- A YouTuber repaired an Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti with a hole in the board
- The project then went further into a quest to juice up this graphics card and set a new record with it
- That attempt was successful, with the resurrected RTX 5070 Ti grabbing top spot in its GPU category for the Unigine Superposition 8K test
Pushing GPUs to record-breaking levels is nothing new for enthusiast overclockers, of course – but here's something that definitely is new: a record being set by a graphics card with a hole in it.
VideoCardz highlighted the achievement of Brazilian YouTuber Paulo Gomes and his team (via PC Gamer), who had previously brought back to life a nonfunctional Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti that had a hole in its circuit board.
That feat of tech resurrection wasn't enough, though, and the YouTube channel figured that setting a record with this RTX 5070 Ti would be a fun task to attempt.
The team used an RTX 2080 Ti board as a new base for the broken GPU, then undertook a whole lot of soldering, fiddling around with voltages, and tweaking power levels to get something capable of setting a world record.
This happened during a livestream that lasted over seven hours (which you can see below – or rather, skip through, rather than watch in its entirety, unless you're very brave), and it ended in a new record for the Unigine Superposition 8K optimized test.
TESTANDO A RTX 5070Ti BURACO EDITION ft. @PauloGomesVGA - YouTube
Analysis: a seriously impressive achievement
This fudged-to-work RTX 5070 Ti with a hole in it managed to score 11,150 in the end, which is a long way behind the number one RTX 5090 results, of course, but it's the best score ever seen for the RTX 5070 Ti itself (some way down the overall rankings, naturally). The GPU did this by hitting a clock speed of 3.23GHz, we're told.
As VideoCardz points out, this isn't the most respected GPU benchmark in town these days, but nonetheless, to get a broken RTX 5070 Ti working again – and working well enough to break any record – is mind-boggling, frankly.
Granted, the resulting graphics card does not look pretty, with wires snaking everywhere and yellow masking tape applied all over the place, but in some ways, this makes the achievement all the more remarkable.
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