Open Source

DIY tap water cooling keeps NVIDIA DGX under 68°C at 95% load

Reddit user achieves 18.77 tok/s on Qwen3.5 with tap water and 80k context

Deep Dive

A Reddit user (/u/OldEffective9726) uses tap water cooling, keeping GPU temperature below 68°C at 95% utilization while running Qwen3.5-122b-a10B at Q6_K precision. The setup uses 110 GB of memory, an 80k context window, and achieves 18.77 tokens/second for continuous vision analysis. The user is unsure how often the water needs changing, but so far it's working fine.

Key Points
  • Tap water cooling kept DGX under 68°C at 95% GPU utilization running Qwen3.5-122b-a10B
  • Achieved 18.77 tokens/second with 110GB memory usage and 80k context window for continuous vision analysis
  • Long-term reliability is unproven; water change frequency and corrosion risk remain open questions

Why It Matters

Low-cost cooling hack could democratize high-performance AI inference on enterprise hardware without expensive data center infrastructure.