I have a laptop with a full fat GTX 1060 6GB, and I wanted to see if running sub zero coolant through it would let me overclock it enough to beat a desktop in FPS.
The laptop has an i7 8750H. I wanted to use an 8700 for the desktop, but I couldn’t find one, so I ended up building it around a 9700K + GTX 1060 6GB instead. So if anything, the desktop had a slight advantage.
I started by running 8 games on both systems completely stock. That put the laptop behind by about 14%.
First thing I tried was just a laptop cooler. It dropped temps by a solid 15C+, but at stock the FPS barely moved. So I figured it needed more power and an overclock.
I BIOS flashed the laptop GPU from 75W to 88W, then overclocked it with the cooler. That unlocked higher clocks and lower temps, and it almost matched the desktop, only about 2% behind… but it still wasn’t enough.
So… freezer time.
I removed the laptop back panel to expose the CPU/GPU heatsinks. Starting with the GPU, I made a 3D printed mount to attach a small water block directly to the GPU die, then added plenty of heatsinks around the VRAM and VRM area.
I wanted to do the same thing to the CPU, but in testing the VRM couldn’t be kept under control with little heatsinks alone, it really needed the bigger stock cooler in place. So I had to improvise, I made plastic mounts that went over the stock screws with captive nuts, so I could attach a water block directly to the top of the stock cooler. I wasn’t expecting much, but it actually worked better than expected.
Then I connected the two blocks together with copper pipe and silicone tubing, ran that to a pump, and into 25 litres of glycol at -25C. On first startup, the GPU was at -16C and the CPU was at 8C. Perfect.
Across the 8 games, I was able to add +388 MHz on the GPU, and even without touching the CPU, it was able to hold turbo boost most of the time instead of throttling like it did at stock. In the end, it tied in 3 games and won the other 5.
It also won in Time Spy, but the bigger flex was doing it with about 35% less watts.
Fun experiment, but I think it shows there’s a lot of untapped performance in these things, and thermals are a huge part of what holds them back.
Video here if you want to check it out: https://youtu.be/ou5nvGNrEsc