Enthusiast builds custom liquid cooling for Steam Machine, drops CPU and GPU temps by 30°C

A Steam Machine owner has built a custom liquid cooling system for the compact gaming console purely out of curiosity. The modification reduced temperatures of the central and graphics processors by 20–30 degrees Celsius, according to the project's author, Stefan Warecka, who shared the work on Reddit.

The Steam Machine is powered by a six-core AMD processor based on the Zen 4 architecture and a custom AMD GPU built on the RDNA 3 architecture with 8 GB of video memory. Warecka began by scanning the console's non-standard motherboard, then designed a combined water block to cool both the CPU and GPU at once. The top of the water block is made of thick acrylic glass, while the base was milled from copper on a CNC machine.

Holes were cut in the top cover of the Steam Machine to route flexible tubing, connecting the water block to compact radiator and pump units mounted on the sides of the chassis. A single fan cools the radiator. Photos of the completed build show the console running Cyberpunk 2077 and 007 First Light.

The author did not release the full assembly video or provide detailed performance figures after the modification. The upgrade brings no significant speed boost, as the CPU and GPU power is capped and the BIOS firmware offers no official overclocking support. Still, according to Warecka, the liquid cooling noticeably improved the thermal performance of the components.