Feb 10, 2025 23:00:00

Designing a water-cooled PC that uses the outdoor unit of a home air conditioner to cool down the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090

NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 5090 has a maximum power consumption of over 500W, which means it is expected to generate a lot of heat, so it is necessary to build a stable cooling system. A Chinese technical video creator, Electrolyte Carbon Acid Iron, posted a video of a system designed to cool a GPU using the outdoor unit of a home air conditioner, which has become a hot topic.

Air conditioning system electric power dissipation? Water cooling direct connection to thousands of tiles, 5090 is the best companion! _ 哔哩哔哩_bilibili


RTX 4090 liquid cooled with 12,000 BTU air conditioner, RTX 5090 up next — GPU runs at 20C | Tom's Hardware
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/liquid-cooling/rtx-4090-liquid-cooled-with-12-000-btu-air-conditioner-rtx-5090-up-next-gpu-runs-at-20c

What Electrolyte Carbonate introduced was a 12,000 BTU air conditioner outdoor unit. The power consumption is about 1200 W. The size is 765 mm x 268 mm x 550 mm, which is obviously huge compared to a typical GPU cooling unit.

Open the inside of the outdoor unit, remove the compressor part, and install a PC coolant pump.

The coolant passes through a heat exchange unit inside the outdoor unit and is cooled by a huge fan and copper pipes.

Mr. Electrocarbonate will attach NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel logo panels to the exterior of the outdoor unit.

A cooling system monitoring panel is attached to the outdoor unit.

This is the finished product. It looks quite strange to have the air conditioner unit sitting between the PC tower and the monitor.

Connect the outdoor unit to the PC's water cooling system.

At room temperature of 23.4 degrees, the GPU was loaded for about 40 minutes using

FurMark and the AIDA System Stability Test , and the system CPU core temperature only rose 2 degrees from the start of the test.

Next, Mr. Electrolyte Carbonate took the entire outdoor unit and PC outside to test it.

When I took it outside and turned the PC on, the GPU temperature was just 2°C and the hotspot was 12°C.

And when I ran the same stress test, the GPU temperature was 20 degrees and the GPU hotspot was 36 degrees.

Electrolyte Carbonate commented that he was satisfied with the tests with the RTX 4090 and that he expects sufficient cooling performance for the RTX 5090 as well.