If you need any form of energy in a contemporary PC construct, you’re going to have to maneuver some air round in some unspecified time in the future. That’s one of many fundamentals of laptop {hardware}: Barring a super-portable laptop computer or a teeny-tiny desktop the size of a Rubik’s cube, you want followers to chill your elements. Unless, after all, you’re able to strap about 25 kilos of steel to it and switch it into a really costly radiator. Just ask this Reddit person, who’s making an attempt to passively cool an Nvidia RTX 3080.

The put up outlines one particular person’s try to get a high-end graphics card to function with none form of transferring elements, eradicating the inventory cooling shroud and changing it with a Frankenstein monster of copper and steel. The passive cooling aficionados at Fanless Tech noticed the put up (through Tom’s Hardware). The person says their contraption is constructed from a stable bar of copper, one foot large, two inches tall and three deep, with what seems like at the least eleven further CPU cooler heatsinks connected to it. Sans followers, after all. They’re not completely affixed — the challenge continues to be on the starting stage.

I did some serviette math, and the copper block alone weighs 23.26 kilos, 10.55 kilograms. It’s dwarfing the beefy RTX 3080 GPU and PCB beneath it. Good factor it’s not really put in, as a result of I don’t know of any motherboard that would take it with out snapping in two, even if you happen to may slot in a customized case. Of course any working construct would use a protracted riser cable.

Based on person EveryNameTaken9’s remark historical past, it looks as if they’re a great distance out from really getting this factor to work, regardless of finishing a few passive cooling initiatives earlier than. The consensus among the many feedback on the put up appears to be that the massive bar of copper received’t have the ability to successfully dissipate the warmth from 350 watts of energy within the card, successfully sitting on high of the GPU like a forged iron pan on a range, making the additional heatsinks superfluous. EveryNameTaken9 says they’ll construct a horizontal variant subsequent, permitting the warmth to rise naturally, and probably attempt drilling holes for extra direct warmth pipes.

There’s a small however devoted group of PC followers lovers who wish to attempt to passively cool high-power elements. There are even just a few industrial merchandise that attraction to the area of interest, like SilentPC’s passive cooling designs, a few of which might even match high-end elements like a Core i9 into an ATX desktop case. But even these choices can’t deal with a card as highly effective because the 3080 with no fan, topping out on the RTX 4060 Ti and utilizing the inventory cooler. Maybe solid-state cooling will usher in a brand new technology of designs…but it surely received’t be for just a few years at the least. And passive followers would possibly scoff at it anyway, because it nonetheless makes use of a tiny quantity {of electrical} energy.