Check Out This Totally Bonkers Liquid Cooled Gaming PC With 69 Water Blocks
by
Zak Killian
—
Wednesday, March 01, 2023, 01:28 PM EDT
Back in the day, liquid cooling meant "custom loop," but you only needed to worry about the two or three processors at the most. These days, when you're doing custom-loop liquid-cooling, you need to cool almost every major component on every single board. That means cooling memory and power delivery hardware as well as the processors. For that reason, most people use motherboards designed for liquid-cooling as well as full-coverage waterblocks that fit neatly onto graphics cards.
Click this image to see the full system, including radiators below and reservoirs above.
"Most people" clearly doesn't include the aptly-named /u/psychoOC on Reddit, though. The user has posted up some photos of his custom liquid-cooled PC that was done up in the old fashion, with no less than sixty-nine (nice) separate waterblocks across nearly every single heat-generating component in the system.
Most of the radiators are mounted below the desk.
The plethora of processor coolers are split across two separate loops driven by six D5 pumps, and the actual cooling is provided by six radiators, including one 240-mm and five 360-mm. Over two gallons of cooling fluid fill over 100 feet of tubing in the build. Comically, in addition to the PC itself, the UV light bars—which make the coolant fluid and 2004-vintage fluorescent-orange fans glow—are also liquid-cooled.
A detail shot of the CPU socket, showing the myriad tiny waterblocks on the VRMs.
The machine has a preponderance of powerful hardware: an overclocked Ryzen 7 7700X, a Radeon RX 7900 XTX, and four sticks of hot-clocked DDR5 memory. Despite that, it stays cool—PsychoOC posted a stress test screenshot that shows nearly every component in the system resting comfortably under 30°C. Perhaps that shouldn't be a surprise given the amount of hardware involved in cooling, but it's fairly impressive considering that there's no chiller involved, just ambient-air cooling.
Impressive temperatures after a 3DMark stress test.
The builder says that he spent "2 months of every night when [he] got home" to complete the machine, and incredibly, he apparently had grander plans that had to be abandoned for the sake of time. He says he'll be posting his overclocking results in a week or two, so maybe keep an eye on his profile if you're curious to see what those parts can do with 69 waterblocks attached.
