Gadgetory

while we have the advantage of component exclusivity with Titan V's we want to try and set some records on hardware bot that's gonna be done by liquid cooling at least one of them so we have two of these I bought this one a few days ago we've been working on it for review hours clocks pretty high already but we need to liquid cool it to get rid of that thermal limit and reduce power leakage which will give us more power to use for the core we are also going to be using this one from channel bit speed tripping who loaned this to us very generously and we're gonna put them in a multi GPU set up and see what we can do with things like GPU pi so this video will be dedicated to liquid cooling our torn down card we went through a lot of different options for this and it took us a while to find a good one but I think we did so we're gonna show you that whole process today but before we get into that this coverage is brought to you by ifixit.com and their pro Tech tool kit I fix it as refreshing their Pro Tech tool kit in time for the holidays you can find a link in the description below to the Pro Tech tool kit and other tool kits that I fix it sells we find the Pro Tech and essentials kits to be the most useful for DIY enthusiasts okay so I'm going to show you all the stuff we did including going through what we did for Vega with some contact paper to make sure what we were doing actually made contact with the GPU and the HBM the big concern with liquid cooling this type of device is that the HBM which you can see as these smaller modules flanking the GPU is very fragile the whole all the silicon is very fragile but the HBM especially it's smaller it's out of the parameter so if you have any kind of like torsional or unequal uneven force on the opposing corners you could definitely crack the dies and we don't want to do that because I actually paid for this myself and it was $3,000 another option we had was doing just you could always do just a better air cooler but I really want to do liquid because Pascal and Volta behaved the same with their clocks which is basically the cooler it is the higher the clock if we can get this below 60 C and I'm confident that we can we can increase the clock significantly if we got it below 50 C we can get it even further which we might be with the help of ambient temperature outside if it's benchmarked outside or something when it's zero see that I would definitely get us there so let me show you what we looked at a couple of the options here and I'll just once again plug our gamers necks as mod Matt would just slowly accumulate their whole paste this is available on store that gamers nexus dotnet slash mod Matt if you want to check it out it's grounded so I'm plugged into a strap which is plugged into the mat corner so that grounds the mat and then that plugs into a common ground point in the wall so we are pretty safe right now from damaging this card and when it costs as much it pays to be paranoid so options that we looked at previously for Vega we used an ASA Tech Intel plate like this and then drilled some holes in it and the problem is Vega is 64 by 64 for the mounting hole distance the spacing for these mounting holes so Vega 64 by 64 this one is about 70 by 70 so if you can see on the calipers there we're 70 by 70 for this it is square and that's problem that means we can't use our Vega plate which sucks because it took a whole lot of work to make next thing I remember these these are from I think deep cool to adapt one of their coolers to rise and almost line up with the mounting holes above it like one would line up but not the other looked at other plates we've got stuff like this that's just entirely too big in any direction and the holes don't line up with anything that's a thread river plate so then I remember this this is a be quiet silent loop 280 that they sent us for review previously it wasn't the best performing on our bench but it was good enough and the more important thing than the performance was the mounting plate so these plates I think it's maybe it's aqua computer that makes these alpha cool maybe I don't know Alva cool uses the same kit either way so we can use theirs as well but these kits just separate and you can see if you can see that that was hole they're starting to line up I'm gonna have a hard time lining up for camera but they are more or less there we might come in at a slightly off angle it might not be perfectly ninety degrees long-term I wouldn't like that but if we can get something working I'd be ok with it so that kind of lines up and then this one looks like it lines up almost perfectly to the point where I was like okay so maybe we mount this to the back of the card run the screw through it that way put the nut on this side with a washer and then we be done and you just tape off all the capacitors and components that you might potentially short with these brackets well better option came up and that is to just straight use to be quiet cooler and we take this then we'll just mount it right there so now you're all caught up to where we are we haven't actually tested this yet it hasn't been turned on or anything hasn't even been fully assembled so we were just figuring out what to even do and now it's time to do those things test it and we're gonna start by I think I've pretty much figured out the mounting pressure I want but I'm not positive yet so I think I want the screws to come through the back side of the card I want eleven point five millimeters of threads exposed so there's our eleven point five so we're gonna use that for the I want to use this gauge down here the screw bottom will come up to that point and basically it'll be coming through like this and then we'll stop once right eleven point five this paper it uses two sheets and they chemically react to each other to create the patterns you're seeing these are all different Vega cards and you can actually see on some of them like this one you can see the HBM right there and the core as opposed to one that has an epoxy resin coating like this or this where it's just the HBM and the core kind of homogeneous and NVIDIA uses that epoxy resin coating so we're looking for the same reaction if we do too much pressure you crack the dye or the HBM and you kill a $3,000 card unless you get exceptionally lucky and only crack the dead HBM or disable hbm die okay so we need a sheet of this I think about that size good be enough that'll be a little bit more than enough so what we're gonna do I'm gonna try and slide this in between the plate and the GPU after we start getting it mounted now I can use thermal paste right now I think we want the tubes oriented at the top be easier to work with so we're gonna mount like this and now you might be asking why don't you leave the base plate on there to cool the prm's first of all they don't really need it we can just put a fan on there and it will cool just as well if not better secondly I don't want this plate on here because if this plate is on here