In a nutshell: YouTuber TrashBench has once again shown off an unconventional cooling system for your PC hardware. On this occasion, he used an ice machine to cool an RTX 3060 – and it worked remarkably well. In Cyberpunk 2077 alone, the system dropped GPU temps by around 38°C.

The experiment was inspired by MrYeester, another YouTuber who recently built a CPU cooling loop around a hacked ice maker that constantly replenished its ice.

TrashBench's idea was slightly different. Instead of using ice as the coolant, he wanted the machine's refrigeration hardware to cool the water in a GPU loop.

The starting point was an RTX 3060 running on its stock air cooler, sitting around 60°C under load, with the hotspot at about 75°C. TrashBench removed the cooler, fitted a liquid-cooling setup to the card, placed a pump inside the ice machine, and filled it with water.

The first run was essentially just a bucket of water with a radiator. It brought the GPU down to about 44°C after 20 minutes, but the temperature would not stabilize because the card was heating the water faster than anything could remove that heat. Turning the ice maker on helped briefly, but its normal cycle was a problem: it made ice, shut off the compressor, refilled with water, then started again.

TrashBench's solution was to bypass that behavior with an external thermostat, the same kind he said he uses to control a beer fridge, allowing the compressor to run continuously. The evaporator also sat above the water line, so he placed a small bucket inside the machine to keep it submerged.

This is one of those experiments you probably shouldn't try at home as TrashBench was working with an electrical appliance, water, a live PC, and a cooling system that dropped below ambient temperatures. Condensation became the experiment's main flaw. He stopped one test after about 10 minutes because everything was covered in water.

Once the condensation was dealt with, the setup produced some very impressive results. In Cyberpunk 2077, the RTX 3060 stayed around 22°C to 23°C after 15-20 minutes. Compared to the original 60°C result, that's a drop of roughly 62%. The hotspot fell from around 75°C to 34°C.

TrashBench is no stranger to this type of DIY build, especially cooling setups. He previously showed that a PC can run inside a freezer, though the benefits were limited, and he bolted dual CPU tower coolers to an RTX 2060, cutting load temperatures by 31°C.