although the basics of a liquid cooler
are pretty simple it's really not that
different from your car radiator the
inner workings of it are somewhat
interesting and we have a lot of those
details for you today
and besides NZXT would not stop sending
me these things until we did one of
these videos on liquid cooler
specifically before we get to the detail
on permeation stators impellers and
chemical composition of the coolant this
video is brought to you by NZ FD and
their Kraken series of liquid coolers
our in-house 3d animation that will be
shown in this video was actually based
off of a Kraken x52 which you can find
in the link in the description below
we've torn apart a lot of liquid coolers
and they're more or less the same when
it comes to implementation of how
they're cooling a CPU but they differ in
terms of execution so that would be the
design and how the cooler actually comes
out of the factory when it's done
because there are a few differences that
are key to note a few cooling products
for an example will relocate the pump to
be somewhere else in the system so on
some of the old Antec dino tron made
products they have the pump located on
the fan near the radiator or attach the
radiator on a lot of these products from
NZ ft from Corsair from EVGA really for
most vendors the pump is located on the
CPU block itself and then a couple folks
like deep cool do some really
interesting stuff where they position
the pump kind of on the block but not
quite for legal reasons so there are a
lot of different executions of the core
function which is to get a pump in the
loop somewhere but the difference is
just how that's pulled off liquid
coolers are mostly made by a few
companies one of them would be ASA tag
to make the NZXT products including the
kraken line the corsair products or some
of them anyway
Eva J products and Thermaltake C LTS
cool it's or quality isn't known for
Corsair some of their products and for
data center cooling Coolermaster makes
their own which is a bit different and
you may be interested to know that Kula
master o am the most of the intel and
and the stock coolers as well including
the air coolers while AC tech OMS many
of the stock liquid coolers and then
there are a couple of smaller companies
that also exist in the space largely
consisting the
appall tech known for enter max and
leopard coolers and Dino Tron known for
some of an tech schoolers we have an
older content piece about who makes your
CLC if you're curious to learn more
about that aspect of it but let's start
by getting a foundational understanding
we can look at the torn down a crack and
x42 that we previously disassembled on
camera and start at the cpu block then
work our way around the basics remain
the same as our air cooler animation
heat from the CPU is conducted through
Tim or solder into the IHS which then
transfers through another layer of Tim
to the cold plate that thermal interface
helps deal with microscopic
imperfections in the service of the IHS
or the cold plate but is otherwise
undesirable it's got worse thermal
conductivity compared to the flanking
copper interfaces these days the most
CLC cold plates are circular and smooth
though there are older models that use
the tree like ringed cold plate and this
is largely a manufacturing and
production improvement in the die
casting process to make those cold
plates because there are only a few cold
plates of pliers just like there are
only a few pump suppliers and so forth
most plates aren't now smooth instead of
that rain design some cold plate
suppliers make the cold plate service
concave to better match the CPU IHS with
GPU cooling plates remaining generally
flat these days again with the most
current generation of enthusiast grades
liquid coolers that like the kraken X 52
that we've modelled for this video those
cold plates are now flat generally the
manufacturing complexity of the concave
indent was not worth the efforts based
on the cochlea spoken to in the industry
and going with a flatter smoother
service generally seems to have an
overall equivalent or superior
performance gain anyway the copper
itself is thin by design with the side
internal to the pump housing terminating
in dense and micro fins the density of
the fins allows for greater surface area
for heat spreading with heat being
whisked away by a straight flow or split
flow liquid design surface area is
critical but so is flow impedance fin
density and fin pitch impact flow rate
which is directly controlled by pump
speed radiator design or heat exchanger
design if you prefer and manufacturer
spec it's up to the manufacturers so
that the folks like NZXT and their
suppliers to work together on a custom
solution for the product the
because a one-size-fits-all model while
deployable doesn't mean it will be the
best performance out of box some coolers
but not all will use a rubber gasket for
split flow circulation this sits between
the housing and the cold plate and
directs liquid down the center channel
split flow minimizes dead zones on cold
plates though straight flow is an
alternative that is also commonly used
as for liquid movement that's pushed
around by an impeller the coolers we've
dismantled lately I'll use an 8 pole
impeller design including the NZXT
kraken series the coarser h100 ib2 and
115 i v2 and the EVGA CLC products as an
aside this also means that your bios
readings of pomp RPM will be incorrect
since bios is expecting a 4-pole fan pwm
but receiving 8 the maximum 12-volt pump
rpm and most enthusiasts grade TLC's
tends to be in the range of 2800 to 3000
