Overclockers go to extremes to cool their PC’s. China’s northern city of Mohe just experienced its coldest temperatures since 1969 by dropping to a freezing record low of -53C. Chinese content creator “苏打baka” decided to take her entire gaming PC loaded with an Intel Core i9-13900K CPU and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 outside to see what it feels like gaming in sub-zero ambient temperatures.

It was first run at moderate workloads and the CPU did initially thermal throttle as expected. After putting the AIO on, the temperatures outside got so cold that the pump eventually died when the liquid within the AIO froze.

The AIO was replaced with the Noctua NH-P1 passive heatsink and the CPU dropped to 10-15C while the GPU ran at an even lower -40C temperature (-18C Hotspot). The CPU had so much thermal headroom that it was easily overclocking up to 6.18 GHz. Even under heavy load, the GPU never went past 30C.

Read more about it here.