Influencer Runs Her Gaming PC at Subzero Temps in Record-Breaking Winter Storm

If you’ve ever struggled to keep your top-shelf PC hardware cool, a content creator in China has found one simple trick: Just take your PC into the middle of a record-breaking winter freeze. The city of Mohe in Northern China hit -53C this week. This led a local gamer to wonder how her PC would run in such low temperatures. As it turns out, her Intel Core i9-13900K and RTX 4090 both ran at subzero temperatures. This allowed for some truly impressive overclocking, of course.

The content creator goes by the name of “苏打baka,” according to Wccftech. She drove all the way out to Mohe from where she lives, along with a bunch of hardware for testing. The city is known for its frosty temps and is regarded as China’s north pole, adjacent to Russia’s Siberia. She posted her cooling shenanigans on the social media site Bilibili. It shows her continually having to modify the test setup as everything kept freezing solid. In many close-up shots, you can see her eyelashes are frozen as well.

The original setup included an older Intel CPU running without a heatsink. (Credit: Bilibili)

Her first test involved an older Intel CPU running without a heatsink on an H61 motherboard. Even without cooling it ran the AIDA64 stress test at -1 to -3C. It appears in the video that she left it outside too long, though. Eventually, it’s covered in snow and ice, seemingly forcing her to adopt a new strategy.

(Credit: Bilibili)

As it turns out, she brought all the parts needed for a top-tier gaming PC, so she built it. It includes a Core i9-13900K as well as an Asus ROG Strix RTX 4090. The CPU was being cooled with a 360mm AIO, at least initially. Intel’s Raptor Lake flagship CPU can hit 100C when all cores are loaded up, so it’s a good CPU to test in freezing conditions. Based on the video, it looks like when she first fired it up the CPU was running around 10C, but the GPU was at -30C. Eventually, the liquid in the AIO froze, so she replaced it with a passive Noctua heatsink and aimed a bizarre array of industrial fans at it from about a foot away.

With that final setup in place, she was able to show some very interesting results. First off, the 13900K was running around -15C, with the GPU at a surprising -40C. This allowed her to overclock the CPU up to 6.18GHz. Not too shabby considering it was a Macgyver’d cooling setup. Even at those clocks, the CPU was running at 15C. With a GPU stress test running, it looks like the RTX 4090 was around 29C or thereabouts.

Obviously, this is in no way practical for anyone, and at the end of the video, it sure looks like her entire motherboard is frozen. Whether that killed anything is unknown, as she claims it was all fine aside from her dead AIO. We’re skeptical, but also impressed with her gumption going out in such cold temperatures.

Now Read:

• Asus Breaks World Record by Overclocking Core i9-13900K to 9GHz
• Intel CEO: Chips Will Have 1 Trillion Transistors by 2030
• Leaked Intel Roadmap Points to Raptor Lake Refresh, HEDT Chips in 2023