Heineken’s beer cooling PC build is the right kind of crazy
A new collaboration between Heineken and Le Pub has unleashed one of the weirdest, but most logical PC builds, and we love it.
Innovation requires us to do things we wouldn’t expect. Heineken retrofitting a fridge into a PC case is bizarre, but this latest PC build appears to have completed the task in style.
The fridge-PC hybrid has been dubbed the TH3 G4M1NG FR1DG3 and isn’t actually available for sale. It is, however, part of Heineken’s current advertisements around different situations to drink beer in.
The PC is crammed into a Heineken 0.0 beer fridge and still utilizes its cooling nature to help cool the components. According to their stats, the fridge can maintain a temperature of 3-6 degrees Celsius (37.4-42.8F) while under full load, and a frosty 0-2 degrees Celsius while idle.
Weird Heineken fridge PC cools your beers during your gaming sessions
However, getting modern components into a fridge of its size is not easy, and it appears the components aren’t as cool as you’d expect. Presumably down to size constraints, the Heineken PC has an Nvidia GTX 1650, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, and an AMD Ryzen 7 5700G. It’s a worthy budget build, but also considerably easier to cool than say, an RTX 4070 and current lineup of Ryzen CPUs.
Even with a fridge, it could be hard to maintain those cool beer temperatures with modern cooling sensibilities. AMD reports that it’s normal for temperatures to hit 95 degrees Celsius.
We also reached out to the people behind Heineken’s beer-cooling PC to get the beer from the tap, so to speak.
New PC cools your beers and has had a lot of thought put into it
Speaking to Andrey Tyukavkin, Global Executive Creative Director, we were curious how they landed on the specs for the PC and whether the size was a factor:
“Yes, the first challenge was definitely the limited space of a Heineken standard bar fridge. But, most importantly, we needed to solve the challenges regarding the thermal performance of the fridge.
“Therefore, we realized the whole thermal budget for the PC was 150-300W max. Having said that in 2023 there are plenty of options that are powerful yet their total thermal signature is well below that.
“The hottest part is the GPU and both the GTX 1650 and the RTX 3050 worked for what we wanted.”
To get the PC to actually fit, Tykavkin’s team “reshuffled the fridge electronics”. In fact, the team, if they ever took another crack at the concept, would want some small improvements.
In the case of actually cooling the beers – and the PC – Tykavkin said:
“Having a solid back wall on the fridge and making the evaporator bigger could help the speed at which both beers and PC are cooled – allowing for hotter, better specs. It can still be improved without replacing the fridge entirely.”
Could there be a future for fridge PCs?
However, when we asked what they’d bring to the table in a theoretically updated version of the Heineken PC, he added:
“A number of them come to mind: better wall insulation, a bigger evaporator (that alchemic thingy that blows cold air) – mostly to pump the heat outside faster while also insulating the cold chamber better.”
It’s certainly not the weirdest PC build we’ve ever seen, but it is one of the most practical. The fridge effectively acts as a secondary cooler for the overall system and is a concept we’d love to see elsewhere.
However, the Heineken fridge PC might be one of a kind for the time being. When asked if the concept could be seen outside of the promotion in the future, Tykavkin said:
“In theory, if you use really improved and powerful refrigeration, it could actually work well for extracting huge amounts of heat from the machine, and of course, it just looks dope – you have beers cooling right inside your PC!
“It will probably remain a niche solution for PC builders who don’t like standard cases, but this one is definitely the coolest.”