by Here’s a water-cooled gaming PC that’ll have you saying “Ohh, wait, what? No way!” There’s no denying that this fluorescent UV light-lit gaming PC looks absolutely stunning, but take a closer look and you’ll notice that nearly every component, whether it’s a RAM stick, GDDR6 chip, of a motherboard chipset, VRM, etc., have their own water block.
This is a build by Reddit user psychoOC (opens in a new tab), and it would have taken two months of continuous work to put everything together. No doubt it absolutely pays off. I see a lot of fancy gaming PCs in this line of work, but this one made me stop scrolling and gawk for a while.
The rig itself is an all-AMD machine with an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX (opens in a new tab) and AMD Ryzen 7 7700X (opens in a new tab). There are four sticks of liquid-cooled RAM running at 6000 MT/s, and it’s all plugged into an Asus ROG Strix B650E-E motherboard.
From earlier photos of the build process, you can see just how much cooling each discrete component needs. Take the GPU, an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX. Each memory and MOSFET chip has its own mini water block installed on it (opens in a new tab) with an inlet and outlet tube to carry coolant over the component, all of which terminate in the larger block on the GPU itself.
This larger block is actually an Intel Optimus CPU water block (opens in a new tab)modified to fit.
“I chose to go this route for maximum heat transfer because modern full-coverage GPU blocks don’t use true micro fins, thick spread fins, which works, but modern hardware has need modern micro-fins,” psychoOC tells me. “That’s why I went with the Optimus CPU water block, Intel mount, which took a lot of dremeling to fit, but the fin density is 5 times denser than any GPU block at full coverage.”
This CPU block has also been lapped and loaded with liquid metal.
Each of the smaller blocks covering this build is of a brass/nickel design. PsychoOC tells me they would have preferred to use copper, but copper minis were not possible at this scale. I also imagine the price of this PC would have skyrocketed had they found some copper blocks to use, and PsychoOC already expects it to cost them around $7,500. Although this is an approximate figure.
The motherboard has been similarly drenched in cooling that wraps and wraps around the build. This was done to keep the AM5 platform cool while providing the best headroom for overclocking the Ryzen 9 7950X3D, which isn’t in the build yet as it was just released (check out our Ryzen 9 7950X3D review (opens in a new tab) to know more).
But there’s more to this PC than what’s inside the case.
It’s not just the painstaking detail in which it’s water-cooled, but the way this build spills over the desk it’s sitting on and the wall beside it that impresses me. The tanks are at the highest point in the system, mounted on the wall to the right of the build, and a few heaters appear to be the lowest, with the pumps also quite low under the desk. That should mean gravity is on the side of the build, but it’s understandable that six discrete pumps are needed to get the liquid flowing at an appropriate rate.
Look at this thing, it’s something else.
Even the UV light bars are liquid cooled, which PsychoOC says is because they run at 10W and proper cooling will extend their life, and also because they look cool. .
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Images used with permission from u/psychoOC.
Here is the parts list for extreme water cooling:
- 69 water blocks
- 6 GTR radiators
- 100 feet of tubing
- 2 gallons of liquid
- 6 D5 pumps
- 4 RAM Phobya coolers
- 7 Cooler Master UV orange fans from 2004
And what does all that water cooling get you? A near-winter maximum GPU temperature of around 26°C and a CPU temperature of just 40.5°C – during a run of Time Spy Extreme. This is more or less what some users’ platforms will idle to. Extremely impressive.
