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Billet Labs builds a silent Ryzen 7 9800X3D PC with 3 radiators
Billet Labs has built a steampunk-style desktop that looks like it was assembled inside a Victorian power station, and it is trying to cool a Ryzen 7 9800X3D and GeForce RTX 5080 without relying on fans. The British liqu
Image: ixbt.com
Billet Labs has built a steampunk-style desktop that looks like it was assembled inside a Victorian power station, and it is trying to cool a Ryzen 7 9800X3D and GeForce RTX 5080 without relying on fans. The British liquid-cooling specialist paired the high-end gaming parts with a passive “chimney” tower made of three radiators, betting that rising hot air can do the work that spinning blades normally handle.
The result is clever, expensive-looking, and only half practical. In short bursts, the system can cope; push it into demanding games, and the temperatures climb fast enough to trigger throttling, which is hardly a surprise for a platform carrying around 500 W of total heat output.
Three radiators and a giant aluminum base
The cooling stack is built from three radiators sized 40 x 20 cm, 28 x 14 cm, and 24 x 12 cm, arranged from largest to smallest in a tapering tower. That layout is meant to encourage natural convection, with warm air rising through the structure instead of being pushed by fans. The open-frame build also uses an 8 mm aluminum plate as the foundation, effectively turning the entire stand into part of the heatsink.
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Inside the machine are a Gigabyte Aorus Pro B850 motherboard, 32 GB of DDR5 memory, and a 2 TB NVMe drive. The board is pressed tightly against the aluminum base through thick thermal pads, while polished copper tubes and brass fittings connect the loop like something designed for a museum exhibit rather than a gaming desk.
The one fan they did not fully escape
Billet Labs also chose a 600 W Flex ATX power supply, and unlike the rest of the system, it was left unmodified, so its built-in fan is still there. In practice, that fan is expected to spin very slowly or sit idle for much of the time, which is a useful reminder that “silent” hardware often means “as silent as the power delivery allows.”
The project’s most interesting part is not that it exists, but what it proves: passive liquid cooling can handle short loads, yet it struggles once sustained gaming stress enters the chat. Billet Labs says it plans to add a single quiet 120 mm fan at low speed, which is probably the correct answer if the goal is usable silence rather than a beautiful overheating sculpture.
Billet Labs passive cooling project specs
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D
- GPU: GeForce RTX 5080
- Total heat output: about 500 W
- Radiators: 40 x 20 cm, 28 x 14 cm, 24 x 12 cm
- Memory: 32 GB DDR5
- Storage: 2 TB NVMe
- Power supply: 600 W Flex ATX
Computing Editor
Tomas lives in the terminal. He covers chips, laptops, and operating systems with a focus on performance and efficiency. He reads kernel changelogs the way other people read fiction, and he's always on the hunt for the perfect mechanical keyboard switch. If it processes data, Tomas has an opinion on it.
via ixbt.com
