Unconventional cooling methods can also work.
It’s slowly getting warmer outside. This also means that your high-end gaming PCs are in a warmer room and need more cooling power. A YouTuber has tackled this problem with a rather unconventional solution and uses a gasoline engine to cool his PC.
The YouTuber is the world-famous Linus Sebastian von Linus Tech Tips. However, we can classify the experiment itself more as entertainment, because for various reasons it is impractical to cool the PC with a petrol engine.
It’s very noisy, has to be refilled with gas every so often, and yes, it probably generates more heat than it cools. You’ll find out later why the experiment ended up being a success. First, let’s take a closer look at the setup.
The experiment – How to cool a PC with a petrol engine
In his experiment, Linus wants to cool a PC with a water pump that has a 2.5 hp motor. Basically, this is very similar to classic water cooling, just with much more power. Theoretically, the water can reach a speed of around 75 kilometers per hour with a motor drive.
Using a variety of nozzles and attachments, he then connects the hoses for the water cooling of the PC with those of the water pump. The testers do not use any special cooling liquid as cooling water, but rather rainwater from a collecting tank.
In the first attempt on an already defective PC, the seals always come loose due to the strong water pressure. With a bit of tinkering, the hardware experts can get the problem under control. Also unconventional is this breathing PC, which is cooled by a kind of lung:
Atmender PC
Youtuber builds a “lung” instead of classic fans
The unconventional cooling actually works
After the petrol engine cooling solution stops leaking, Linus and his colleague plug in a working PC and start the engine.
In the first attempt, they run a stress test on the PC, which is designed to push the PC to its limit. Here the graphics card (probably an RTX 3090) reaches a temperature of just 42.8 degrees and draws an incredible 600 watts of power. Normally, the RTX 3090 ends at 370 watts. The fact that so much more power can be absorbed is because it has been specially modified. The 42.8 degrees are all the more astonishing since many graphics cards can reach a higher temperature even when idling. However, it should be said that the water itself was already pre-cooled.
To max out the setup, Linus now increases the resolution, causing the graphics card to draw more than 700 watts, but the temperature only rises slightly to 44.5 degrees Celsius. Finally, they increase the power of the petrol engine to see whether a higher flow rate results in even better cooling performance.
And that is indeed the case. They can cool the PC down to 35 degrees during the stress test. In the end, they get even more performance out of the pump and overclock the graphics card so that it tops out at over 760 watts. The pump starts to smoke. But even here, the GPU only reaches 44 degrees. You can watch the whole video here:
link to YouTube content
This is not a solution for everyday use
As mentioned at the beginning, cooling with a petrol engine is not an elegant solution for everyday use. Nevertheless, we were able to see an exciting and entertaining experiment with it. However, this is not the only exciting experiment on how to cool graphics cards quickly. Another YouTuber saves over 45 degrees with an equally unusual approach.
How do you cool your graphics card? Classic with air coolers or are you more of a fan of water cooling? Or did the petrol engine convince you? Please let us know!
