Should a fellow graphics card fall in the line of duty, it's down to its fellow soldiers to ensure it makes it back home. Okay, not really. But there's something genuinely touching about the story of this RTX 5070 Ti, which arrived in a Brazilian workshop with a hole in its PCB, rendering it unusable.
How did the hole get there? Unclear. But what was certain was that a large chunk of the VRMs were now missing, which meant power could no longer reach the chip itself (via Videocardz). However, YouTuber Paulo Gomes took it upon themselves to see what they could do for the stricken graphics card, and arrived at an unusual solution: wiring in the VRMs still attached to an AMD Radeon RX 580 donor card to provide electrical assistance to the fallen RTX 5070 Ti.
And holy hell, it appears to have worked. The AMD card was rigged with a series of electrical wires to bypass the missing VRMs, and was left riding piggyback aboard its much-more-powerful competitor. There's something uncomfortably medical about the whole affair, what with the sequence of wires resembling hospital tubes—but lo and behold, the RTX 5070 Ti now provides an output signal once more.
However, the project was not without its issues. For a start, AMD and Nvidia cards handle power management differently, and splicing them together to work in even a rudimentary fashion was no easy task. Monitoring the electrical flow has been a constant issue, requiring what appears to be a fair bit of current balancing and continual checking of the connection wires to make sure they weren't being damaged by the inevitable heat.
It's also worth mentioning that the card hasn't been benchmarked yet, as while the hackery appears to be enough to allow the card to produce a signal once more, there's a whole lot of "suck it and see" methodology going on here. The GPU has yet to be subjected to a heavy load, and Gomes admits that there's still a lot of work to be done.
It's a bizarre arrangement of components, too. Thanks to the piggybacking RX 580, the "card" (let's refer to it as one unit from this point) now has five cooling fans, and two entirely separate heatsinks facing back to back. I also kinda love that the RX 580 is a much smaller white model emblazoned with a whole heap of RGB lights, whereas the RTX 5070 Ti appears to be a Gigabyte unit with a much more austere aesthetic.
It's a bit like a cockatoo riding a German Shepherd. Anyway, the RTX 5070 Ti lives on once more, and the RX 580 now appears inseparable from its fallen comrade. I'm very curious to see what happens when the former is put under duress, but I hope Gomes and their pals have the appropriate fire protection handy. Don't try this at home, kids. Leave it to the electronics experts—or at least, the very brave and electrically inclined.
