Immersion cooling is typically associated with large-scale server environments where conventional air-cooled setups are insufficient. Efforts have been made to commercialize the technology, but, of course, enthusiasts wanting to push their hardware will not wait for any revolution—they’ll push through to power their own breakthrough.
Such is the story of u/Tra5shL0rd on Reddit, who took to r/nvidia to showcase his crazy DIY immersion cooling apparatus, only with a further twist. In lieu of mineral oil—which is typically used for these endeavours—he dipped his graphics cards in ATF, or Automatic Transmission Fluid, that is used in cars.
I Overclocked a 1080Ti… In Transmission Fluid – YouTube
The cooling works remarkably simply. The host took a large plastic container in which he put a ROG Strix GTX 1060 stripped down to its PCB and heatsink, connected via a PCIe riser cable to a clean motherboard outside. He poured 2.1 gallons of ATF on top of it, filling the tub about halfway through. Then he installed a submersible pump inside the tub to circulate the fluid, which was connected to an external pump that facilitated the exchange of hot ATF for cold. That was the first loop.
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The second loop involved taking the aforementioned warm ATF and running it through a Dodge Journey transmission cooler, which acted essentially as a radiator to cool it down. The chilled fluid then flows back into the tub, completing the loop and actually creating something akin to a real car’s internal mechanism. It’s wild, and entirely non-practical, but it’s exactly the kind of thing hobbists enjoy.