A Chinese techtuber has designed a liquid-cooled PC system that hooks up to a household air conditioner unit instead of a PC-mounted radiator. The video creator, oddly named 'Electrolytic sodium carbonate' (ESC), showcases a rather normal-looking PC tower - but next to it, there is a 12,000 BTU air conditioning unit to supercharge cooling. The result is that the GPU runs at just 20 degrees Celsius under stress testing.
This project is ready to be the "perfect companion" (machine translation) for an upcoming Core i9-14900K with Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 system, says ESC. However, as they are still waiting for a water block release for their graphics card these first tests have been completed using a Core i9-13900K PC system fitted with an RTX 4090.
This isn't ESC's first work in integrating powerful household air conditioning units with personal computer systems. The video host shows an established 'whole house' liquid cooling system that appears to have five loops available for PCs. We have pictures of the inside and outside parts of this cooling setup in the gallery.
Next up, the ESC video host talks about the increased TDP of the RTX 5090, which moves the power needle a not insignificant amount beyond the expected load of an RTX 4090. We are then introduced to the Xiaomi KFR-35GW air conditioner, which gets a nice bit of Nvidia – AMD – Intel branding, though we are not aware of any AMD components in the test system. This AC unit offers a quoted 12,000 BTU cooling power and typically consumes about 1.2kW. It measures 765 x 268 x 550mm, so is quite a lot bigger than the PC tower it is cooling, and a lot bigger than a 360mm PC cooling radiator.
We are then guided through the modification of the Xiaomi KFR-35GW. Some welding and pipe management later, and we see the liquid cooler reservoir ready inside the AC unit.
How well does this AC unit cool the test PC? After 40 minutes of "roasting" this PC by stress testing it with popular tools such as FurMark and the AIDA System Stability Test the system CPU cores are said to be only a couple of degrees hotter than when the test started.
ESC then took the AC unit outdoors, where it would normally be installed, and noted that the GPU temperature was just 2 degrees Celsius, with a 12 degrees Celsius hotspot. Running stress tests again saw these GPU temperatures rise to 20 and 36 degrees Celsius, respectively. Sadly, the video doesn't include charts for inside and outdoors, CPU and GPU, idle and load – those would have been very interesting.
During the video the host says that they are happy with the capability of the air conditioner-cooled PC as demonstrated, and believe it is ready for both the 14900K and RTX 5090 components, which are waiting in the wings, and any upcoming RTX 6090.
