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Corsair Hydro X: Water Cooling by Former EK Engineers | Computex 2019

2019-05-28
Cerreta Corsair suite at Computex 2019 and we finally have a look at the hydra x line course there's been teasing this for over a year now probably like eighteen months there's CPU blocks gb blocks at pump res combo and then tubes fittings all that stuff so we have prices we have some interesting specs specifications on the fin pitch for example that we'll be going through today along with material choice and the resistance to coolants so that's our topic for today before that this video is brought to you by the gigabyte z 390 ARS master motherboard which comes equipped with one of the more powerful z3 90 V RMS for heavier overclocks on the new 9th gen Intel CPUs the ARS master is also one of the few motherboards with a real heatsink this generation featuring a mix of high surface area fins and looks oriented hover blocks oh and it's also got updated our DV illumination learn more at the link below so behind me is the Corsair hydraulic series in full we have a lot of b-roll of this stuff that will will cut to but it's pretty simple Corsair is targeting I guess we've we've heard two different stories on what audience is being targeted and one of them is going for the the user who is a bit more scared of getting into open loop and not offering you a million SKUs that could potentially make it difficult to choose the parts you need for your build so that's that's audience number one audience number two I guess will we're still trying to figure out there's it's not like there's a lack of performance focus but to be fair there's also not a lot you can do in performance with water cooling it's just like don't don't corrode stuff and don't leak that's kind of the main goals and beyond that you're talking single-digit degree differences which are often within my margin of error but let's go through the the product name prices then we'll get into the interesting specs that we got here at the show so CB blocks there's a XE 7 and the XC 9 there are five dollars apart at $75 or $80 to the XC 9 vaccine 9 is reserved for a EDT parts like thread ripper or the Intel HD T CPUs XC 7 for everything else the 9 has an aluminum pump cap and the 7 has a plastic pump cap there are 16 RGB LEDs on the underside of the pump that point down at the motherboard so you got a bit of an under glow kind of like the car neons approach there's paste pre-applied it's done in a hexagonal pattern which I guess looks cool I'm told that it's for maybe performance but frankly it just it looks cool and that's about it so it's custom silkscreen for that they pre apply the pace the GPU side of things it's XG 7 for the block there's no extra nine present leave actually 7 is $150 to the block and it always has a backplate so this is where Corsairs trying to do as I said a simpler approach for customers who've never actually done water cooling and might be a bit intimidated by it so the idea is all the stuffs included now that doesn't mean you pay a bit more than if you cut some of those features so kind of tea whether you want that or not but the back plates there it's got pre-cut pads pre-installed on the GPU which is around the GPU block so you have all the pads pre-installed there are some pads missing from the efi cold plate or the block for example now whether or not those really will become relevant you'd have to look at in testing so it doesn't have every single pad that nvidia uses on the efi card so it's not a one-to-one match which does mean that you you know as a customer you might be kind of looking at it like well where's the rest of the pads for the components and video eskalene but we'll look at that later for the most part they are cooling the MOSFETs on the core the core and vmm so you're you're hitting the most the really important stuff we'll just have to look beyond that for everything else so XG 7 pick up patch be installed pump res has a temp monitor in an end cap fitting it is a thermistor this is something we've seen in pretty much every end cap fitting for the four it's it's not an inline temp monitor which do I really want to see because most the ones out there suck and of course air with the focus on not leaking would be a a good candidate for making one of those there's a flow indicator on the GPU it's not a flow monitor but or measurement but an indicator and then the main price is I think I went through a few of them the xd5 pump press combo is $155 actually seven $350 plus or minus bit depending on which card you're cooling like the Strix for example there's Fe and then the radiators are well plenty you can see behind me there's skinny one 20s up to four 20s they're soft 2d tubing is you've got 14 and 12 for outer for hard or four hard-line then for soft you have 12 and 10 for the diameters there's ASC let's talk about the specs that I got in a side room here so the GPU Finn pitch 0.25 millimeters and this is done by skiving we have shots of skiving machines from our factory tours previously actually had a Coolermaster factory skiving it's a really slow process but it's still faster than CN seen and I was skiving you can do something like a cold plate sorry six of them at the time that you'd see on C a cold plate but the fin pitch is a big big impact or to how long that takes so it's really loud in here 0.25 millimeter fin pitch low for reference EK is about 0.6 a lot of the CLC's start getting to area where they're so dense on the fin pitch that like 0.2 0.1 for something like that that you actually end up having a bit of impedance on the pump and for the flow rate you're looking at something in the range of 35 to 60 litres per minute average for a closed-loop liquid cooler at the high end 60 for a max rpm and for the GPU on the Corsair unit today it's about 50 litres per minute so it's it's it's fine it's in there we do need to do some testing obviously but we have been told and haven't validated but we've been told by some pretty good engineers formerly from ek who now work at Corsair that the temperature difference is in the range of about two degrees versus GPU blocks from ek or about 1.5 two degrees for the CPU blocks so it's really small differences and then the approach here is high quantity lower price and semi modular so the cold plate can be lifted out we have shot to that as well of the GPU that makes it more modular so can you place into other gb of locks the co blade doesn't presently cover the entirety one or two die which is a shortcoming but should be good enough in theory at least what we're told and we'll look more into that later but micro fins can be pulled out and then just placed into any GP block depending on the demand which is actually really clever approach to reducing the the total I guess the issues with production runs on water coin parts because you can just target whatever's popular at the time there are two different approaches to nickel plating on these there's chemical nickel plating on the cold plate for a thinner plating so it doesn't have quite as much thickness once you actually apply the nickel plate to the copper so that doesn't create a bunch of impedance issues by effectively increasing the thickness of the fins and I think that covers mo the basics now there's some more information to on coolant and what we're told is and need to validate this we have the ability to though and I've collected enough information but what we're told is that apparently the main concern from Corsair whether it's a manufactured concern or a legitimate one we'll look into is that the coolant on the market a lot of it will slowly like crack the acrylic and blocks and so Corsairs using a different material it's like a transparent nylon I guess instead of just a straight acrylic so how much that matters not sure today but it's an interesting marketing point and one that we'll until when we get home I think that covers it for the Corsair open-loop components thank you for watching as always subscribe for more you can go to stored on cameras X's net help us out directly or patreon.com stops cameras axis subscribe for more coverage at the show sorry about the noise here I'll see you all next time
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