Last Sunday, China's Northern city of Mohe experienced its coldest temperatures since 1969, dropping to a record low of -53C, and 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 to see what it feels like gaming in sub-zero temperatures.
Content Creator Puts Gaming PC With Intel Core i9-13900K & NVIDIA RTX 4090 To The Test, Runs It In China's Coldest City With -53C Temps
The video has a cautionary "No hardware was damaged while recording this video" statement in the description and you really have to see it to get a taste of what this content channel is all about.
So starting off, Baka first put together a test setup comprising an Intel 2nd/3rd Gen CPU running on an H61 motherboard. You might ask what's so interesting about this setup. Well, the CPU was running without any heatsink and since the temperatures were so low, the CPU had an operating temperature of -2 to -1C. Even under AIDA64's stress test, the CPU recorded a temperature of just 1-3C, and that too after several minutes of being under load.
But that ain't fun, the actual build is what this story is all about and that used a top-end Intel Core i9-13900K CPU, an ASUS GeForce RTX 4090 ROG STRIX graphics card, and a 360mm AIO cooler. It's well known that the Core i9-13900K can reach 90-100C even with good cooling under stress tests. It was first run at moderate ambients and the CPU did initially thermal throttle as expected but it's the next part where things go crazy. In fact, the temperatures outside got so cold that the pump eventually died and the liquid within the AIO froze which meant that it wasn't working at all.
To take things to the extreme, a Frankenstein of an air cooler featuring several industrial-grade fans. 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 clocking easily up to 6.18 GHz. Under load, the GPU never went past 30C.
And what do you do when you have your PC with 24 Intel cores running at 6.18 GHz and the best GPU from NVIDIA on the planet operating with sub-zero temperatures? You play Minesweeper, of course..
After testing and being out in the sub-zero wilderness of Mohe for an entire night, the PC and the cables were entirely covered in Ice. We would assume that the hardware survived but this was an interesting experiment for sure. It looks like people living in cold regions can't use PC gaming hardware as makeshift heaters in the winter, that's all I could make of this video. Do give it a watch below:
