This monstrous Nvidia GPU just broke a world record, despite having a hole in it

What do you do if you find you have a dead Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti on your hands? Well, if you're Brazilian GPU modding wizards Paulo Gomes and Enzo Tulio, you get it working again and break some records, of course.

After receiving the RTX 5070 Ti last year, Paulo Gomes managed to get the card working again by Frankenstein's monstering it together with the PCB from an RTX 2080 Ti, using the donor board's power circuitry to get the GPU firing up again. With what is one of Nvidia's best graphics card options now restored to some sort of working order, Gomes then teamed up with the modding team at ET's LGA1155 to take this card from a half-working, hacked-together abomination to a world record-beating hacked-together abomination.

Over the course of a seven-and-a-half hour live streamed video, the team tinkered and tested, tweaked, then tested again, soldering, desoldering, and resoldering components along the way. A lot of this work was to do with adding extra power and ground wires to reduce resistance and voltage loss from the donor PCB to the RTX 5070 Ti. You can see the state of the original card's PCB below.

Along the way, they also fixed issues with the display signal and Windows driver compatibility, eventually raising the performance of the card from roughly equivalent to an RTX 3060 to being a chart-topping RTX 5070 Ti.

As to which record was broken, the team primarily focused on the Unigine Superposition benchmark, running both its 8K Optimized and the 1080p Extreme tests. In the latter, the team recorded a top score of 16,792, which would be enough for 11th position in that test, according to the charts on HWBot. Meanwhile, in the 8K Optimized test, the card hit a top score of 11,150, which beats the current highest score recorded on HWBot. The team didn't officially submit their test run, as the submission process is quite long-winded, but the score was there for viewers of the video to see.

Regardless of whether you want to consider it a true world record, it's still an impressive feat to get a graphics card with a one-inch hole in its PCB - and a cooler/power delivery setup that looks like the above - back up and running. Most of us are just happy with a 1% software overclock or seeing temps drop by 1° by installing an extra fan in our case.