Gadgetory

everyone I am joined by Rob Taylor from ASA Tech I've known Rob for quite a while he used to be at NZXT yep and now you do the liquid cooling stuff at his tech that's correct so we have an interesting topic those of you who know Paul from Paul's hardware recently was talking about liquid cooler failures and we've talked about it a bit in the past I wanted to talk to rob and walk through what are the different points of failure how frequent or infrequent is failure what are the root causes and I think the idea here is there's generally a stigma in the industry with PC builders of I'm afraid to use a liquid cooler a closed-loop like a cooler yeah because I feel like there are more points of failure than a heat sink yeah there's like a gradient that like if if they're not going to go custom loop why even take the chance on anything leak right right we're not even just leaking but just like failure I'm you so I want to talk about that before getting to that this coverage is brought to you by the EVGA 1080 TI sc2 and NVIDIA destiny to bundle running up through September 4th the 1080i sc2 comes with a synchronous fan control for its dual fans and nine thermal sensors and again includes destiny to learn more at the link in the description below so I don't know how do you want to start with this one so you know we actually have a very good record on failure rates ASA tech as a manufacturer we witnessed less than a quarter of one percent failure rate so that's you know a fraction of 1% and it's actually going down every month for shipping it's continually recent filler rates can happen fit failures can happen for a lot of different reasons but uh the majority tends to be from the loop running at a outside of the spec temperatures might be higher than what it's rated for which could exacerbate and accelerate permeation relation all right you covered that a lot you know we we've done a lot to try to stave off permeation rates but you know you can never get perfect sealed oh yeah permeation open temperature right and so that's that's the the main concern is like permeation is idea of liquid leaving the loop yeah by getting normally I guess permeating the tubes obviously yeah and so I was like what leaves the looky-loos lubrication on what is it a bearing yeah so the way it works and you know there's there's all sorts of dynamics and to what what's considered a failure you know generally we would consider a unit to start failing if it creates noise that's out of outside of our noise spec that's usually the first way that you would you would witness a failure in the process it's like like the rattling gurgling yeah that the air bubble noise after long-term use not not not what you hear when you get a fresh you can start it up and it goes through but something that was working that no longer sounds like it's working really yeah and you know this could be delayed by you know making sure radiators in the correct orientation having the tubes down down so you're not pre-processing more air into the loop but you know a lot of people think that the the unit's died or fail in a similar way that a fan or a hard drive would so you a lot of end users and even IT administrators in big data centers they kind of look at components split up you have your solid-state components and you have your rotating moving bearings convenient components and those would be your infants or hard drives and they like to think that it's liquid coolers as well but we do have like a big thing going for us that really sets us apart from from all those and that's really that we have a solid sealed bearing design so our bearing we use ceramic bearings just like every great bearing product that it exists you know it's not a cheap cheap out plastic bearing or anything so you start with a great bearing you keep it floating in the propylene glycol water mixture propylene glycol acts as a lubricant right and it's completely sealed so not just storage right yeah temperatures absolutely 40 C or something absolutely so you know you're not nothing's happening it's not being really exposed to the elements do not you're not having dust come in you're not having lubricant come out you're not having any sort of interaction with the rest of your environment and this really helps to extend the lifetimes of our bearings over say like a fan bear ride or a hard drive event where you know it's open air so the biggest threat to the bearing is gonna be if you lose liquid in the loop correct right so how do we how do you lose liquid in the loop generally my understanding is you have temperature it depends on the manufacturer of the product but temperature threshold of what like 60 Celsius 60 cells is that's liquid temperature I think there's a misunderstanding for a lot of people where it's not 60 C like the temperature of your CPU correct it's the temperature of the liquid and to give perspective on this in our i7k B Lake coverage we had the i7 up to 90 something Celsius and the liquid was like 32 correct so you've got a lot of room there if the liquid temperature starts going up it might be because of something like the fan on the radiator dying for example you're not cooling it anymore or it might be time to clean out the radiator right depending if your job has dust filters you know dust will act as an