RTX 2070 Mobile shunt mod boosts performance close to desktop level

Report from PC Games Hardware forums.

PCGH forum member “HerrBolsch” inspired by recent reports on mobile GPU shunt modding, has made a similar mod himself. Shunt modifications are often used by enthusiasts to bypass power limits on desktop GPUs, but forum user has now applied the same method to a mobile graphics card.

The project involved an RTX 2070 Mobile inside a Zotac mini PC. Typically such mods involve laptops. The original goal was to set up water cooling in the small chassis, but the work expanded to include a hardware modification. By soldering additional resistors to the GPU, motherboard power delivery, and memory, the fixed 115 W TDP of the mobile card was effectively raised toward the 175 W power level of a standard desktop RTX 2070.

Source: PC Games Hardware

As we can see, the Intel Coffee Lake-H based Mini-PC from ZOTAC doesn’t have traditional pre-soldered mobile GPU, rather it’s a separate board with display connectors and PCIe connector replaced with a ribbon cable. In that sense, it’s more of a desktop/mobile hybrid, but using a mobile GPU.

After the mod, while monitoring software such as HWiNFO and GPU-Z continued to report the original 115 W limit, external power measurements suggested an increase of around 60 W. The higher power headroom allowed for improved clock behavior, and in tests, the modified RTX 2070 Mobile achieved around 15% better performance.

This puts the mobile variant close to its desktop counterpart, which normally enjoys a much higher power budget. The modification is not for casual users, as it requires precise soldering, however is it clear that this particular system is already out of warranty, so hardly any harm do attempt it.

Source: PC Games Hardware