YouTuber discovers dry ice can indeed cool your gaming PC, if you have a very specific model from a very specific manufacturer
Hey, it's mryeester again. We've covered this particular YouTuber's attempts to build an infinite ice-based CPU cooler, and edible thermal paste. The PC prankster has upped their game this time, though, as they've now figured out a way to cool a CPU with dry ice, regular ice's even cooler cousin.
Sort of. Anyway, it turns out this would be a terrible idea if you simply placed the dry ice atop a top-mounted AIO, as it melts through the radiator vents and down to your precious components. Mryeester has gained some HP sponsorship, though, and the Omen Max 45L test machine they've been using has a handy "Cryo Chamber" cooling system.
Essentially, the AIO radiator and fan setup is isolated from the rest of the system in its own section, away from the rest of the components, with vents on top and a large gap below it. I think you can probably see where this is going.
I've skipped to the main point of interest in the video above, as mryeester spends a rather large amount of time demonstrating all the features of the HP machine. Hey, we've all got to make our money somewhere, right?
Sticking dry ice directly on top of the AIO resulted in some pretty cool effects, as the fans were set to exhaust upwards, creating ghostly vapour trails. Temperature-wise, though, the CPU figure dropped to 37 °C, which was the same as the temps recorded using regular ice. Still, it's a marked improvement over the 43 °C idle temperatures recorded at stock.
Placing the dry ice in the handy chamber below, however, meant that the AIO pulled ice-cold air up through its vents, lowering temps down to a chilly 34 °C at idle and beating the standard ice-cooled score by a few degrees.
So, does this mean higher fps results for gaming, as the CPU can now clock itself to the moon as a result of this esoteric cooling solution? Kinda. Not really. A little bit, perhaps.
Mryeester recorded a 157 fps result in the Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark at stock, and 159 fps using the dry ice—which, as they point out, could essentially be a rounding error. Chilling down a desktop CPU by a few degrees really isn't going to make a massive difference to gaming performance, unless it was heavily thermally limited to begin with.
Ah well. We've all had our fun, and HP's Cryo Chamber has had a chance to prove itself in a very, err, unusual use case. Also, don't play with dry ice, kids. It's a mryeester thing, and they've got all the right oven mitts.