Around five months ago Germany’s renowned overclocking guru der8auer published a video in which he showed us noobs how to do fairly straight forward power mod on a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti card. The mod basically involved applying liquid metal to the three shunt resistors (PCIe slot, 6-pin and 8-pin) that measure the power going to your card. This shorts them, basically fooling your card’s measurement capabilities which allows you pump more power through the GPU. A nice quick but effective mod. A few days ago however, he got an email from a YouTube subscriber called Chris who had applied the power-mod demoed by der8auer, but in doing so had damaged his card.

Chris in fact reported that after five or six months his rig was failing. After debugging the system he found that in fact the shunt resistors had literally fallen off the PCB. The only real explanation is that the gallium is reacting to the solder or tin used to attach the resistors to PCB. In fact, in certain communities this has almost become a known issue with some overclockers recently starting to insulate the solder.

In his most recent video der8auer goes back to his original GTX 1080 card to see how it’s faring. The card in question has been in use on his regular day-to-day use rig and has never shown any signs of instability or failure. In fact as far as he can tell, the card still manages the same level of performance that it was capable of when it was new. Der8auer removes the heatsink and strips it down the PCB and takes a good long look at those shunt resistors. What did he find? You’ll have to watch the video to find out.

Catch the video here on the der8auer YouTube channel.