done something interesting recently well I'm sure they'll overlay something interesting here and put some text and make it look very enticing for you to click on that'll also be up there