insulator and inhibit the heat transfer all right so I guess the question there then is on the liquid side ignoring the fan aspects don't make the fan a liquid side what would cause liquid in any loop to gunk up or to information is mostly in heat it's heat is really it's hard to talk about this without trying to sound overconfident in the product right but the failures generally come out when they run out of stuff and the biggest way that these things go out of spec is when an end-user wants it to run quieter than it should be able to or handle a heat load that that maybe is too great for that size galoot right and so when the heat goes into a loop all sorts of craziness can happen he as everybody knows from high school chemistry is a great catalyst it'll cattle everything it's magic so you know you have corrosion is not being it inhibited as well you had which could build up gases and pressures it could start to separate the propylene glycol from the water which means you're not getting as homogenized a mixture of fluid which could in turn further create more corrosion and gas buildup as well as deforming plastics just because the temperature is higher are you basically boiling it off yeah and all throughout all this you have water permeating through at a much quicker rate than it was ever into so that that's 60 C it sounds kind of innocuous to stay under it at the moment you go over it things things get really bad very quickly you know and and it's not to say that oh you want to over 61c dilute the unit's right you know and and that's part of the difficulty is and the products that we certifies we know 60c is good we've done extensive testing to ensure that 60c is what will create a lasting you ride but the 60 why I've gotten away with I mean three what are the long-term things where we can't quite guarantee we've gotten away with like for example the NZXT Kraken plugs into a state of power yeah I forget that sometimes yeah and the thing is like you notice it pretty quickly because the system doesn't perform well sure so I don't know some of those units we still use I've never had any problems with that absolutely like in a test environment we - first of all anything that those thermal testing never have that problem because yeah you wanted to be consistent but if it's just a cooler that we use to keep the CPU cool we're not doing thermal testing it's fine absolutely I don't know maybe if you like cut it open and pour the liquid into a measuring cup it's also you know you know it's generally fine but it's also you know at what point of its life have you run it at that you know what other what are the other hit points that that product stacked up yeah you know so yeah so I don't know I think you were saying why a quarter of a percent was you're on that right so we're less than a quarter of a percent I think right now we're about point zero zero one five so it's like less than one tip of a percent it was where we're at right now right yeah and so you know these things are pretty reliable and then if you start to talk about failures it's in terms of a fear you know not just the fear of having to deal with an RMA but the fear of are your components of are at risk where I using these coolers it's very very rare for them to be at risk yeah for a catastrophic failure which would mean that other components are affected if there's a blast zone if you will is very very low the like well the only reason I would even happen I guess is two reasons one is a leak and the other one would be like if the pump stops moving liquid and your CPU gets hot yeah in the latter scenario you have t.j.maxx that'll shut things down yeah or it'll just down clock like crazy and it's not at risk and if it does do it either of those things you notice immediately yeah you'll usually I'm not a plastics expert admittedly but generally from what I've seen if if you do hit Tmax on these CPUs modern CPUs you know the pump plastics may get deformed but you're we're not we try to design them in a way that it's somewhat intelligent so even if there's plastic deformation that it's not just like Oh Deb start point of failure this is where all the water is gonna leak across we you know we do everything we can to ensure that we have the highest quality design possible yeah I haven't had any closed loop coolers leak I don't think from any of the manufacturers yeah a sec cool it Coolermaster we've had we've had pumps fail I think two times one was the sight on that was on an FX 9000 series CPU and I think just frankly I think it was like that that's a much Pat you know that's a question of who is that fault right there that's yeah maybe ultimately like that point of failure it's a 120 CLC yeah I'm like a 200 plus watt CPU yeah so you know it's it's just a lot of heat yeah so it's gonna wear faster I think one of the other ones we had fail or fail was because the fan mounted to the radiator failed and I don't know what kind of damage happens to the pump and the cooler yeah but you know it's not cooling I'm working for the fans oh sure sure and then it takes a little while to heat up the right to get to write so I guess one point we can make here is I was talking with you the other day about is with several of the motherboards now actually issues for sure you can set thresholds for when the