Have you ever seen the stonking great size of the latest high-powered cards from Nvidia and AMD? Three-plus PCI slot-thick designs appears to be the brand new commonplace for something above the midrange. That’s making it more durable and more durable to discover a new, high-end card that may slot in these cute mini-ITX PC builds. When you’re breaking rulers in frustration, you would possibly wish to try a brand new customized watercooling block that makes the RTX 4090 sufficiently small to suit right into a single slot.
The block was found by YouTube channel Optimum Tech (through PCGamer) and featured in a current video. The Alphacool ES block is simply 209 millimeters lengthy and 24 millimeters thick, a bit thicker with the GPU’s PCB truly put in. And on that word, not simply any outdated RTX 4090 will do: this block is just suitable with a handful of playing cards from Inno3D, plus the reference design (not the Nvidia Founder’s Version). It’s designed for enterprise functions, so it has no flashy RGB or different gildings.
If you will discover the appropriate card, you continue to want a liquid cooling setup with a customized loop highly effective sufficient to deal with it whereas working with the reasonably small coolant line fittings. However should you’re down for all that, putting in the block in all probability received’t section you, and neither will the $166.36 half value. As soon as all the things is ready up, the result’s a card that’s roughly one-quarter the amount of the inventory RTX 4090 and able to match into just about any water-cooled PC.
Optimum Tech discovered that the water-cooled RTX 4090 didn’t take any big hit in thermal efficiency on his check bench. Whilst you received’t get the complete cooling energy {that a} bigger setup can ship, it’s greater than sufficient to run the newest video games and make them look their finest. And should you’re attempting to construct a screaming quick gaming PC with the newest elements in a mini-ITX case, it may be the best choice.