Hardcore cooling! Player DIY split water cooling: 510W power consumption graphics card only 37 ℃

A Reddit player recently shared an amazing DIY achievement: he successfully built a split water cooling system that puts cold rows in an outdoor environment after two months.

With a natural cold source of -4°C, the full load temperature of the RTX 4070 Ti Super graphics card is suppressed to a staggering 37°C.

Know that hanging a cold row outside the window sounds simple, but the biggest enemy in practice is frost. When extremely low-temperature coolant enters a warm and humid indoor chassis, condensate is rapidly generated on the hardware surface, causing the circuit to short-circuit and panic.

In order to solve this pain point, the player did not blindly cool down, but built a sophisticated climate monitoring system. At the heart of the system is an Arduino Mega microcontroller and a complex set of Python scripts.

With 3 sets of liquid temperature sensors and 3 sets of humidity sensors spread throughout the chassis, the system is able to calculate the current frost temperature in real time.

The electric three-way valve then precisely adjusts the coolant flow to ensure that the water temperature is always 5°C to 10°C above the dew point, which ensures excellent heat dissipation and completely eliminates the risk of frosting.

In terms of the testbed, the processor uses the Intel Core Ultra 7 270K and opens the lid, directly removing the metal top cover (IHS) to improve thermal conductivity.

The graphics card chose the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super, which was bypass-modified at the hardware level, and its power consumption limit was brute-force unlocked to 510W, far exceeding the official standard.

In terms of heat dissipation, the internal waterway is connected to the outdoor Alphacool XE240 thick cold row, equipped with two owl high static pressure fans. In order to prevent the coolant from freezing in the cold, the player mixed pure ethylene glycol in the DP Ultra dedicated coolant to further reduce its freezing point from -18°C to -28°C.

The 510W graphics card core is only 37°C in the Unigine Heaven stress test and 48°C in the more demanding Steel Nomad test. The full load temperature of the processor in the Cinebench R23 is also only 52°C, and the final score is up to 47,400 points, which is extremely full performance release.

However, it should be noted that although outdoor heat dissipation is very attractive in the northern winter, this scheme involves high-risk hardware modification and sophisticated automation programming, and ordinary players must not imitate it easily to avoid hardware damage.

Source: MyDrivers (Fast Technology). Content is presented with source attribution. Read the original report.