rpm plus or minus about 10 percent with
the one standout difference being the
gen 4.5 EVGA GPU cooler at 3600 RPM to
help mitigate the noise impact from a
high RPM at several Coulee and OEM use a
layer of foam padding between the pump
internals and the outer shell our torn
down X 42 it shows a big foam block used
for this aiding in vibration and noise
reduction getting back to the basics
liquid moves up one tube and into the
water tank on the radiator which has a
partition wall down the middle the tube
mounts to the radiator on a barb which
is generally either a three flange or
single flange design the single flange
designs I'll use most commonly in server
and data center use cases with ASA
Tech's leveraging piano wire to pinch
the tube like a clamp this helps sustain
higher pressure in failure events though
three flange Barb's are still rated for
several times the pressure of what would
ever be experienced in an enthusiast
desktop setup anyway so those tend to be
more common for people in our audience
as the warm to liquid from the CPU feeds
into the radiator it travels down
roughly half the channels and to the
other side this is the cooling process
aluminum fins within the radiator core
conduct heat away from the channels then
the radiator fans dissipate that heat
from the fins you may also hear the
phrase heat exchanger or hex it really
means the same thing as radiator when
we're
this particular type of product at the
end of the channel the liquid does a
u-turn and travels back down to return
to the other side it's even one more
path of cooling from the fan and the
heat dens and at this point the liquid
it should be nearing its lowest
temperature that tends to be around 26
to 32 Celsius for the liquid temp the
pending on the chemical composition of
the liquid and the heat of the CPU being
cooled as for the liquid use the density
mix of propylene glycol and distilled
water some manufacturers will use a
higher percentage of one or the other
depending on what their goal is for
example you might be targeting as a
manufacturer support for something like
a negative 40 C environment if that's
the case you would probably run a higher
percentage of propylene glycol or just
glycol in the mix then distilled water
most of the manufacturers tend to target
around negative 20 C for their lowest
technically within spec supported
temperature and that is because of
mostly shipping reasons shipping and
storage they want to be able to support
that that's fine to make sure it doesn't
freeze when you put it on a plane and
ship it but some folks do negative 40 C
targets or greater or just around that
area the mixture of the liquid used for
cooling can be modified by the supplier
to fit that spec and finally we have
tubes which are generally made of either
Fe P or EPDM rubber the more rigid tubes
tend to be Fe T which has excellent
reduction of permeation but it's a lot
less flexible during installation
tinking and FP p2 will result in
cracking the inner PTFE or Teflon
coating which results in permeation and
pore cooling ability it's really a very
bad thing when you crack that inner
coating that inner coating is what makes
FTP good EPDM rubber tubes have the
opposite set of pros and cons they
really won't get damaged if you bend
them all a lot they're more flexible but
it does require a bit of an expensive
R&D process to get the compound to a
point of resisting permeation in a way
that is competitive in the market
finally all these things tend to have
some sort of PCB in them the simpler
ones without all the crackin Stiles
crazy RGB LEDs use a smaller PCB that
really serves one function which is the
host
firmware of the liquid cooler while the
more advanced models that would be again
this or something like the EVGA CLC we
looked at or anything really with RGB
LEDs in it might have some sort of
custom PCB generally that's made by ASA
tech or the supplier though in some
cases they do allow manufacturers to
customize their own PCB as we talked
about in our x42 tear down that PCB is
more or less the brains of the system
and then depending on the manufacturer
depending on the unit you buy it's
possible they have some memory chips on
there as well some sort of storage to
keep the profiles for pump speeds if the
particular cooler allow is a manual
tuning of the pump speed a lot of them
don't that can be stored on the PCB in
some sort of memory depending on which
cool you buy so these things are
actually fairly complex for what they do
considering air coolers are basically a
radiator which is just what a thin stack
is and a fan although they do have some
complexity with the copper heat pipes
it's nothing near what a closed-loop
cooler does now it's not the sense the
most complex thing we look at something
like a GPU of course would be far more
complicated but for something that cools
a CPU or GPU there's a lot going on here
that's why we wanted to make a video
about it because really there's a lot
more under the hood of what's going on
with these things then you might really
realize when first looking at it though
our tear downs do teach quite a bit
primarily don't use a drill to take
apart it liquid cooler and we'll go back
together so that's all for this one
check us out on patreon you go to
patreon.com/scishow and Xanax ourselves
that directly the website gamers next to
scott net will have a full article for
this if you're curious to learn more
thank you for watching subscribe for
more i'll see you all next time
you
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