Have you seen the stonking great size of the latest high-powered cards from Nvidia and AMD? Three-plus PCI slot-thick designs appears to be the brand new customary for something above the midrange. That’s making it more durable and more durable to discover a new, high-end card that may slot in these lovable mini-ITX PC builds. If you’re breaking rulers in frustration, you would possibly wish to take a look at a brand new customized watercooling block that makes the RTX 4090 sufficiently small to suit right into a single slot.

The block was found by YouTube channel Optimum Tech (through PCGamer) and featured in a current video. The Alphacool ES block is simply 209 millimeters lengthy and 24 millimeters thick, a bit thicker with the GPU’s PCB truly put in. And on that observe, not simply any previous RTX 4090 will do: this block is barely appropriate with a handful of playing cards from Inno3D, plus the reference design (not the Nvidia Founder’s Edition). It’s designed for enterprise functions, so it has no flashy RGB or different elaborations.

If you’ll find the best card, you continue to want a liquid cooling setup with a customized loop highly effective sufficient to deal with it whereas working with the somewhat small coolant line fittings. But if you happen to’re down for all that, putting in the block in all probability gained’t part you, and neither will the $166.36 half value. Once all the things is about up, the result’s a card that’s roughly one-quarter the amount of the inventory RTX 4090 and able to match into just about any water-cooled PC.

Optimum Tech discovered that the water-cooled RTX 4090 didn’t take any enormous hit in thermal efficiency on his take a look at bench. While you gained’t get the complete cooling energy {that a} bigger setup can ship, it’s greater than sufficient to run the most recent video games and make them look their greatest. And if you happen to’re making an attempt to construct a screaming quick gaming PC with the most recent elements in a mini-ITX case, it could be your best choice.