Gadgetory

a lot of liquid coolers are made by the same couple of companies and today what we're going to do is show you the internals of various closed-loop liquid coolers as they're available on the market so these are mostly coarse air coolers we also have an EVGA cooler but there's one common thread between them and that's a Sutekh the difference is that corsair somewhat recently has gone back to using the other supplier cool it for its h1 15i Platinum cooler so the difference is we're gonna take this apart today see if cool it has any internal changes from what ASA Tech's doing and they probably do and then talk about the differences between really just the couple of actual cooler suppliers that exist on the market and how they relate to the manufacturing brands that you all know before that this video is brought to you by EVGA SZ 390 dark motherboard the Z 390 dark is a flagship motherboard for Intel's unlocked case cue CPUs with tuning done by overclocked engineering team kingpin and 10 to enable higher memory and CPU frequencies the motherboard uses a unique rotated socket design to move EPS 12-volt cables to the right side making cable management easier and also sticks to two DIMM slots to improve memory overclocking stability and Headroom we previously analyzed the BRM in full and found it among the best in class 4 z 390 overclocking and it also got rid of RGB LEDs learn more at the link in the description below we've previously done teardown videos of these coolers but let's just walk through it for all of our newer viewers this is an EVGA c LC 120 and this was a product we didn't recommend buying the CLC 280 or 240 we're fine but this just didn't make any sense either way though the way they're assembled is all the same and the difference is just radiator size in the fan and ultimately the difference really between corsair EVGA NZXT is mostly going to be Fant ice and RGB LEDs and the design of the identity of the cooler but the product itself doesn't really change from product to product in terms of the the Pampas so this is what an ASA tech pump looks like there are different generations there's Gen 4 there's Gen 5 is Gen 4.5 and we have some like this old court aah 1:10 this is what's left of a years old teardown we did but that's the impeller for it's the same impeller design for the ACE attack gen Forge and four point five into five designs and it's just sockets in there it's a magnet and it's got three prongs and it spins that's all there is to it we'll cut to some footage of the Gen six pump design where the impeller is a much larger piece of metal that sits inside of the entire interior of the pump housing so it's a bit higher quality but the real difference is between generations a pretty minor and in terms of thermals the Gen six cooler is actually worse than the Gen 5 pump from ASA tech and that's just because Gen six focused more on permeation so the biggest issue with liquid coolers is with time there is permeation the radio rate of permeation is not as bad with Gen six but it's still there and what happens is the liquid permeates into the tubes ASA tech uses rubberized tubes they're much more flexible there's no interior housing so on the Coolermaster tubes there's actually an interior teflon coating and that would prevent this kind of Bend I'm doing right now if you did this on the coolermaster ones like what's used on the fury X then what would happen is you'd crack that teflon lining inside and the permeation we really bad so they're less flexible but that teflon liner does help a lot with permeation is just the downside is obviously there this there is going to be permeation that's why most of them are rated for five years of use and so the changes to Gen six for permeation the internals of the average ASA tech pump go like this there's the cold plate and it has a bunch of micro fins in it they are very dense we have a video showing how liquid coolers are made where we have some footage and we'll pop that into of the skyvan machine that makes these cold plates so it's copper contact to the CPU or the device the cold the micro fins give you a lot more surface area the water goes through those fins that way and the only limitation is making sure there's not too much flow impedance where if the fins are too close together the liquid actually can't move through it so that would be bad so this is what you end up with there's a set of channels in here too you and this gasket goes on top of it so the gasket goes on top you can see how it lines up right here so this gasket just pops down on top of the cooler and this might not be the exact one for this cooler but it's there all the same idea and this still has the plate on it for this one we pulled this off of but you can see the inner chamber design it's got a piece of foam here this is often for vibration reducing some of that coil or the pump line so the pump vibration noise there's the top of the pump housing which has the outlet and Inlet for the tubes and the electromagnet as well that powers the action of the pump itself and then you'd socket everything in here so that would be the cold plate goes in here there's some corrosion but you get the idea so the cold plate goes in there water goes in one goes through the cold plate comes out the other some assembly elements this isn't on all of the A's tech coolers but it's another foam damper that goes into this part and that's just for vibration reduction once again if I remember correctly NZXT has one as well we've teardown videos of those two when the pumps come in and out of the housing and that's really about it one of the other differences in Gen 5 and Gen 4 is how the pumps are mounted going into the top versus coming off the side that the manufacturer could change this and I'm the PCB designs here so the PCB this is e BGA's but NZXT made its own PCB something that a stack really doesn't allow but they did for Gen 5 with NZXT and this has on it a thermocouple which is right here so that probe is coated in thermal paste and it sits down into the liquid chamber so that you can get a liquid