This Frankenstein Of A Cooling Setup Contains A Passively Cooled RTX 3080 FE

This Frankenstein Of A Cooling Setup Contains A Passively Cooled RTX 3080 FE

There’s a subset of PC enthusiasts that chase for the lowest noise levels, and this often involves passively-cooled hardware. They come in many forms, from undervolted hardware, a plus-sized heatsink, to some truly exotic ways of dissipating that heat – they all come in some level of difficulty to pull off.

Perhaps this example (via FanlessTech) of the passively-cooled RTX 3080 truly represents the idea to which passive cooling enthusiasts decided to crank things up to 11. This monstrosity involves a solid block of copper to conduct heat, and it’s needed presumably just to install a total of *ten* CPU coolers on top of it. Evidently, this is a pretty crude build as the builder asked for feedback, to which they were advised to overhaul as copper on its own isn’t as efficient than, say, a copper heat pipe (which contains small amounts of liquid to carry heat more efficiently).

Another user pointed out that using CPU fans isn’t advised for passive cooling – as heatsink thickness and gaps between them are not the same. Regular CPU heatsinks are designed with a fan applying air pressure to it, allowing to stack the fins tighter which enables better cooling capacity; passive cooling fins are instead designed with convection in mind, requiring fins to be spaced out to not trap heat in tight spaces.

The user cited the MonsterLab “The Beast” case as the inspiration for this build. That PC case is capable of cooling up to a combined 400W of hardware, though it comes with an optional set of 140mm fans to increase its thermal capacity.

Source: Tom’s Hardware

Pokdepinion: This whole thing is probably magnitudes heavier than the stock cooler. 5kg, give or take?