Immersion cooling is typically associated with large-scale server environments where conventional air-cooled setups are insufficient. Efforts have been made to commercialize the technology, but, of course, enthusiasts wanting to push their hardware will not wait for any revolution—they’ll push through to power their own breakthrough.
Such is the story of u/Tra5shL0rd on Reddit, who took to r/nvidia to showcase his crazy DIY immersion cooling apparatus, only with a further twist. In lieu of mineral oil—which is typically used for these endeavours—he dipped his graphics cards in ATF, or Automatic Transmission Fluid, that is used in cars.
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The cooling works remarkably simply. The host took a large plastic container in which he put a ROG Strix GTX 1060 stripped down to its PCB and heatsink, connected via a PCIe riser cable to a clean motherboard outside. He poured 2.1 gallons of ATF on top of it, filling the tub about halfway through. Then he installed a submersible pump inside the tub to circulate the fluid, which was connected to an external pump that facilitated the exchange of hot ATF for cold. That was the first loop.
The second loop involved taking the aforementioned warm ATF and running it through a Dodge Journey transmission cooler, which acted essentially as a radiator to cool it down. The chilled fluid then flows back into the tub, completing the loop and actually creating something akin to a real car’s internal mechanism. It’s wild, and entirely non-practical, but it’s exactly the kind of thing hobbists enjoy.
1080Ti overclock, powered by Dodge motors and Valvoline. from r/nvidia
TrashBench, as the tinkerer is called over on YouTube, ran some benchmarks, and the results were great. Across various gaming and synthetic tests, he saw a consistent improvement of about 10%, and up to 16% in 3DMark. This was attributed in large part thanks to the 2160MHz boost clock that the GTX 1060 was able to achieve, surrounded by ATF, up from 1886MHz stock speeds. Overall, a resounding success that netted 1st place in Firestrike global scores.
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Curiously, a 1080 Ti was also thrown into the mix with a similar teardown of the Strix variant, but these results were milder. The 1080 Ti was running at around 1960 MHz with air cooling, but it pushed to 2114 MHz when cooled with the ATF. TrashBench saw a roughly 7% increase in FPS, but because the 1080 Ti is already a power-hungry GPU with minimal headroom, this was not as impressive. The GTX 1060 more than doubled the 1080 Ti’s gain and ultimately emerged as the real winner.
All in all, it was a fun experiment, but it left a whole lot of mess. TrashBench even specifically advises against using ATF, as it stains everything and is a nightmare to clean, which is something you’ll be busy with since transmission fluid will get into every nook and cranny of your hardware. The Reddit post ends with a tip of the hat to Dodge, who helped power this cooling system with their transmission cooler. The ATF was from Valvoline, who unfortunately missed the shout-out.
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