Dude, check this out. ASRock has a
Radeon 7900 XTX that is completely
fanless. This is going to be great for
about 30 seconds. Then it starts to
thermal throttle dramatically. Are you sure you don't want something
with a fan on? No, no, no, no. See, this
this was part of the plan. I have always
wanted to take one of these server oriented desktop cards with the no fans
on them and hook it up to an air conditioner. Get it? AC PC. How in the
hell is this going to work? I don't know. You're smart. You'll figure it
out. Gosh, look at the time. I've got a meeting to get our way to. Oh, and uh
one more thing. While you're at it, can you remove all the other fans from the system? I want it completely silent. Not
so fast. If you've always wanted to try this, then you're helping out. First,
we're going to take a closer look at the AC 516S portable smart air conditioner
from our sponsor for this video, Drio. It's a 14,000 BTU model, which is
designed to cool up to 450 ft. So, it
should be plenty for a couple square ft of computer with capacity to spare,
meaning that when we're done, we will have built the first ever gaming PC that
actively cools your room. Well, this is nice and flat. So, I think the easiest
way to get the air to the PC is going to be just some kind of shroud and a pipe.
Yeah, that's great. Why don't we mock it up with this foam board? I mean, I had
something a little prettier in mind, but Well, we got to make sure it works first, right? Okay. Oh, did someone
already do the work for me? I did. Wow. I thought you were going to make me do
the work today. Well, you do some of the work. Okay. Remember, kids, always cut
toward yourself. That way, you can see what you're doing. You can't get hit by a train if you see it coming.
Don't worry, my balls already don't work anyway. Okay,
that's not bad. Okay. Okay. Well, she's
not completely airtight, but she also doesn't need to be. And this should be
good enough for us to get a quick test. Want to see if air is going to move, right? Hey, not bad. Now, this could be
a little restrictive. In a perfect world, we might want to step down the
exhaust to a bigger circle, then step it down to our smaller one. But again, this
is just proof of concept. We want to know if it's kind of going to work. All right. How's that feel? Glorious. There
you go. Is that better? Oh, that's beautiful. Where are you exhausting this
to? I mean, normally it would be a window. The window right there. Yeah, but that window doesn't open. Why not?
Um Oh, yeah. That's how they work. Oh
my. Oh, not ideal. Um, okay. You're not
really supposed to run a compressor sideways and then It was very brief.
That was not the Oh my god. Did this seriously just like totally survive?
It's our best design ever, man. Let me tell you. Okay. So, what I'm thinking
Yeah. Go into the front here with like
kind of a manifold and then we can have shrouds on the things. Oh, shrouds.
Okay. Like duct mod kind of idea. Sure. So, we have one over the CPU. Yeah. Cuz
you don't like this fan apparently. Well, I kind of think we should start with the CPU fan being the CPU fan cuz
this really doesn't feel like much. I pulled it out. So, you know. So, we're putting this on the front. Let's do this
for now. See if it works. Oh my god. Fired up. We just have to prove that it
works and then we can make something good. Have we done anything to make them
believe that we will make something good? I mean, we've done a lot of videos. They must believe something.
Yeah, there's been some good ones. Did it turn on? Yeah. Somehow everything
still works. It's impressive how quiet the compressor is. Hey, the fans too
actually are pretty silent. I'm surprised even after dropping it. They claim it runs at 46 dB, which is pretty
reasonable for a unit of this capacity. Now, I noticed that the compressor is
cycling pretty often. That's on purpose. Yeah, that makes sense for room air
conditioning because you got your thermal sensor going into the unit and it's going, "Okay, do is our temperature
good enough?" It's not great for what we're doing where we might want 100%
output all the time. We'll have to figure that out. Wow, our CPU is at 16°
and our GPU is at 33. Nice. Neither of them are doing anything yet, though. So,
give us time. Let us cook. And the CPU is up to 32 immediately. Still cold
exhaust. You know what's the craziest part of this is that the cost of buying
a window AC unit actually not that far off like getting a custom water block
system. Like should we just be ducting chilled air into our systems? Maybe. Not
necessarily. Spoiler. Condensation can be a major issue when you are plumbing
cold air directly into a warm environment, but we'll get to that
later. So, we're back to running smooth again. For how long? I don't know. That
coil wine though is Wow. Okay. GPU is getting pretty warm. It's only at around
70° still. Okay. The CPU is sitting at
27 though, which is perfectly reasonable for a gaming load. Hold on. It just
dropped to 2050, 2020, 2000. Oh, no.
