Ice machine mod drops RTX 3060 temperatures hard

ice machine – A YouTuber turned a countertop ice maker into a custom cooling loop for an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060, and the temperature numbers in Cyberpunk 2077 fell dramatically—if you can look past the condensation risks and the fact that it’s built like a one-off experime

On paper, a countertop ice machine has nothing to do with gaming PCs. In practice, one YouTuber has turned that mismatch into a working cooling setup.

In a new video, TrashBench takes an ice maker and builds a custom cooling arrangement around an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060. The surprising part isn’t just that it runs—it’s that the temperature drops in real games are far larger than you’d expect from something designed to chill drinks, not GPU heat.

The idea didn’t come from nowhere. TrashBench says the project was inspired by another creator, Mr. Yeester, who used an ice machine to cool a CPU. But rather than copying the same approach. TrashBench goes after a different target: cooling a graphics card directly with the machine. instead of “simply dumping ice into a loop.”.

The baseline was already steady. With the RTX 3060 in its original air-cooled state, Cyberpunk 2077 had it hovering around 60°C, while the GPU hot spot sat near 75°C. Once the modified ice-machine setup was in place and working properly, those numbers dropped sharply.

In the same game, the GPU stayed around 22 to 23°C, and the hot spot fell to roughly 34°C.

That’s the headline takeaway: yes, an ice machine can cool an RTX-class GPU—and in this case it did so dramatically.

But getting there required serious changes, and not the kind you can casually recommend to anyone who wants a stable gaming rig.

A normal countertop ice machine isn’t built for a constant electronics-scale heat load. Its cycle makes ice, shuts the compressor off, refills with water, and repeats. That rhythm is fine when your goal is freezing water for drinks. It wasn’t enough to keep the water cold under the RTX 3060’s ongoing output.

So TrashBench modified the machine’s behavior. He used an external thermostat—something he said he normally uses for a beer fridge—to keep the compressor running continuously. He also had to work around the placement of the machine’s evaporator so the cooling section could actually chill the water being used in the loop.

The setup worked, and the results show it.

Still, the video makes the limitations impossible to miss. Once the water temperature falls below ambient conditions, condensation becomes a real problem, with moisture collecting around the hardware. And beyond that. the overall build is messy enough that it reads like a proof-of-concept. not a pathway to a practical “upgrade.”.

Yes, an ice machine can cool an RTX 3060 dramatically in a gaming scenario. But between condensation risk, the complex modifications, and the obvious safety concerns, this lands in the “fun experiment” category—not the “follow this for your PC build” category.

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