When I play PC games in my small office, I can feel the heat of the room rise. My gaming desktop is, in a very literal sense, a space heater. Billet Labs has taken that concept to an artistic conclusion… by building a gaming desktop out of a gigantic, Victorian-era radiator. The whole contraption weighs almost 100 kilograms (or 220 pounds). “Big iron” computer hardware was never more literal.
Billet Labs is a UK-based custom cooling shop that supplies copper pipes and blocks for cooling loops as well as bespoke projects. They know their way around big hunks of metal. The plan for this build was to take an antique iron radiator (that’s the thing that heats up your house with water pumped from a boiler, if you were born after 2000 or so) and convert it into a functional, water-cooled gaming PC. There was a secondary goal of preserving the classic look of the cast-iron design, meant to blend into interior decoration.
The system uses copper pipes and a pump to move heat from the components, mounted underneath the radiator, to 18 liters (4.75 gallons) of water in its interior. The pipes themselves accentuate the design, giving the whole thing a definite steampunk look. (I’m sorry for dipping into that empty well, but if anything is steampunk, it’s this!) The PC components are carefully mounted to the curvy iron bottom with the help of 3D scanning and printing.
If you’re wondering about the components, it’s a mini-ITX system with a Ryzen 9800X3D, an RTX 5080, and a 600-watt Flex ATX power supply. It took days of custom building, including a classic lever for a power button, a magnetic rust filter to keep the interior clean, using a blowtorch and a straight-up Acme anvil. It’s a fun watch.
The creator found that the finished system could hold things well within safe temperatures way below the hardware’s throttling mark on a benchmark torture test. After an hour of running the system at its maximum, the interior temperature of that massive supply of water was only 29.25 degrees Celsius (84 in Freedom Units).
You can see a breakdown of the thermals on the Reddit /r/PCBuild post, spotted by VideoCardz.com. The hour-long video is worth a watch if you want to see an expert lovingly create a work of functional art.