- YouTube TrashBench tried an extreme cooling solution
- He rigged a custom ice cream machine for his Nvidia GPU
- The cooling solution worked – but only up to a point
If your part of the world is entering summer and the temperatures are rising, you might be looking for more creative ways to keep you and your PC kit cool: like a custom graphics card cooler based on a custom ice maker.
This is the work of YouTuber TrashBench (via XDA Developers), who ran water from an ice machine past his Nvidia RTX 3060 GPU using a water pump. Right from the start, we must emphasize that you should not try this at home – it is potentially very unsafe, as the YouTuber himself admits in the video.
A number of modification hacks were required to get this even close to working. The ice maker had to be disassembled and connected to a thermostat to make sure it always stayed on and kept cooling the water, instead of pausing as ice formed and was pushed out into the ice maker bucket.
Further DIY solutions were required for more cooling and drainage, but eventually TrashBench was able to get his rather barmy setup operational – at least for 10 minutes until he announced “everything is covered in water”.
Some actual results
Look at
Condensation from the cooled water was building up around the pipes in the custom system and forming on the GPU cooler itself. Obviously, water and electronics don’t mix very well, so additional protection steps were necessary.
With a few final tweaks, TrashBench was able to get the water in its ice maker adequately chilled, and even managed to play a little Cyberpunk 2077. The graphics card ran at around 60C with standard air cooling in place, but was kept below 23C during playback Cyberpunk with the ice cooler.
At the hottest point on the RTX 3060, the temperature dropped from 75C to 34C, tests showed. However, as the water temperature in the ice bucket continues to rise, it’s not clear how long the experiment lasted – as the YouTuber himself acknowledges, you shouldn’t try to cool your GPU with an ice machine.
“This is not a tutorial. I’m not an electrician. Everything here is stupid,” says TrashBench in its video description, so beware that this “damn little GPU cooler” should remain nothing more than an entertaining and temporary distraction.
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