This water-cooled mod shrinks the Nvidia RTX 4090 down to just the right size to fit in an ITX case.
Neat trick: Remember when the best graphics cards only occupied one slot in your PC case? Those days are long gone, and even lower-end cards take up a significant amount of space in the back of your PC. But what if you could more than halve the footprint of the RTX 4090? This is what Optimum Tech did with the aftermarket GPU water block.
Today’s high-end graphics cards are no longer the thin components they once were. With their thick heatsinks and fans, GPUs like the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 turn an apartment into a townhouse condominium. However, the YouTube channel Optimal technology (OT) used a water-cooled mod to turn the Nvidia behemoth into a thin, folio-sized card.
Optimum Tech has stated that this is probably not the ideal solution for most PC builds, but water cooling is a bit niche anyway. However, it said that the smaller footprint could come in handy in enterprise server applications. However, OT plans to install the card in their main rig to see how it performs compared to the current setup. At the moment, he just launched it from an open bench.
The mod used is an ES waterblock from Alphacool. It is only compatible with a few RTX 4090 models. In this case, Optimum Tech used an iChill Inno3D card. The move to a water-cooled GPU meant the card could easily fit into an ITX case—just 210mm long and thin enough for a single case slot.
While testing it on an open bench, Optimum Tech found the performance to be on par with other alternatives such as MSI’s Supreme Liquid X. It ran God of War and Control at frame rates above 100fps, and the GPU temperature only rose to about 53 degrees Celsius. However, performance in one case can vary significantly. Optimum Tech recommends using it in a dual heatsink configuration.
Again, Alphacool designed this waterblock to reduce the size of the graphics card and fit more in the rack. However, there is nothing stopping enterprising developers from including the mod in current or future installations, which OT intends to do soon. The block is sold for $166.36 from Australian retailer Aquatuning.
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