This bizarre but apparently usable RTX 5080 skateboard mod is kinda cool but surely if you wanted a mobile GPU there’s a better way

OK, there’s not a whole lot to go on here beyond a short video clip posted on Reddit. But it sure looks like what we have here must surely be the world’s first GPU-to-skateboard conversion. And an implied commentary over the silliness of modern graphics cards.

A Redditor who goes by the handle ashleysaidwhat has apparently attached a pair of trucks to an Asus ROG Astral RTX 5080. The result is a seemingly workable skateboard, of sorts.

“She’s a 5080 Astral but she looks like a 5090, and she handles like a TUF,” is all the poster has to say. The rest is Reddit history and presumably a future podcast series.

Was the RTX 5080 already bricked? Hopefully. Is it now completely toast as an actual GPU? Almost certainly. Is it even a full graphics card, or just a CPU cooler attached to some kind of board beneath? We may never know.

Personally, I’m guessing the latter. While the cooler checks out as matching the Astral RTX 5080, there’s no end bracket. Likewise, the PCIe connector with all the electrical contact points isn’t visible and, as you can see from the official Asus image below, it sticks out quite a lot in reality. Well, provided it hasn’t been machined off or something.

She’s a 5080 Astral but she looks like a 5090, and she handles like a TUF from r/pcmasterrace

Ultimately, it’s all speculation, perhaps even one of those mysteries that’s better left unsolved. If it was a functional GPU before this whimsy, then ouch. If it’s just the cooler, it’s maybe less fun and you kind want it to be a full graphics card.

Of course, this does rather amount to a pointed implied commentary on the ludicrous size and scale of modern graphics cards. It really oughtn’t be even an option to turn a GPU into a skateboard.

Personally, I’ve often wondered about the sense of really aggressive cooling for computer chips. Yeah, I know, hear me out.

Chip performance tends to tail off as you up the power consumption and thermal output. It doesn’t just keep on scaling up, linearly. So, you might double the electrical power and heat output, but only get another, say, 10% to 20% performance.

Admittedly some of Nvidia’s low-end graphics cards have enjoyed awfully incremental improvements of late. But even these days that isn’t a spectacular performance increase, gen-on-gen, for GPUs. Indeed, getting 10% extra performance out of a GPU these days is generally considered a stunning result.

So at best, hefty cooling is buying a single generation’s worth of performance. But that’s a one off. You can only move into an extreme cooling paradigm once. So, why not just chill out on the clocks and cooling? We’d still be at 2023 performance levels, at worst.

Of course, as soon as you do that, someone will come along and say, hey, I can squeeze another 10% to 20% out of this thing with a ridiculously big cooler and pumping it full of electrons. Some people will definitely pay for that, and then we’re back where we are, again, with ridiculous graphics cards so big peeps are turning them into skateboards.