I just finished my basement into a beautiful new home office and will be moving everything down shortly. I plan to have my computer to the left of my footwell in a new custom built desk, and planned my mini fridge to be in the next alcove to hold drinks for the workday. I plan to build a new workstation shortly with a new Ryzen 1800X, and the XFR got me thinking...
I was already considering a liquid cooling setup as this will also act as my primary gaming PC (and I play a few cpu-bound games), as well as 3D rendering workstation. With the fridge so close, it seems like a waste not to make use of it as part of the cooling setup if possible.
The Setup
I envision a pump inside of the PC case with a tube that runs out of the case, through a finned heat exchanger, into the fridge, coiled along the interior wall, back out of the fridge and then back into the case for cooling. The external, finned, air-cooled heat exchanger would be used prior to the fridge to reduce excessive heat and limit the extra power the fridge would waste dealing with at least some of the heat. The fridge would just be cooling near ambient coolant to a modest sub-ambient temperature.
Again, the fridge is not the only heat extraction component of this system. The system will be designed to work effectively even if the fridge wasn't there.
The Purpose
To be clear: I understand that the mini-fridge is going to pull extra power because of all of the heat generated by the computer components and dumped into the fridge.
I also understand the fridge may not be able to reduce coolant temperatures too terribly much, and that an aquarium chiller may be more effective.
I also understand that to get the most performance in the cases when I really need it I will likely need to manually overclock instead of just relying on XFR.
The purpose of this project is partly the fun factor (it would make a great story) and partly the minuscule up-front costs. I don't want to do anything that would endanger the PC components. But if I can do it safely and get another 100MHz - 200MHz out of it I would consider that a win.
Previous Research
Google returns many forum posts of users asking if this can be done, and a number of responses saying it’s a bad idea, but no one goes into details as to why. To further confuse the matter it's unclear if some of these questions involve putting the whole PC in a fridge, as at least one or two advocated submersing the mainboard.
The Challenges
The main challenges that I see right off the bat are:
- Finding the right place to drill the input/output holes in the fridge and properly sealing them to prevent excessive heat loss.
- Determining the quantity of heat (I’m not even sure what unit one uses to measure that) produced by the PC and determining if the fridge will overwork removing that level of constant heat input.
- Could condensation build up on the line running from the fridge into the PC given that the temperature of the liquid in that branch will almost certainly be below ambient?
