If you're looking to come up with a different way of cooling a big CPU or GPU to get more oomph out of it, your options are a bit limited. Water loops, dry ice, liquid nitrogen, mineral oil—they've all been done before and to varying degrees of success. Enter stage left, one tech YouTuber with a cooler from a Dodge Journey SUV and a whole heap of automatic transmission fluid.
The content creator in question happens to be YouTube channel TrashBench (via TechSpot), and on face value, I think it's fair to say that its recent endeavour to cool the pants off a GeForce GTX 1060 and 1080 Ti more than lives up to the channel's name. I'm not being mean here; it's just that automatic transmission fluid (ATF) is the last thing you'd pick for trying to cool down a GPU.
It's designed to act primarily as a lubricant for automatic transmissions, and although it does soak up heat, the main reason why cars have coolers for the ATF is to keep its viscosity under control. Definitely not for cooling an entire graphics card. But hey, there are no rules about this, so why not?
Well, it's sticky, viscous stuff, and while it's not harmful or corrosive fresh out of the bottle, ATF is oil-based, so it's very messy to work with. In a Reddit post, TrashBench host u/Tra5hL0rd_ freely admits this. "ATF is fun. It crawls into every crevice, stains your cables, and turns teardown into a full day regret spiral. Don’t try this unless you’re okay with ruining hardware and your mood."
What TrashBench did was fill a large plastic container with eight litres of ATF and plopped a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics card, minus its fans, into it all. Then a submersible pump was added, with its output hooked up to a transmission cooler block from a Dodge Journey SUV. To draw heat out of the ATF loop, a second one was fed into the other side of the block, running a glycol mix and… err… a drinks chiller box thing, half full of ice.
Honestly, it's better to just watch the short video above. TrashBench's overclocking results weren't super great with the 1080 Ti—a fraction under 8% higher clocks—but the 1060 played ball far nicer. While it's not highly clocked out of the box, TrashBench still managed to get a 16% improvement, all with the GPU barely reaching 30 °C.
The end result? Only the world's highest score with a Core i9 14900K and a 6 GB 1060 in 3DMark's Fire Strike. Okay, sure, there are only eight other entries in the database for that hardware and test combination, but there are only eight lanes in the 100 metre Olympic sprint, too. At the very least, the colour of ATF gives the whole thing a nice Goth vibe.
Anyway, I tried immersion cooling myself, many moons ago, but with an old Pentium 4 setup sitting in a vat of mineral oil. No records were set with that endeavour, other than a possible claim to the most amount of time spent cleaning a kitchen after I accidentally knocked the whole thing over. Immersion stuff is surprisingly easy to do, but Hell's bells, is it unruly stuff to deal with.
I'll leave you with TrashBench's thoughts on doing the whole ATF-powered overclocking shebang with a current-generation graphics card. "F*ck, no." Wise words, indeed.
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