This quiet, open-air gaming PC has four 360mm radiators

If you think the 240mm AIO cooler attached to your CPU is pretty good, then prepare for your rig to be humbled by the monstrous cooling power on display here. This outdoor water cooler Gaming PC features four (yes, four!) 360mm radiators, meaning it can cool its high-end components while making barely a whisper of noise.

Thanks to our rapidly growing PC building Facebook page, we’ve seen plenty of custom gaming PCs, from mods based on existing case designs to scratch PC builds. You can even submit yours for review right here. Now let’s chat with Oliver about how he built this glorious outdoor PC version.

Where do you start when building a system like this? For Oliver, the main starting point was the fabulous Yuel Beast Atlas II open-air chassis, made by PC case maker Eric Mihal in small batches.

Eric’s cases aren’t cheap – the Atlas II starts at $345 – but they’re extremely flexible and allow you to put together a PC that really makes a statement. “The Yuel Beast Atlas II case has the advantage that only a few components need to be in a certain place,” explains Oliver, “and many components can be arranged in different ways.”

Oliver already had a general idea of ​​how the cooling system worked before he started. “The initial idea was to have six fans placed symmetrically at the top and bottom,” he explains. “Then I simply arranged the components and tubes as symmetrically and in straight lines as possible.”

Believe it or not, this magenta coolant circulates around a single water-cooling loop, rather than four separate loops for each radiator, made up of EK Quantum water-cooling components, along with an Alphacool flow meter . Unlike some water-cooling aficionados, Oliver largely built the water-cooling system using measurements and his eyesight, rather than spending hours drawing the system in CAD.

“I first placed the components where I wanted them, then measured the distances,” he explains. “For the sake of simplicity, I ensured that the tubes were only bent at one level and that they were always bent at a 90 degree angle. I used tools from Alphacool to bend them. To be honest, a lot of it was a matter of measuring by eye, especially when shortening the tubes.

Does it matter which components went where in the loop? “A specific order of components in the loop wasn’t crucial for me, although I wanted to mount the GPU with the coolant visible in the front – it’s an active backplate, I could have flipped it around” , he said.

What was the hardest part? “The very straight tube between the two radiators,” Oliver explains to us. “Acrylic glass is very rigid when cold and sensitive to fractures. It only worked when I screwed one of the fittings onto the radiator after inserting the tube.

With the cooling capacity of four 360mm radiators equipped with 12 be quiet! Silent Wings 4 fans, Oliver has no trouble cooling the high-end components of this rig. The spec includes a 24-core Intel Core i9-13900K CPU and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 GPU, but Oliver is more interested in using that cooling power to keep his system quiet, rather than overclocking his components.

“I really like open windows, but at the same time I’m quite sensitive to noise,” he says. “The system is completely inaudible with fans below 800 rpm in a fairly quiet environment, even with the case completely open. »

In fact, Oliver says he only runs the 12 fans at 10 to 20 percent of their rated speed, meaning they often run at just 600 to 800 rpm. He says they rarely run above 30 percent of their rated speed of 3,000 rpm.

What kind of temperatures do you get with this kind of cooling power available? “The last time I paid attention to temperatures, MSI Afterburner recorded a maximum GPU temperature of 52°C in Cyberpunk 2077 with maximum ray tracing after about an hour, but it averaged below 50°C. ” For comparison, the RTX 4090 Founders Edition reached 67.5°C in our testing. “The average CPU temperature was in the same region,” he adds, “but it peaked in the 80s.”

And when Oliver was asked if he would do anything differently next time, he gave a pretty confident answer. “I’m more than happy and probably wouldn’t accept anything fundamentally different,” he says. “I probably should have shortened the tube between the flow meter and the GPU a bit and probably would have made the connection between the radiator and the CPU from one tube, not two, like in the current version. ”

Magenta Water Cooled PC Specifications

• CPU: Intel Core i9-13900K
• Motherboard : Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Apex
• Memory: Corsair Dominator Platinum 32GB, 5600MHz
• Graphic card: Asus ROG Strix GeForce RTX 4090OC
• Storage: 2 x 1TB Kingston KC3000
• Power supply : 1,200 W rest assured! Dark Power Pro 12
• Case: Yuel Beast Atlas II
• Cooling: 4 x EK-Quantium Surface S360 radiators, EK-Quantum Kinetix FLT 240 D5 PWM D-RGB Plexi pump/resolution combo, EK-Quantum Vector² Strix RTX 4090 D-RGB Nickel + Plexi GPU water block, EK-Quantum Magnitude LGA1700 Full Nickel processor water block, Aquacomputer flow sensor, 12 x be quiet! Silent Wings Pro 4 PWM fans