PC designed to be air cooled at the center of a massive fan — centrifugal force says no

Over on Chinese videosharing platform Bilibili, user 苏打baka uploaded a lengthy video showcasing the building, iteration, and operation of a true fan PC build, by which we mean the entire PC has been built into the center of a giant box fan painted to look like a case fan. This video demo should not be mistaken for an actually-viable Mini PC project, and does not constitute any PC cooling advice.

苏打baka’s name is a combination of the Chinese characters for “soda” and Japanese-Romanized “baka” meaning “fool”, so their name can effectively be translated as “Sodabaka”, “Sodafool”, or “Soda-foolish”, depending on how semantic you feel like being. We’ll use Sodabaka. Besides this project, they also do lots of other PC hardware and gaming-centric content on their Bilibili channel.

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Now, let’s talk a little more about the details of the PC build in question. Sodabaka essentially took an old Intel Sandybridge-era Mini ITX motherboard and tested its operation while attached to a spinning fan. 

The first attempt at this used a smaller CPU heatsink that didn’t adequately cool the system, even while it was spinning, with tests showing the processor reaching 100 degrees Celsius. However, this did function as a general proof of concept that you could make a PC spin violently at the center of a fan and still have it operate without issue.

So, when moving onto the final testing of the fan PC build, Sodabaka instead used an even larger passive air cooler — which may have been a good idea, if the final testing of the PC build didn’t also include steadily ramping up the speed of fan upon which the entire PC spins. While the beefier-cooler version of the fan PC does seemed to work, as far as its principle functionality went, its final testing run ended in disaster.

So, what happened? Did the static buildup short out the PC or something? Fortunately, nothing so mundane. Instead, the fan PC was tested at increasingly higher speeds until the weighty cooler was violently flung from the PC in the last moments of the original video. No wonder Sodabaka hid behind a riot shield for much of the video demo.