1990. What did I do? Good year.
So, it's not perfect, but we weren't expecting it to be. What we have found,
though, is that it's not dropping as low or as fast as when we were running
without the duct. I want to see what we're going to land at. We're at 100
degrees on the GPU, which is obviously not ideal, but we're at 1500 MHz. So,
while we're at the same temperature, we are running at 4x 5x the clock speed.
Yeah, that's a pretty big deal. We're settling in around 1400. And you can
actually see a difference in the smoothness with the cool ducted air
heading toward it. And that's not even blowing right through the heat sink yet.
I think this is pretty promising. Let's put some more work into it. Now we're
going to switch over to the other AC unit that we did bad things to. Okay.
Ah, dots for 3D scanning. Exactly. We 3D
scanned the surface here. Wicked smart. And that's to get a better seal against
it, I assume. Exactly. Okay. Let's have a look. We also made a little tweak to
this one. We took the thermister, which usually lives inside the evaporator. If
that gets too cold, it turns off the compressor, but we don't want that. No,
we want it to just keep running. So, we just kind of stuck it out of the way and
it'll just run forever now. Okay. So, we might get some condensation on the back,
but we can deal with that later. Yeah. Normally, this is like a condensation
free unit, right? Yeah. They capture the liquid internally and recycle it and
evaporate it. Ooh, that's fancy. Don't eat that. I
wasn't going to eat it. Is there a reason we wanted it
pointing down? Uh, because of the way the baffles work in there. They're kind
of aiming this way. Got it. Makes sense. The main issue with our mockup though
was not getting the cold air off of the AC unit. It was getting that cold air
plumbed up to our components. So that is
where these shrouds come in. Uh so this
goes on the outside. Yes. Air goes in. Okay. Air comes out of them and we'll
get into the components through those. It's funny cuz I've used air
conditioners to cool PCs lots of times. It's just always been to chill coolant
that I then pump through a water cooling system. I've never really just chilled
an air cooled computer. Well, I shouldn't say never. Like, I took that
one outside to the NCX parking lot 17 years ago or whatever. But see, how
great is that low back force?
Huh? What? It's a good product. We just can't stop you from shilling, can we?
It's not shilling if it's a good product that you believe in. What the heck
happened to this? Okay, so we thought that this little guy here Yeah. was the
temperature sensor, right? That makes sense. So, we were blowing a hot air gun
at it to try to make the thing run constantly, right? Turns out that's the
humidity sensor, right? And also, that's kind of melty, right? Wo, that's
awesome. We're going to put that cold air right down the fins. That' be
perfect. I am a little concerned that the fin density on the GPU is a little
bit higher than on the CPU, so there might be more back pressure and
therefore we might get Oh my god, it's still really hot. We might get less flow
through the GPU, but we're going to have to see how it goes. We would never
recommend putting this much strain on a 12vt high power connector. What could
possibly go wrong with these connectors, though? Yeah, maybe just wrap it. Yeah,
there we go. If you have an AC in your room anyway, what is a good reason not
to do this? I mean, this thing is what, 14,000 BTUs? Yeah, that's what 4,000
watts, something like that. Yeah, something like that. So, we can we can do way more cooling than we're going to
put out here, which means if our components get too cold and then warm up
in the warm air and water can form on them and then everything's bad. But it's
possible, and we haven't tried this yet, it's possible that the system will work
even when the AC is not running. True. So, we could just have like potentially
you could configure a system so that you have just normal operation and it just
works off of your room's temperature like any other air conditioner would.
But you could have like like turbo mode and run the AC continuously if you want
to like, you know, I don't know, overclock. Oh, dude, I can smell the
flawless victory from here. We could use an insulated hose here to try to keep a
little bit more of the cool air in, but I think this is going to work pretty well as it is. Yeah, I think we're going
to be fine. And when we consider that the area we're trying to cool ultimately
is the room, we don't really care if we have any losses of coolness into the
room around us anyway. As long as there's enough going to the PC, we're
fine. Yeah, there she goes. Not going to
lie, I'm still not feeling much out of that GPU. Dude, we may need to put some
kind of baffle or something in to make sure that we're not sending all of the
air flow to the CPU. What Jordan's trying to demonstrate
is that obviously if you were to set something like this up at home, which
we're not necessarily recommending, you would want to have the AC unit itself
farther away so that you get a noise benefit. And that's where something like
an insulated duct would come in to make sure that it's still running at optimal
efficiency while giving you that sweet, sweet silence. Of course, none of that's
going to be very useful if it doesn't work. Oh no, Jordan. Yeah, buddy. Our
CPU is at 17°. That seems a little cool.
