Chinese enthusiasts presented an unusual project based on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB. The card becomes an ultra-compact single-slot, low-profile solution about the size of a modern smartphone, completely devoid of additional 6- or 8-pin power connectors. However, trying to fit a power-hungry chip into the tight constraints of a motherboard slot can result in a catastrophic drop in performance. The standard TDP is 170W, and the PCIe slot can provide up to 75W of power. To prevent the card from being protected without external cables, the author modified the current sensor circuit and forcibly tricked the power consumption monitoring circuit.
The cooling system is a thin metal shell with a micro radiator and a turbo fan without heat pipes and a full-fledged fin block. The memory chip has no thermal pad at all. The set of video outputs has been reduced to just one HDMI port and one DisplayPort.
Due to severe power starvation and overheating (hotspot temperatures exceeded 90 °C during testing), the graphics processor was unable to maintain a frequency of around 900 MHz instead of the advertised 1777 MHz. As a result, in the 3DMark Time Spy benchmark test, this RTX 3060 scored only 4821 points – almost half the standard indicator of this model (about 9000 points). In terms of pure graphics power, this modification is even inferior to budget gaming veterans represented by the GeForce GTX 1060 and Radeon RX 580.
