- A Redditor improvised a new cooling solution for their Razer Blade 16
- This was a workaround for a broken heatsink which Razer wanted £2,500 to repair
- The cooler is fashioned from a plastic storage crate, and it's been drawing praise from gamers on Reddit – but be wary about attempting any DIY along these lines
"That's not a laptop cooler… that's a laptop cooler" as the old Crocodile Dundee-inspired quote goes – and in this case, the custom cooling solution being shown off on Reddit really is scarily huge.
Wccftech noticed the story of a Redditor in the UK, the owner of a Razer Blade 16 laptop in which the heatsink broke. That left the laptop lying useless, with a £2,500 (around $3,300 / AU$4,800) bill to replace said heatsink (because the procedure also involved fitting a new motherboard), and unsurprisingly the owner didn't fancy shelling out that much for a repair.
So, they left it for a year before deciding to go the DIY route and fashioning a new cooling solution themselves. And as you can see from the photo above, it's quite something.
The Redditor replaced the copper heatsink and "stuck a liquid cooler on it", with the latter being realized in the form of a crate with pipes running to the gaming notebook.
We're told the laptop couldn't be tested while gaming to check if this left-field liquid cooling is actually good for keeping the Razer Blade 16 motoring while running a game, but the Redditor claims the device has been sat idling just fine for half an hour. They can't test it fully yet as they've forgotten their Windows password, so need to reinstall the OS.
The total cost of the repair? £100 (around $130 / AU$190) using kit bought from Amazon, and of course Razer wanted 25 times that much.
Analysis: chaotic goodness
Obviously, there are some major caveats to bear in mind here, most notably that it requires a good bit of technical knowhow to pull off a repair like this. And the way in which this particular cooler has been implemented looks shaky to say the least, with the giant cooling reservoir fashioned from what appears to be a plastic storage crate, with plugs and wires haphazardly positioned on top of it. As one commenter puts it, this is very much a "chaotic" looking solution – albeit 'chaotic good' in that it has brought the dead gaming laptop back to life.
The crate and overall setup could, of course, be tidied up, and the coolant tubes springing a leak remains a concern; that really would finish off the Razer notebook. And obviously enough, this renders the laptop not portable at all, but better that than being non-functional, I guess.
Overall, it's clearly an eye-opening feat, but I can't stress enough that it's something I would not recommend you try yourself. It'll be interesting to see if we get an update from the Redditor confirming what kind of temperatures the Blade is reporting when playing taxing PC games or when running a stress-test benchmark.
As one fan of the concept on Reddit enthuses: "This is sick as hell especially for the super high-end Blade models that people use as desktops, this is great to keep them temps down."
This story also raises a point about how ridiculous laptop repair costs can get when a relatively insignificant component in terms of the overall bill of materials can necessitate a major change like a motherboard swap.