While most PC builders are content to rely on an AIO liquid cooling loop or good old-fashioned air, there are always those who will go the extra mile to keep their components frosty. If you’re willing to invest a lot of money and even more electricity, you could just hook a liquid cooling setup into a residential air conditioner. You absolutely shouldn’t, but you could!
One video producer in China did just that, hooting up a 12,000 BTU unit into a custom cooling loop for a system with a Core i9-13900K and RTX 4090. On Bilibili, the creator shows off the massive system running at 20 degrees Celsius at rest (that’s 68 degrees, if you live in some kind of backward wasteland that uses Fahrenheit). According to Tom’s Hardware, running the system under load increases the temperature by only a few degrees.
It’s an impressive bit of engineering to be sure, but I wouldn’t recommend it even for the most extreme overclocking setup. The Xiaomi 12K BTU air conditioner might cost about the same as a nice custom loop setup, but it’s the size of a gaming desktop all on its own, it’s incredibly loud, and it needs to be installed outside if you want to avoid turning the room into a sauna.
And finally, the thing eats up more than a kilowatt of energy when it’s active — you’ll spend more money powering this just for cooling than you would a typical gaming desktop and all the fixins’. And that’s assuming you can handle the complicated initial setup or know someone who can. I think I’ll stick to a Cooler Master for the time being.
