A notable DIY enthusiast， overseas blogger TrashBench， has recently showcased his ambitious project: a custom-built immersion cooling system for PC components. This innovative approach deviates from typical commercial applications of immersion cooling， which are primarily found in large-scale server environments.
Instead of the commonly used mineral oil in such DIY setups， TrashBench opted for transmission fluid to submerge his graphics card. The setup involved a large plastic container holding the PCB and cooler of a ROG Strix GTX 1060 graphics card. To facilitate external connectivity， a PCIe riser cable was used to connect the submerged card to the motherboard outside the container.
The cooling process was ingeniously designed with two circulation loops. In the first loop， a submersible pump within the container circulated the transmission fluid. This fluid was then directed to an external pump， which facilitated the exchange of hot and cold fluid， mirroring the basic principles of many internal cooling systems.
The second loop involved routing the heated transmission fluid from the first loop through a transmission cooler from a Dodge vehicle. This automotive component effectively served as a radiator， dissipating heat from the fluid before it returned to the container， thus completing the cooling cycle. This setup draws a parallel to the cooling mechanisms found within automobiles.
The performance gains were remarkable. Benchmarking revealed a consistent improvement of approximately 10% across various games and synthetic benchmarks. In the 3DMark Fire Strike test， the performance uplift reached an impressive 16%. This significant boost is largely attributed to the GPU’s ability to achieve a substantially higher boost clock speed of 2190MHz under this extreme cooling condition， compared to its default 1886MHz. Such an overclock even led to TrashBench achieving the number one global ranking in Fire Strike.
The experiment was also extended to a GTX 1080 Ti. While this card could reach 1960MHz with traditional air cooling， immersing it in transmission fluid allowed it to achieve 2114MHz， resulting in an approximate 7% performance increase. This demonstrates the potential of such extreme cooling methods to push hardware beyond its usual limits.
Despite the impressive performance improvements， TrashBench himself cautioned against replicating the setup using transmission fluid. He highlighted the significant mess it created and the difficulty in cleaning， as transmission fluid has a tendency to seep into every crevice of the hardware， making a thorough cleanup a considerable challenge.