I have no access to the components what I want to do is later on I want to be able to short the shunts so that's a shunt right there that five million I see that's a shunt and we have another one down here that's a Shawn this one we think goes to the PCIe you can actually see the traces running down here so we probably don't need to play with that one but if we use liquid metal we can short these two and bypass some of the the power or voltage restrictions and I'm going to talk to builds worried about how to do this properly and what kind of results we should expect but we're going to do that last after just straight liquid cool in it so we removing thermal limits first then we'll remove some of the power elements by shorting those putting the base plate on would make it impossible for me to access those without completely disassembling all the work we're about to do and again these VRMs are plenty strong without the baseplate so we're actually going to remove the pads and not even cool them and then later now that we've done all the thermals for this card already I'll just replace the pads with better ones probably like the thermal grizzly minus eight or whatever they're called pads so we're gonna exploit these as much as we can and push the screw all the way to the inside again it's very easy to cause damage in this process we would advise that you don't do it and I would also advise that we don't do it but we make stuff for video so if it goes horribly wrong we still get contact and it's kind of been practiced at this point anyway done this with a lot of cards now got these on the next step is gonna be figuring out how much tighten them so I need to loosen these enough to get that contact paper in there this has two sides one's rough and one is shiny we want rough to contact rough to trigger the reaction we want white on top of clear just like this there will be a bit of a reaction where I'm handling it at the corners but right so we have that in there now it's time to start tightening these there's no time limit on it or anything I'm going to start by getting the corners I posed in to be tight enough that the paper is not going to move that way I can start handling the card vertically I know we want to be at least 11.5 that's pretty much pretty close okay so that's what it's going to look like when we're done now we just need to figure out if we got it tight enough unfortunately that means unscrewing everything I'm doing all that work which wasn't that much but okay we need to go tighter on that I think so not great contact most the contact was at the top which there's last couple turns I was going all on the bottom which means we were kind of imbalance anyway now I'm gonna reuse this paper you should use new stuff but as long as we see all red at the end then that's all I'm really going for today let's try this again and we'll go to 11.75 this time I think it's perfect but I'm starting to get uneasy from how much force is being applied so we're gonna see if it looks okay it does not need to be a hundred percent red it just needs to be enough that thermal paste will cover the gaps that's getting actually pretty damn good so if I actually tighten it properly to 11.8 I was kind of loose on the bottom we were at like eleven point seven so if we go to eleven point eight on the bottom then we'll be good because you can see this outer edge was already hit once in the last attempt and it's pretty much the same pattern as before you can see one was slightly lower than the other so that's good now we're covering more in the middle covering a bit in the bottom thermal paste will help out with the rest it's still a bit of a gap but if we just make sure they're all eleven point eight I think we'll be in business so we can take that information and prepare for thermal paste and then just make sure they're all tightened I will make a note to not bias towards the top next time as well we have options here I was considering this is her care package from thermal grizzly I was considering conduct a not liquid metal but it is the problem with with conduct or not is it's electrically conductive and I like conductor not a lot and it would be fine to use if I I'd basically have to use electrical tape around these kind all these little ICS so like the resistors and the capacitors makes her nothing shorts and it wouldn't be that bad but we are taking on enough risk as is that I don't need to compound that with with an electrically conductive chemical it would improve performance but this stuff which which one is this this is cryo not cryo not coming in and knock us black tube just kind of you know it's a honey even it's still 12.5 watts per meter Kelvin so I don't really think we need to go with liquid metal it would get us a bit but it's just it's really not worth the risk right now Dan this is just like spilling out so for this one the approach we're taking is manual spread so I'm just gonna cover the whole thing not even to clean the excess because it's just not relevant okay so any excess will squish out and then stuff that's contacting the sides of the mountain or the the package assembly will conduct into this cold plate so we can pick up some extra temperature there because the the cold plate is larger than the silicon so here's what we're gonna do now I'm gonna get the throne paste off my face and my hands and this thing's pretty much ready to go so what I need to do is thermal test just a really quick one just plug the plug the card in turn the computer on check the temperature idle if the temperature aisle starts climbing towards 90 then we shut it down and tighten the screws a bit more to improve the contact if the temperature looks fine I'll put it under like a 30 second load and if it climbs towards 90 we'll shut it down and tighten everything if it doesn't then we're good to go now we don't have HBM sensors but there's a good chance if the GPU is fine the HBM is fine especially with I mean I can physically see down there and I can see the dye is contacting the cold plate so I think we're good I'm actually pretty happy with this one this is a 280 liquid cooler on here so it's very pretty powerful cooler as far as video card cooling goes I almost forgot this is a Titan V that we're working on so it is doing 250 plus watts we're gonna try and push it towards 300 and the cooler should be sufficient I'll probably replace the fans with maglevs or something like that but yeah I need to do some cleanup and test in and I think we're good to go if you liked this coverage and you like the Matt I was using I actually I really I'm very pleased with how it came out you can pre-order it that's stored on cameras Nexus dotnet slash mod Matt we have information there on what it does if you are curious otherwise you can help us out in smaller ways at patreon.com slash gamers Nexus or just subscribe and make sure you watch the follow up content that's just as much of a help as everything else that you were watching as always I'll see you all next time