Forget water cooling, this guy just cooled an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D gaming CPU by spraying coolant directly onto it, and you need to see it in action

You might be content to cool your CPU with a basic CPU cooler using a heatsink and fan, but master overclocker Roman "Der8auer" Hartung has just demonstrated that you can also cool an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D by spraying coolant directly onto the CPU's bare integrated heatspreader (HIS). Spray cooling is a complex system that requires careful thought about the coolant and apparatus you use, and I don't recommend trying it at home, but it's really cool to watch it in action.

What's more, it works, with Der8auer showing the spray-cooled AMD CPU completing a multi-core run of the gruelling Cinebench R23 benchmark. The end score is below what you'd expect from the same CPU with a traditional cooler in place, which Der8auer, puts down to the CPU probably hitting 95°C at some point during the run, so we're not looking at spray cooling gear barging into our best CPU cooler guide any time soon, but it's an interesting experiment.

Spray cooling is basically a form of phase-change cooling, which in this case means the coolant changes phase from a liquid or mist into a gas when it hits its boiling point, shortly after making contact with the hot CPU. This phase-change process can remove a massive amount of thermal energy, and the idea is that when the gas cools down and becomes a liquid, it can then be recirculated into the system. It's not unlike the phase-change refrigeration units we used to see in the likes of the Asetek Vapochill back in the old days of overclocking, or even the vapor chambers used by some graphics card cooling systems.

As Der8auer explains in the video above, it's a complex system that requires some careful thought. For one, you need a coolant that's up to the job, which means it needs to have a low boiling point, while also not being electrically conductive or flammable. Der8auer uses 3M Novec 7000 in his setup, which ticks all the boxes, including having a low 34°C boiling point. However, he does also point out that it's about to be banned in the EU later this year, so we're not likely to see a big boom in hobbyist spray cooling with Novec any time soon.

It does work, though. The apparatus Der8auer constructs for the experiment gets through around 500ml of coolant in just 15 minutes, but you can see the naked CPU being kept in check by the mist being sprayed onto it, while ice crystals form on the spray nozzles. The CPU cores are shown to be running at 60-70°C with the CPU processing a light workload, where it draws around 50W. It's then shown running through Cinebench and passing the multi-core test.

While I love to see these kinds of extreme cooling experiments, though, I recommend sticking to the tried and tested airflow and liquid cooling designs for your own chip. If you're thinking of upgrading your CPU, check out our guide to buying the best gaming CPU, where we take you through all our favorite chips right now, including the 9800X3D used in this cooling setup.

Have you ever tried using extreme cooling on your CPU? Tell us all about it in our community Discord server.