My homelab workstation — hostname AI-NT-No-Problem — has been running a Ryzen 9 9950X3D and an RTX 5090 in an Antec Performance 1 FT full tower for months. It does local AI inference with llama.cpp, hosts my Coder server for remote development, runs Tailscale, a Cloudflare tunnel, Docker, RustDesk, and whatever else I throw at it. It's the nerve center of the whole operation.
It also sounds like a drone trying to fly away.
The RTX 5090's stock triple-fan cooler is the main offender. Under inference load — four concurrent Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B requests pulling 386W average — those fans spin to nearly 50%. In a room where I'm trying to work, that's unacceptable. So I decided to move everything into an SFF open-frame case with custom hardline water cooling. The question wasn't whether I wanted to do it. It was whether 2×240mm slim radiators could actually handle a 575W-TDP GPU and a 16-core CPU sharing a single loop.
One way to find out: measure everything before, measure everything after, let the data decide.
The Hardware Swap
