Eh… depends what you’re looking at. The heat output of one of AMD’s 3d-cache cpu’s while handling various games would be much more reasonable than that. Especially as you don’t immediately increase power consumption by making performance tweaks or overclocking, the way we used to do to every CPU immediately. Actually you often improve performance now by making tweaks that lower consumption and heat.

And the upper limit on price, performance, size, etc on GPU’s has gotten further and further from the midpoint, so the only model I can think of that is around that level is the 4090. It’s advertised at 450W while everything else from either of the two relevant brands is 355W or less, though I agree the numbers are often made up. Admittedly I’m not really a gamer, but still.

Anyone remember the 295×2? Run a bulldozer/piledriver cpu overclocked as heavily as possible if you’d like a real space heater :D.

Ahh come on, most mid range GPUs are less than 150w, even those that cost more than a semi decent second hand car (rtx 4080 is 320w and even the 4090 OC edition is 450w) aren’t pulling 500w yet. Even so they’ve their own fans. 2 or 3 90/120mm case fans in the right push/pull config is more than enough with some additional ventilation. If you’re water cooling you’re just trading those 4 internal fans on the GPU/CPU for case fans or external ones.

Even the smallest closed loop water cooler should work pretty well – you haven’t moved the heat very far physically, but you still have similar fin area to most coolers and now the heat is to be immediately exhausted out the case – something that isn’t true of even the best big tower air cooler. Of course if you have decent case airflow…

There is also the thermal mass of that fluid to consider – even if it can’t actually cool at a steady state the same power it will handle the spike loads by smoothing them out allowing longer at high boost before thermal throttling kicks in. So for most gamers that is actually better than being able to run continuously at that higher power rating, as most games and many professional tasks are spike loads.

All they needed was to get all the mobo fan headers as inputs (plus some muxing so you can have more fans) and it probably wouldn’t even need an MCU.

There is no network on the board though. It seems to connect over usb. As it’s internal, it seems strange to not just have a pin block for usb, and an rp2040 is massive overkill, both in processing power and component list.

Don’t forget the tiny closed-loop “water cooling” that moves the heat sink ten centimetres further from the CPU, to nobody’s benefit except those who manufacture LEDs to light up the tubes