We’ve seen some innovations on the DIY front with PCs, but few as daring as hooking up a household air conditioner box to cool a computer and a heavyweight GPU.
Yes, the air conditioning unit is on wheels (Image Credit: ‘Electrolytic sodium carbonate’ on Bilibili)
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Tom’s Hardware noticed this effort from a Chinese PC enthusiast on Bilibili whose name translates to ‘Electrolytic sodium carbonate.’
The setup works using a 12,000 BTU air conditioning unit to power the liquid cooling for the PC, which as it stands, packs an RTX 4090 graphics card with a Core i9-13900K processor.
The result in test runs was that the Lovelace flagship was kept at 20 degrees Celsius, and here’s the really impressive bit about this temperature – that was under stress testing (like AIDA system stability, and similar). Cool, eh? (Quite literally). That was the GPU temperature reported, with a hotspot reading that peaked at 36 degrees Celsius.
The idea is for this to be the PC which the tech enthusiast runs an RTX 5090 in (with the CPU upgraded to a 14900K, to boot). The reason why they’ve stuck with an RTX 4090 for now is because they don’t have the water block for the Blackwell flagship graphics card they’ve bought, as it isn’t out yet.
So, once that final piece of the cooling puzzle is in place, it’ll be interesting to see the results, and how hard the RTX 5090 can be pushed with, well, kind-of-conventional cooling (it certainly isn’t liquid nitrogen, anyway).
If you’re curious about the power that the air conditioning unit pulls, it’s apparently 1.2kW, which will ensure the RTX 5090 isn’t the most costly part to run here in terms of the electricity bill.