system shuts down it's like he plugged the pump I think a lot of people don't know about this if you plug the pump in the fan into your headers go into BIOS check the settings for those headers and there should be like a minimum duty cycle warning yeah right we're like if you hit 200 rpm or less or what a coordinate system has been Decker dated so it needs to look into shutting down or yeah and like reducing clock speed yeah and now we've got a lot of a i/o headers to yeah really cool and that's that's something that the mother of yeah that's news just kind of yeah taking up on their own there were always some compatibility issues with the motherboards trying to manage the fan speed but it turns out to be a pump and running right well also you have issues there where if they're looking for a fan speed and they're hitting a pump with an eight pole motor yeah it's not going to be accurate the RPMs wrong and you do some Google foo and you're to find out your number doesn't match what Google's number is and you start to panic yeah yeah cuz it'll say it's like the Thermaltake Engine 27 is a good example that's an air cooler with an eight pull motor oh really yeah I think I'm pretty sure it's an eighth Pole and have you plug it in it'll read 5,000 rpm which like if that thing's spun at 5,000 rpm you lose your freaking is yeah like it would take your hand definitely it's half of that but that's just because you know the motherboards expecting for yeah so yeah I don't know what are your thoughts in general on like if we if there are people who are concerned about as an enthusiast I don't want to buy the kraken whatever the corsair whatever because I'm concerned it'll fail how do you how do you reconcile that versus an airport what's your main argument so I think I have really one of the most unique backgrounds for this type of question so I mean you've known me since I was a NZ economy where I started and it's kind of seven years into the onion and yeah you know that's about right but uh so I started off working at NZXT where we created the cracking series we were a customer of ASA tech and I was the product manager at NZXT to create the Kraken series and so you know NZXT that never really made a liquid cooler before we didn't know what we were getting to into we didn't know what the potential difficulties in trying to do that might be you know what if there were failures what if their catastrophic failures and you know really we kind of just dove in and we created the 140 series of liquid coolers most of the the product wasn't substantially much more different than what was out there but it really there weren't any negative side effects we broke into the industry we had a somewhat unique product and we we didn't see a huge spike in our mas we didn't see a huge installation issues we we didn't have any of these potential GXE briefly happier as fire t40 as well like so there was some experience in their correct correct names and so we were still doing air coolers and then at a certain point NZXT decided all right air coolers are gonna be relegated to a lower end while we try to elevate liquid coolers to a higher end but not just a DIY custom liquid cooling there the goal became how do we provide the Elite liquid cooling experience that you could pull out of a box and stick into your system and so all throughout that there's always constant fear you know we did things and the second generation which was the automatic pump control which hadn't been done before which seemed trivial but when you start playing with fans beads if you start playing with pump speeds and you don't know what the liquid temperature might end up being all throughout these scenarios you know you always you go to bed with a little bit of a gut beer oh yeah because there's a million possible heart exactly exactly and can't test for them all and you know then we made our own firmware and made our own software at the at the point cam got created in every every time every step of the way you're like really excited to do something new but you're always afraid of something happening and largely in part we haven't seen any major failure so you haven't heard a lot about like don't buy this liquid cooler because it's just flat-out bad right you know as much you know fortunately ASA tech gets to make most of the liquid coolers on the market but you know I'm not afraid to say that as a whole we haven't really seen a lot of just like bad eggs yeah and I think that's been that speaks to the the bulletproof style of these these designs the relatively simple there's a little bit of a magic a little bit of science fiction to them if you don't quite know how to break it down and you've done a really good video detailing of how really simple it is pretty straightforward um yeah and so I think when you get an appreciation for that we start to appreciate the design a little bit more you start to understand its limitations a little bit more and you're less likely to to be afraid of these failures and you know you I've been pretty impressed I will say so I never had a liquid cooler before I worked at NZXT and I didn't have one until NZXT started to make on I've been genuinely impressed at at how robust these designs have been and how long they've stood the test of time I know a lot of people still use like