Forget S'mores, Camping Accessory Gets A GeForce RTX 5050 Cooking At 3.5GHz
The entry-level NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5050 is underpowered compared to its bigger siblings, but such compromises have never stopped modders before. Undertaking the sacred duty of squeezing as much performance out of underpowered silicon as possible, hardware modders TrashBench and Clock Bench challenged each other to take the same GeForce RTX 5050 GPU and find a way to custom liquid cool it to its fullest potential. To achieve this end, TrashBench hooked up the tiny desktop GPU to a massive camping freezer with a fully-custom liquid cooling loop setup, completely forgoing all practicality to secure a truly wild 23% performance boost over stock, handily defeating Clock Bench in its modding contest.
Some readers may be wondering why he did this, but the truth among enthusiasts at this level is that "why" is a secondary question, if it's being asked at all. The more pertinent question is always "how" it can be done, and this applies especially to a humble YouTube channel with no ads or sponsors to speak of. This is pure love of the game at work, and it was so brilliantly executed that we just had to highlight the achievement.
The full video shows some more details, including footage of the benchmarks being run and visible freezing happening on the loop as a result of such an overkill cooler being attached to a humble graphics card. Have a look...
If you share our taste for hot hardware modding projects and record-breaking cooling achievements, we highly recommend giving the two channels a Subscribe so we can all enjoy more projects like this. While this differs greatly from the usual boundary-breaking cooling achievements, like LN2 projects paired with cutting-edge RAM and CPU overclocks, it's still an impressive showing of what can be done with a class of hardware usually not given the time of day.
Like LN2, though, we aren't quite sure about the long-term stability of a cooling solution like this, with the visible frosting hinting that it's unlikely for this setup to work uninterrupted for days at a time. For stable GPU overclocks, enthusiasts remain best served by more traditional cooling methods—but it's not like this project was done to compete with any of those.
Image Credit: TrashBench and ClockBench
