YouTuber TrashBench has shown off another unconventional cooling system for your PC hardware. In this case, he used an ice machine to cool down an RTX 3060 — and it worked remarkably well. In Cyberpunk 2077 alone, the system lowered GPU temperatures by about 38°C.
The experiment was inspired by MrYeester, another YouTuber who recently built a CPU cooling loop with a hacked ice maker that constantly replenished its ice.
TrashBench's idea was slightly different. Instead of using ice as a coolant, it wanted the ice machine to cool water in a GPU loop.
He initially used an RTX 3060 running on the stock air cooler. It was running at around 60°C under load, with the hotspot reaching around 75°C. TrashBench removed the stock air cooler, installed a liquid cooling setup on the card, placed a pump inside the ice maker, and filled it with water.
The first test was essentially a bucket of water and a cooler. It brought the GPU temperature down to about 44°C after 20 minutes, but the temperature wouldn't stabilize because the card was heating the water faster than it could cool. Turning on the ice maker helped for a while, but its normal cycle was a problem: it would make ice, shut off the compressor, refill with water, and then start again.
TrashBench's solution was to bypass this behavior with an external thermostat, the same type a beer cooler uses, allowing the compressor to run continuously.
It's one of those experiments you probably shouldn't try at home, as TrashBench was working with an electrical device, water, an active computer, materials that don't offer safety. TrashBench stopped one test after about 10 minutes because everything was covered in water.
Although the press releases will range from very select to rare, I said I'd pass...because sometimes the editors hide.