But our GPU is at 90. Okay, I think we
need to put more baffel in. Yeah, the CPU needs like nothing. Interesting.
Oh, this is so nice. Sorry, computer. I need this more than you right now. Now,
you might have noticed something. We have the hot side blowing at the
evaporator. That is to maybe hopefully
help keep ice from forming on it. Yeah, cuz we overrode the whole no
condensation thing. Remember that? I don't know if it's going to work or not, but it's here. Oh, dude, we're down to
82. Oh, dude, I'm starting to get excited now. Okay, now this is getting
cool. 80. We're at 80 now. 76. Dude,
every single tiny gap that I plug, we are getting extra performance. Dude, she
works awesome. And what's really cool is we're still throwing all this cold air
out into our room. The air coming off the GPU is actually pretty toasty.
Little warm. I think we would need, like you said, to tweak the baffle system a
little bit or create a less turbulent path for the air into the GPU to try to
focus it down there or even use a GPU that doesn't have such a tiny little
heat sink on it. But overall, we're still getting cold air off of the back
of the system. Yeah. Everything that's coming through the CPU is like freaking
cold. That's great. Yeah. So, we're cooling our room and our PC and we have
no fans in this thing. Well, power supply. Okay. Power supply fan. Somebody
stole somebody stole the only good power supply with fanless. Stupid question.
Yeah. Turn the computer this way. Yes. Make this go straight. I was about to We
were on the same wavelength, Jordan. Same wavelength. Let's see if we can
reduce our losses here a little bit. 76 didn't really make a difference. What
about moving it up? Let's get our path
as direct as possible here. Okay. I can
No, I can feel more air flow off the GPU for sure. There's a hand in my way. Oh,
sorry. Yep. It's still hot. But it's a lot more. We're down to 74. And
remember, we settled in around 76. So, let's see if we get a little bit more
out of it here. This is getting a little damp now. Double wall. So, you'd
probably want to insulate the whole shebang. Actually, this especially,
yeah, where you're going to get like condensation dripping off this in the
longer term. 71. That's the lowest temp we've seen so far, though. So, that's an
interesting thought. So you'd want insulated lines and then you'd probably
want like an accelerator fan at a midpoint just in order to increase the
pressure cuz this is not designed for high static pressure. No, not at all.
This is designed to just throw cold air out into the room. Blast of fuel in the
room. Yeah. So in order to overcome the losses from the tubing and from the
fins, you'd probably want to add like an accelerator fan that's somewhat balanced
with the output of this. But there's a ton of potential. Final temperature, a
nice 69° under load in Valheim. And all
it cost us was the risk of condensation forming, which is going to happen
anytime you have a cold surface and warm air. So, if we were to deploy something
like this longer term, we would want to put some kind of insulation on
everything from our ducting to any 3D printed components and especially on
anywhere inside the system where cold air is going to be. But with that said,
I don't think this is actually that wild of a concept for someone to do at home
if you're going to have the AC. Anyway, look at these CPU temps. It's sitting at
anywhere from 11 to 14° in games. And
this is what What do we have in here? A
12700K. That is flipping awesome. You
don't have to use a Drio AC for this kind of shenanigans. In fact, I'm sure
they'd probably prefer if you don't. You just use it to clean your room. But hey,
massive shout out to them for sponsoring this video and letting us uh gently
abuse their machines, maybe. Yeah, not so gently. They also sent over this room
fan, which actually I was kind of impressed by. It's super quiet, and I
like the way that it can oscillate in all kinds of different directions. We're
going to have it and the AC unit linked in the video description, as well as a
limited time discount, so you can find all the details down there. If you guys
enjoyed this video, oh, why don't you check out the playlist? We have a janky
cooling playlist. With all the times we've done bizarre stuff like this, this
is one of them.