After benchmarking, TrashBench was able to remove the parts from the freezer and verify that they were not only still cold (at just 9°C), but in his words, " dryer than a GPU market ." In YouTube comments, he added that he didn't actually expect the experiment to work at all. So why did his test work when others failed? The secret wasn't that the freezer was cold — it's that it was big. Smaller freezers heat up almost instantly under load, causing rapid temperature swings and repeated crossings of the dew point, which happen to be the exact conditions that create condensation.
In contrast, a large chest freezer acts less like an air conditioner and more like a cold reservoir. Hundreds of liters of air pre-cooled to –28 °C can absorb several hundred watts of heat for minutes before warming significantly, thanks to thermal inertia slowing temperature changes, reduced hot air recirculation thanks to open space, more cold wall surface area for passive heat absorption, and lower relative humidity spikes, even with minor air leakage.
The silica gel worked because the environment was stable. In a small freezer, the desiccant is quickly overwhelmed. In a large one, it actually has time to scrub moisture from the circulating air. TrashBench didn't try to make the freezer continuously cool a running PC, which would be an impossible task. He treated it as a temporary thermal battery, spent carefully during the benchmark runs .
TrashBench's conclusion is cheeky in a typically-Australian way: 'Like everything in life, size does matter.' He also notes that this kind of setup only really makes sense if you're planning to push overclocking harder than he did here — and doing that for long would almost certainly overstress the freezer's compressor. The takeaway: size matters, but so do expectations.
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Zak Killian Contributor Zak is a freelance contributor to Tom's Hardware with decades of PC benchmarking experience who has also written for HotHardware and The Tech Report. A modern-day Renaissance man, he may not be an expert on anything, but he knows just a little about nearly everything.
JRStern Shouldn't the freezer be filled with big chunks of ice in poly bags or bottles, to give it sufficient thermal inertia and capacity? Reply
USAFRet JRStern said: Shouldn't the freezer be filled with big chunks of ice in poly bags or bottles, to give it sufficient thermal inertia and capacity? And this will still kill the condenser motor before long. Fridge/freezer is not built for a continual heat source on the inside. Reply
Notton IMO, instead of Silica Gel, he should use Sodium Polyacrylate, which is the stuff in diapers, shampoo, reusable ice packs, gellets/orbeez (gel blaster balls), etc. It's significantly more absorbent than Silica Gel. Reply
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/air-cooling/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/air-cooling/australian-modder-solves-pc-in-a-freezer-conundrum-with-sheer-size-socks-filled-with-silica-gel-power-condensation-conquered-and-minimal-overclocking-gains-on-display-at-minus-28c#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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