RTX 5070 Ti with a hole through it still works, thanks to Radeon RX 580 power mod

Talk about unusual mods.

In one of the strangest graphics card experiments to date, Brazilian moderns and technicians Sidnelson and Paulo Gomes managed to bring a dead RTX 5070 Ti back to life using parts of an older AMD Radeon RX 580. The RTX card had arrived completely burned in the VRM area, with a section of its PCB literally missing (or was it a gunshot hole?). A normal repair was impossible, so the card was left as scrap.

Instead of giving up, they decided to turn the unusable card into a technical challenge. By rerouting power delivery and performing multiple circuit modifications, they used the RX 580 as an external VRM source to power the RTX 5070 Ti GPU core. The result is a working hybrid card that operates with electrical assistance from another graphics card.

Source: Paulo Gomes

Modders explained that the most difficult part of the process was adapting the VRM architecture. AMD and NVIDIA use very different power management systems, and synchronizing them required extensive rewiring and manual tuning. Despite this, the modified RTX 5070 Ti managed to initialize and run light workloads, showing that the experiment was at least partially successful.

Source: Paulo Gomes

The original PCB damage had left a visible hole in the power delivery area, but through bypassing certain circuits and linking new power lines from the RX 580, the team was able to restore basic GPU operation. They had to carefully balance current flow to prevent overheating of the connection wires, since both cards were drawing high currents simultaneously.

No heavy load tests have been performed yet. The hybrid card currently runs only under light conditions to avoid electrical imbalance and thermal stress. The next step, according to the technicians, is to refine the power delivery interface and possibly run benchmarks in a second phase of the project.

Is there anything Brazilian modders can’t fix?

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