The Water-Cooled PS3 Sony Never Made

November 6, 2025 by Tyler August 3 Comments

The Playstation 3 had a dizzying number of variants from its first launch in 2006 to when they stopped selling the slim models over a decade later in 2017. Of all those, you’ve probably never heard of the water-cooled Playstation 3 Pro, for the simple reason that it did not exist until [Zac] of Zac Builds created it in a video to push the limits of the now-vintage hardware.

This hack isn’t totally unique; you used to be able to buy watercooling kits for the PS3, but like the console itself, those have long since left the market. Of course [Zac] is hacking this Playstation 3 in 2025, so he’s doing it in a very modern way: with 3D scanning and CNC machining.

After very, very carefully removing the heat spreaders from the CPU and GPU to replace the dried out thermal paste, [Zac] scans the main board to design mounts for the dual waterblocks. Those mounts are, of course, 3D printed in carbon fibre reinforced nylon. Since the mount is going to be under pressure and rather warm, he anneals the nylon for 24 hours at 85 degrees. 3D printing also comes into play mount the pump and radiator into a handsome case that nearly looks like something Sony could have put out back in the day. That whole workflow seems normal today, but would have been borderline science-fiction with the console was new. .

Note that this is not a 2007 unit. [Zac] picked the newest PS3 he could that was still hackable–each revision got more efficient as the chips moved to smaller architectures, but Sony did eventually lock down the firmware to prevent overclocking. Which is of course the point here: since the stock hardware leaves a lot on the table in terms of thermal management, [Zac] figured there would be great performance boosts available.

As it happens, [Zac] was right about performance boosts– on GPU limited titles, he’s getting upto 50% higher frame rates. (Which makes sense, given he’s overclocking the GPU by about 50%.) Loading times are also much improved with the inevitable HDD to SSD swap.

The last time we featured a watercooled playstation hack was back in 2011, for a PS3 laptop of all things. The modern workflow makes it much easier. It’s been a few years since we last posted a Playstation 3 hack. Perhaps now, as they age into becoming “retro” we’ll see a revival in that category.

Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip, via Yanko Design, which seems to provide an LLM-assisted (or generated) summary of [Zac]’s video.

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Desk Top Peltier-Powered Cloud Chamber Uses Desktop Parts

August 9, 2025 by Tyler August 6 Comments

There was a time when making a cloud chamber with dry ice and alcohol was one of those ‘rite of passage’ type science projects every nerdy child did. That time may or may not be passed, but we doubt many children are making cloud chambers quite like [Curious Scientist]’s 20 cm x 20 cm Peltier-powered desktop unit.

The dimensions were dictated by the size of the off-the-shelf display case which serves as the chamber, but conveniently enough also allows emplacement of four TEC2-19006 Peltier cooling modules. These are actually “stacked” modules, containing two thermoelectric elements in series — a good thing, since the heat delta required to make a cloud chamber is too great for a single element. Using a single-piece two stage module simplifies the build considerably compared to stacking elements manually.

To carry away all that heat, [Curious Scientist] first tried heatpipe-based CPU coolers, but moved on to CPU water blocks for a quieter, more efficient solution. Using desktop coolers means almost every part here is off the shelf, and it all combines to work as well as we remember the dry-ice version. Like that childhood experiment, there doesn’t seem to be any provision for recycling the condensed alcohol, so eventually the machine will peter out after enough vapor is condensed.

This style of detector isn’t terribly sensitive and so needs to be “seeded” with spicy rocks to see anything interesting, unless an external electric field is applied to encourage nucleation around weaker ion trails. Right now [Curious Scientist] is doing that by rubbing the glass with microfiber to add some static electricity, but if there’s another version, it will have a more hands-off solution.

We’ve seen Peltier-Powered cloud chambers before (albeit without PC parts), but the “dry ice and alcohol” hack is still a going concern. If even that’s too much effort, you could just go make a cup of tea, and watch very, very carefully.

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A PC That Uses Hot Coffee As Coolant

August 7, 2025 by Lewin Day 38 Comments

Modern computers generate a great deal of heat when under load, thus we cool them with fans and sometimes even water cooling systems. [Doug MacDowell] figured that water was alright, but why not use coffee instead?

*Someone tell us how [Doug] made this graph look like it’s right out of a 1970s college textbook.*

The concept is simple enough — replace water in a PC’s cooling loop with fresh-brewed coffee. [Doug] fully integrated an entire PC build on to the side of a General Electric drip coffee maker. It’s an absolute mess of tubes and wires, but it’s both a PC and a functional coffee maker in one.

The coffee maker percolates coffee as per normal into the carafe, and from there, it’s then pumped through two radiators on top of the PC. From there, it circulates to the water block on top of the CPU, and then back to the carafe on the coffee maker where the cycle repeats. Doug notes the coffee is initially so hot (90 C) that the PC is at risk of crashing, but after 75 minutes circulating through the system, the coffee and CPU sit at an equilibrium temperature of 33 C.

You can’t really drink coffee from this machine. PC water cooling components are not food safe in any way, and [Doug] notes mold will become an issue over time. For short periods at least, though, it’s possible to sort-of-cool your computer with hot, fresh coffee if you really want to do that.

We’ve featured some great hacks of conventional coffee machines over the years, including this fantastic talk at Supercon 2023.

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Massive Aluminum Snake Casting Becomes Water Cooling Loop For PC

July 25, 2025 by Lewin Day 5 Comments

Water cooling was once only the preserve of hardcore casemodders and overclockers. Today, it’s pretty routinely used in all sorts of performance PC builds. However, few are using large artistic castings as radiators like [Mac Pierce] is doing.

The casting itself was inspired on the concept of the ouroboros, the snake which eats its own tail if one remembers correctly. [Mac] built a wooden form to produce a loop approximately 30″ tall and 24″ wide, before carving it into the classic snake design. The mold was then used to produce a hefty sand cast part which weighed in at just over 30 pounds.

The next problem was to figure out how to create a sealed water channel in the casting to use it as a radiator. This was achieved by machining finned cooling channels into the surface of the snake itself. A polycarbonate face plate was then produced to bolt over this, creating a sealed system. [Mac] also had to work hard to find a supply of aluminum-compatible water cooling fittings to ensure he didn’t run into any issues with galvanic corrosion.

The final product worked, and looked great to boot, even if it took many disassembly cycles to fix all the leaks. The blood-red coolant was a nice touch that really complemented the silvery aluminum. CPU temperatures weren’t as good as with a purpose-built PC radiator, but maxed out at 51 C in a heavy load test—servicable for [Mac]’s uses. The final touch was to simply build the rest of the PC to live inside the ouroboros itself—and the results were stunning.

We’ve featured a few good watercooling builds over the years. If you’ve found your own unique way to keep your hardware cool and happy, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline!

PC Watercooling Prototype Is Pumpless

April 18, 2024 by Al Williams 23 Comments

Watercooling is usually more efficient than air cooling for the same volume of equipment, and — important for many people — it is generally quieter. However, you still have water pump noises to deal with. [Der8auer] got a Wieland prototype cooler that doesn’t use a pump. Instead, it relies on the thermosiphon effect. In simple terms, the heat moves water — possibly boiling it — upwards to a radiator. Once the water is cool, it falls down back to the heat exchanger again.

It looks like any other AIO, but the block is extremely flat compared to normal coolers, which have the pump on top of the plate. As you might expect, orientation matters, and you can’t have tight bends in the hoses. The system also has to be totally airtight to function properly. The test was meant to be against a commercial AIO unit with the same number of fans. However, there was a problem, and the final test was done with a larger radiator with one of its three fans removed.

The prototype performed fine and was quiet. It didn’t do as well as the commercial cooler, but it wasn’t bad. Of course, this is a prototype. Maybe a final product will do better. Around the ten-minute mark, the IR camera came out, and it didn’t show any major unexpected hot spots.

We’ve seen water-cooled printer hotends, and pumping is a problem there. We wondered if this technology might work there. The whole thing reminded us of heat pipes without the internal wick to move cold working fluid. We’ve even seen a water-cooled calculator.

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Upgrading PC Cooling With Software

March 9, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 21 Comments

As computing power increases with each new iteration of processors, actual power consumption tends to increase as well. All that waste heat has to go somewhere, and while plenty of us are content to add fans and heat sinks for a passable air-cooled system there are others who prefer a liquid cooling solution of some sort. [Cal] uses a liquid cooler on his system, but when he upgraded his AMD chip to one with double the number of cores he noticed the cooling fans on the radiator were ramping quickly and often. To solve this problem he turned to Python instead of building a new cooling system.

The reason for the rapid and frequent fan cycling was that the only trigger for the cooling fans available on his particular motherboard is CPU temperature. For an air cooled system this might be fine, but a water cooled system with much more thermal mass should be better able to absorb these quick changes in CPU temperature without constantly adjusting fan speed. Using a python script set up to run as a systemd service, the control loop monitors not only the CPU temperature but also the case temperature and the temperature of the coolant, and then preferentially tries to dump heat from the CPU into the thermal mass of the water cooler before much ramping of cooling fans happens.

An additional improvement here is that the fans can run at a much lower speed, reducing dust in the computer case and also reducing noise compared to before the optimizations. The computer now reportedly runs almost silently unless it has been under load for several minutes. The script is specific to this setup but easily could be modified for other computers using liquid cooling, and using Grafana to monitor the changes can easily be done as [Cal] also demonstrates when calibrating and testing the system. On the other hand, if you prefer a more flashy cooling system as a living room centerpiece, we have you covered there as well.

ADATA SSD Gets Liquid Cooling, But Not Everyone’s Convinced

June 3, 2023 by Lewin Day 19 Comments

Solid-state drives (SSDs) were a step change in performance when it came to computer storage. They offered incredibly fast seek times by virtue of dispensing with solid rust for silicon instead. Now, some companies have started pushing the limits to the extent that their drives supposedly need liquid cooling, as reported by The Register.

The device in question is the ADATA Project NeonStorm, which pairs a PCIe 5.0 SSD with RGB LEDs, a liquid cooling reservoir and radiator, and a cooling fan. The company is light on details, but it’s clearly excited about its storage products becoming the latest piece of high-end gamer jewelry.

Notably though, not everyone’s jumping on the bandwagon. Speaking to The Register, Jon Tanguy from Crucial indicated that while the company has noted modern SSDs running hotter, it doesn’t yet see a need for active cooling. In their case, heatsinks have proven enough. He notes that NAND flash used in SSDs actually operates best at 60 to 70 C. However, going beyond 80 C risks damage and most drives will shutdown or throttle access at this point.

Realistically, you probably don’t need to liquid cool your SSDs, even if you’ve got the latest and greatest models. However, if you want the most tricked out gaming machine on Twitch, there’s plenty of products out there that will happily separate you from your money.