Have you ever seen the stonking nice measurement of the most recent high-powered playing cards from Nvidia and AMD? Three-plus PCI slot-thick designs appears to be the brand new customary 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 lovable mini-ITX PC builds. In the event you’re breaking rulers in frustration, you may 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 really put in. And on that be aware, not simply any outdated RTX 4090 will do: this block is barely suitable with a handful of playing cards from Inno3D, plus the reference design (not the Nvidia Founder’s Version). It’s designed for enterprise purposes, so it has no flashy RGB or different elaborations.
If you could find the proper 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 price. As soon as all the things is about up, the result’s a card that’s roughly one-quarter the quantity 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 large hit in thermal efficiency on his take a look at bench. When you received’t get the complete cooling energy {that a} bigger setup can ship, it’s greater than sufficient to run the most recent video games and make them look their greatest. And should you’re attempting to construct a screaming quick gaming PC with the most recent elements in a mini-ITX case, it could be your best choice.