old antics yeah Corsair is like way way back that's what I was another good topic is on on time a fact of liquid coolers is that eventually you'll have to replace the unit just sure that they're not impervious to time oh absolutely and that's that's the thing too that I know the PC community especially the DIY building PC community the same kind of thinking goes into oh I don't want an integrated battery on my phone right these are all points of failures but when you start to break it down and if you spend $100 on a liquid cooler that'll get you through five years and then generally most people aren't using them for beyond three to four years yeah usable life of a system expire yeah you know it's always nice to think that you you want to keep all your stuff for a long time and unless it's a nail ahem processor you're probably not doing that so it's it's it comes down to being like how practical is it and you're getting really the best performance the best convenience best reliability with great warranties now five six year warranties on these products from brands you you know and trust and who are improving their own customer service experiences every single day I I don't think there's really any reason out there nowadays to not do liquid cooling I would say there's it would be fair for you know product is for everyone there are probably people who want a system with a long life that they when they're done with it they can shelve it and pull it out later definitely and if you want to pull a system out in six or seven years yeah you probably should have an air cooler in there unless you're okay with replaces up it might turn on I might be okay to get your files off but this is I I guess the point of like transition from liquid to air you can make an argument of if you want this thing to be accessible seven plus years whatever sure sure I think the the discussion era starts to be is all right are you starting to play in a different league right you know there's a lot of stuff where the cutting-edge technology is really just not meant to be a lifetime solution oh there's a reason it's not used in like enterprise exactly there's an liquid coolant is used in enterprise to be clear but there's reason cutting-edge isn't used in that kind of server I think the best way to kind of look at it is the time-tested long-living solution is usually the first one to come about right that's the one that people are less afraid of there's less chance there's less risk no one's gonna get fired for using it because you always blame the product cuz it's been around right exactly exactly you know you can't visit the blog for a solution right on guys everybody uses Ticonderoga so you know when when you do start to want that that quietness though when you go to bed when you do want to pick up that extra 100 to 200 megahertz usually it's much more than I have and you've got a warranty and you didn't have to fill it yourself you don't have to change the fluid every year and you don't have to worry about corrosion inhibitors or any of the stuff and it comes in all the colors you like has infinity mirrors and pre-installed mounting kits it's just it's - it's I think we've done everything we can to make it both easy reliable and cutting edge performance for the end-users and it's just gonna it's still always gonna be that little bit of fear with what it yeah and so you know it takes a level of comfort and it takes a little a level of understanding the product yeah I would say like if someone takes all of your RMA numbers your your points of failure analysis and stuff and tries to counter probably the main counter it's like okay but quarter of a percent or whatever it is for the cooler and then whatever it is for the fan yeah we get we have combined two points of failure but I think like at that point this is personally speaking at that point you should base to be plugging the fan and the pump definitely into a BIOS detected header that can just tell you if there's a problem it is you can't do anything about about the fans really and that's that's a new type of technology that's come about they've an inch further ensure the the performance yeah cool I don't know I think that's pretty good that everything like no we use liquid coolers for most of our test benches personally I put them in place because they're easy to set up we're turned down building every single day yep and air coolers are great we still use air coolers too but also I don't know I have probably six of every NZXT liquid cooler I have five or six of the coarser ones actively in use and we've had maybe two pumps fail or fail and I what the point of failure was that's not so bad out of everything especially considering one of them was from the fan definitely one was from a 220 watt plus CPU absolutely and you know the like I said I think the best thing we could do is just ensure that you have a steady stream of liquid cooler that you could keep trying to kill and hopefully make their way out of the lab yes most of them survived so far so yeah that's it for this one I just want to talk about the ASA Tech's take on liquid cooling reliability so there you all have it make well I got it we're all about reliable thank you rob for joining thanks Steve yeah we'll see you all next time handle a shitload that that maybe is