temperature reading if the liquid temperature goes over 60 degrees Celsius then you start having some serious well two problems one of them is serious permeation issues the other one is you start damaging the plastic inside of the pump and so AC Tech's maximum rated temperature 60 degrees liquid temperature not CP temperature much big much much different in what those numbers means so 60 C internally would mean your CP is really roasting where you have high case ambient so that's how those this is an older AC tech design coarser h1 10 you can see the coils for the motor motor itself the PCB and then the impeller down there but impeller for most these designs up until Gen 6 was the same Gen 4.5 was just a faster faster pump speed useful for things like GPU cooling with the EVGA hybrid coolers or what thermal takes flow so that is what they typically look like that's an ASA tech pump more or less that's really all there is to it even the modern versions we have here an H 150 i this was previously disassembled as you can tell pieces of it aren't put back in right now and it has some corrosion on the cold plate but well that we hopefully have already shown some footage will pop some more in but the interior is a bit different otherwise the disassembly process is about the same for all the others and then today we're taking apart the H 115 i Platinum so this is one we're taking apart today and the bottom of it is secured with just Phillips heads that's nice hopefully they're not as tight as the a-stack ones they stack ones are really hard to get out we've historically had to drill at least one of the screws out because they just they get stuck and that's because of how tight they're screwed and out the factory and then not quite sure what these things are right here is three of them one two three it might just be to help align the plate onto the block onto the chamber but we'll see once we take it apart so this one we're going to take the cold plate off first that'll drain it and then we'll go from there all right Wow okay well much easier start than the AC tech ones which isn't necessarily good or bad but these tech ones we'd already be straining right now to get these screws out there also typically torques so we'll speed through this process and then see what's underneath so there's a there's just a small spot where you could force it open with a wedge and that was by design so we pop that off so this liquid is this is just propylene glycol these mixtures and liquid coolers are distilled water and propylene glycol typically it's about 20 percent propylene glycol but they'll go up to 40 percent depending on the storage and usage conditions industrial applications might use a higher percent distilled water is better for thermal capacity and transfer but propylene glycol is used for four reasons like better cold storage temperatures things like that it also has a biocide in it to kill any bacterial growth because water is a great place for that to grow let's empty out the rest of this cooler so here's the cold plate that came out and once again we have a gasket on top this is for directing the flow together or actually it's it's just on the inside of the cold plate if we peel the gasket off which is just rubber you'll see the micro fins so here's the kulit micro fins and here's the a sec one a lot of these pump makers and the closed-loop liquid cooler makers just like anything else they buy a lot of their stuff from elsewhere so we don't know if if cool it's making their own cold plate or if they're just buying it from someone who has a skiving machine or a lot of them but that's what it looks like and same for every other material like the rubber gasket is very likely made by a third party and then just designed by cool it race attack so cool it's got a square it off block the real question is just you know is the contact area any different is the fin pitch or density any different and the fins actually are different so if we get a close-up of this you'll see that the cool it design has a it's trapezoidal so the fins are coming up at an angle over here flattening and then coming back down it's not that different for me Tech is just that ace attacks is flat on either side but otherwise it is the same idea we don't have any tools to measure the thin density unfortunately but but we can see that the shape has changed a bit the cool at ones are also actually they're really not that different ace attack keeping in mind is a bit more square but it's text 31 millimeters or so by roughly 26 millimeters and cool it's about 30 millimeters by roughly 27 millimeters the difference being that the last millimeter of cool it's is shorter but otherwise they're really not that different the squared off change is quite different and then the fins the micro fins themselves are about the same there's also a difference up here so at the top end right now you can see how when it was manufactured it's got this sweep coming down as opposed to the AC tech design where the flow is is guided a bit differently with the chamfered edge all the way down to the bottom that first fin instead of the angle going out to the sides with the flow directed around the micro fins and coming back in alright that's just the mounting mechanism okay alright so there's the flow liquid comes in one of these comes out of the other of course and in doing so this plate is situated here to guide it so there is a yeah this is my broken screwdriver so it looks like it comes in or out here not sure which it hits that this looks like the impeller yeah the impellers in there we can get a closer look at that when we get disassembled the rest so you can see I can actually rotate it a little bit so it's hitting the impeller in there and the liquid is flowing it looks like through this channel and and through here and then through all the micro fins that would be sandwiched right against that so the water is going to flow out of this or or into either way direction I'm not positive on but water goes through here and through the micro fins beneath it and that's your direct path what we need to