Epic Cast Iron Radiator Gaming PC Weighs 218 Lbs And Rocks An RTX 5080

Building a PC with a radiator? Well, nearly every PC has a radiator; after all, that's what the finstack on your tower cooler is. Building a PC ON a radiator? That's a different story altogether. YouTuber Billet Labs has built what might be the coolest build you've seen in a while, because it's the coolest one we've seen in years. Aesthetically, anyway, but we'll talk more about thermals toward the end.


Both foundation and inspiration for the build was this vintage Victorian-era cast-iron radiator that holds 18 liters (4.75 US gallons) of water. As a PC enthusiast and water-cooling fanatic, Billet Labs saw the thing and said, "I have got to use that for my next PC build." After cleaning the well-worn exterior of the giant metal device, he set to work 3D scanning the base and constructing a 3D-printed bracket that would attach to the bottom of the radiator and hold his PC parts safely out of sight.


Then, he set to the process of constructing the liquid cooling loop for his new system. He did this with copper pipes, which likely has many of you reading this wincing in pain. Don't worry! Billet Labs is quite experienced and well aware of the corrosion concerns at play here. He's not running plain water in the loop, but instead using inhibitor designed specifically for the mix of iron and copper, as the pairing is common in home heating systems (especially in the UK, where he's based.)


The hour-long video he produced goes over the absolutely grueling process of preparing the radiator for use, including an entire week spent doing nearly nothing but filling and flushing the radiator with various chemicals, including citric acid and what appears to be regular old dish soap. At one point he managed to pressurize the thing with hydrogen gas. After finally getting the water to run clear, he put it all together.


That wasn't the end of his problems, though. First, he had to deal with copper shavings damaging his pump, and then after replacing it, he had a persistent problem with air bubbles seeping into his loop. It turns out his seals simply weren't good enough, and he had to re-do the entire loop multiple times. Then, his pressure kept falling due to clogged filters, which were clogging in minutes rather than weeks.


Eventually, after working around all the problems, he finally got his system up and running. It's quite a beast: a Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU provides the backbone for the GeForce RTX 5080 to flex its muscles. His first game test was in the venerable Halo 3, where he was seeing average frame rates in the 400 FPS range, even in native 4K. Well, naturally; that's an Xbox 360 game. But how was the cooling provided by the 99-kg beast?


Actually not that great! But certainly serviceable, especially considering he has his fans turned off for casual use, and only ran them at 10% for the Cinebench + Furmark torture test. Still, the giant radiator's strength is thermal mass, not radiative ability; he sees his GPU heat up pretty significantly and his CPU thermal throttle while running the intense power supply test that is the pairing of Cinebench and Furmark.


Even still, while gaming, the machine stays cool and almost completely silent. More importantly, it looks absolutely sick. He took the time to fabricate copper shells for his analog pressure and temperature gauges, and even replaced the I/O shield for his motherboard with one he scorched with his blowtorch to give it an artificial patina. The whole project is awesome, and if you're interested, you should definitely check out Billet Labs' video on YouTube above.