Canon EOS R5 Overheating? This Watercooling Mod Can Fix That!

The Canon EOS R5 is, by all accounts, a very good camera. It’s a mirrorless full-frame sensor DSLR that is capable of recording 8K video, which is very impressive at this price point. There is only one problem: it overheats after recording about 20 minutes of 8K video and can take up to two hours to cool back down. That’s a massive flaw and one that Canon should have addressed before the EOS R5 ever went into production. But if you already own a Canon EOS R5 and want to be able to record 8K video for longer periods of time, YouTuber Matt of the DIY Perks channel has a guide on how to modify the camera with a watercooling system.

Watercooling is commonly used to cool overclocked processors and GPUs in gaming PCs, but we certainly don’t see it used often (or ever) on cameras. If you’re not familiar with watercooling, you can think of it in the same way as your car’s radiator cooling system. Coolant, which isn’t necessarily water, is pumped through tubes that feed through a heat block on the processor, or whatever is getting hot. That coolant is then pumped through a large heat sink that is cooled with a fan. Because that heat sink has much more surface area than what you could fit onto the processor itself, you can mitigate the heat more efficiently. In the case of the Canon EOS R5, it is the processor that is overheating. This mod adds a small watercooling system that draws heat from the processor to an external radiator.

Before you even consider this mod, you should understand that it isn’t for the faint of heart and that you will absolutely void the warranty. It requires the fabrication of a custom copper heat sink to pull the heat away from the processor to a point where the watercooling heat block can be mounted. Even without the watercooling, that heat sink alone was enough to at least double the recording time of the camera before it overheated. A firmware update is needed to for that to work, as the original firmware simply relied on a timer and not real heat measurements. With an external watercooler radiator, the camera can record in 8K indefinitely. Matt also demonstrates how similar performance can be achieved with a couple of different kinds of fan-cooled heatsinks that fit onto the exterior of the camera’s body. Those fan coolers are likely the best option for most people, as they’re the least obtrusive while still remaining effective.