do is get the impeller out though and this is like a fill cap I think but I'm not sure how to get it off okay it's tape okay really sticky tape holding that in so really sticky tape holding in the top plate which covers two more screws all right well that's one huge screw so that was going into the LED diffuser plate and then this is clipped in we've got foam just a pad for vibration which is consistent with the ASA tech designs under that fancy white PCB for all the LEDs oh yeah you can see the same thing too right here so you can see those two copper wires there they're probably going down to the coils underneath which means as soon as I remove this PCB those wires are gonna snap but that's fine we're not rebuilding this anyway so now we're gonna break some coils some break some copper wire off so before I snap it there's what it looks like so that's where the PCB connects to the coils and we're gonna terminate that connection sadly you can see the wires are soldered into the PCB but the PCB is not all that different from what you'd find in really any other product this pops up there's the impeller okay alright so there's the impeller base and you can see that there's the copper coils will be in there let's compare this so AC tech design that's the same piece right there and then the impeller goes on the other side and this one uses it's got a gasket as you would expect for being a liquid cooling product and then the motors in there the impeller is quite a bit different so here's the coolant impeller and then here's the old ACE attack impeller then we'll show once again briefly the Gen 6 impeller but Gen 6 impeller is pretty similar to cool it choice here whereas Gen 4 Gen 5 very different and this will impact rate of flow and the noise that you get out of the pump too then the rest this is a fill port not sure trying to remove it went wrong so whatever it's fine we're not rebuilding it anyway at this point these little things we're not we didn't figure out what those - just yet and then the tubes come into the housing so it's really pretty simple design but it's not too dissimilar from ASA tax somehow it theoretically doesn't interfere with the patent that ASA tech has on putting a pump inside of a block deep cool bypasses this by having a multi chamber approach other companies bypass it like UK by having the pump built into the radiator instead of into the CPU block but it's it's worse for a lot of other reasons like radiator size gets kind of ballooned so anyway this is this is what the cool it one looks like and you can see just how the difference is more or less boiled down to the impeller choice and some of the flow choices but overall it's the same basic idea some differences and for example where do you put the foam padding to damp the noise and that's just gonna vary product product based on where each one has noise issues there's differences between kulit and ASA tech we also we have some old footage we'll go find and put in here of the an Tek 1250 that used Dino Tron for their supplier appalled texts another popular supplier they have been used by Silverstone in the past for example and coolermaster makes their own we've seen their factories and toured them deep cool mostly makes their own they're all about the same I mean they a lot of these companies will assemble it in-house they might buy an impeller from over there rubber gasket from their tubing from another place and then put it the Killiney of the product but that's what they look like on the inside if you've been curious if you've felt disillusioned that all the liquid coolers are the same don't worry you were pretty close to accurate but there are some important differences so what the companies actually do like what courser does what NZXT EDA is what EVGA does they dictate the design within the parameters of what the generation of pump can do or how much it can deviate from the base spec so what they'll do is design a PCB like this one Corsair had in here whether or not they designed it I'm not sure but typically the manufacturer will design the PCB go to the supplier and say we want to use this PCB and then that will integrate with whatever softer they want to do it'll integrate or control the RGB LEDs that's a huge differentiating factor these days which is why you see it a lot the pump speed to some extent can be dictated by the the manufacturer the brand that puts the name on it so if they want a faster pompe slower pump they can somewhat dictate that within the parameters or the specs of the base product and then the fans are the absolute biggest difference beyond that it's things like tube length tube color cabling cable management and how the product comes together they can also to some extent dictate things like cold plate size so Corsair because of course there was the initial and primary partner for the ASA tech Gen 6 pump of course her did get to control a lot of the Gen 6 design as ASA tech made it and that was a unique advantage for Corsair so of course her chose a very slightly smaller cold plate for their Gen six coolers versus their Gen 5 coolers and that's something that courser was was to our knowledge dictating not ASA tagging that's kind of where they deviate fin pitch fin density to some extent can be dictated by the manufacturer as well so there's a lot of things they can do but it is ultimately made by other people as everything is in this industry for the most part until you get down to base supplier level even though these radiators they're bought from often other companies from suppliers of radiators not from liquid cooling companies so yeah that's it we have another video on how the looking coolers are made if you want to watch that but we'll wrap this one here thank you for watching if you want to pick up the mod mats I was working on they are anti-static mod mats they they're a great build service for protecting the table you're working on and also very water resistant as we've learned regularly from these subscribe for more you can get a store like Erin's access net to pick up one of the mats I'll see you all next time