Gadgetory

we recently tested to see if you could refill the enter max lick tax TR for 240 millimeter cooler this one to just see if it's actually maintainable and serviceable further in its life because this is a high-end cooler that you're putting on a high-end processor so you might be using a workstation like that for four or five years onward at that point is when you start encountering permeation issues tends to be about five years that the liquid begins permeating the tubes enough that you can lose some performance you get air bubbles in the tank where you could suck air through the pump and all of those things create noise create friction and things like that so we refilled it now we're testing to see how the refill worked thermally before that this video is brought to you by thermal grizzly makers of the conductor not liquid metal that we recently used to drop 20 degrees off of our temperatures thermal grizzly also makes traditional thermal compounds we use on top of the IHS like cryo not and hydro not pastes learn more at the link below for the first thing here there was no increase in noise so fortunately we were able to get all the liquid back into the loop and that meant that the pump noises that you hear kind of up until the point that it's fully refilled went away so it's actually the same noise levels as before exactly and that leaves us with just thermal performance we're gonna start with those and get that out of the way right now and then come back and look at what could you do if you were refilling your own loop of a similar build to this one to improve on what we did because that was a learning process so now that we've gone through it there's some clear things that we could then it all benefit from looking at in terms of filling the loop and making sure that it is maintained for a long service life in our prime95 test that 100% fan speeds 4 gigahertz and 1.35 volts the aromatic SelectTech 240 CLC kept our 1950 ex at 49 point six degrees over ambient and that's 40 die that's about one degree lower than the stock unit with the original coolant this is very nearly within usually test variants and we can declare these as functionally equivalent in performance there is no appreciable difference and may even be a slight performance uplift if that the peak temperatures are similarly distanced about one degree and the idle temperatures are about the same refilling the coolant did not hurt performance and may have slightly aided though it's not an appreciable uplift if so blender is next this one is slightly less stressful but does do AVX workloads and it's more reliable in its load level on CPUs and power consumption for this one we're seeing a more confidently measurable difference of about two degrees Celsius between the original 240 and the refilled 240 and we're at forty two point three degrees for the stock test and forty for the refilled test giving us two degrees even with highs similarly distanced and there's some room of course here for just variants between tests we did remount this three times for each test so that gives us an average average all those passes and that helps account for things like thermal paste spread differences though we use a graduated syringe and place a known amount of compound on and then spread it manually so it's pretty consistent but still doing it multiple times helps make sure that any potential differences in how the compound was spread can be accounted for and averaged out that said we're really not that far from test variation from margin of error things like that from sensor reading differences so functionally the same which is really not bad because we weren't going for better here we were going for not worse so we achieved it not worse and technically in blender we saw two degrees improvement which is outside of error a bit so it looks like maybe a slight performance uplift things to know here the coolant we filled this with was more parts distilled water than what was probably in there originally we originally had just stock with unit a propylene glycol mixture that's what pretty much all of these closed-loop coolers come with we don't know the exact mixture of a glycol versus distilled water but it can go up to forty percent it just kind of depends on what the manufacturer is going for if they're trying to store negative forty C they're going to have a higher mixture or higher percentage of glycol so it depends on what they SPECT but we were definitely under whatever was in there and then we did have a light amount of a biocide in there to help with potential corrosion but I wouldn't recommend necessarily using the Coulomb that we use which is just from an ek kit with an additive in the fluid you could probably do something a bit better than what we did but we're not we're not worried about things like corrosion right now because it's just a test of can you refill it not how should you refill it so it wasn't a tutorial but yeah select your coolant carefully if you do a refill and make sure it's got some kind of bio site in it or something to help with potential corrosion concerns because what comes in their stock has those chemicals in there so you'll want to make sure you do as well because I do mix metals with the screw the and the cold plate and things like that next thing here so what could we improve on is probably the next main part so I starting you know we refilled this with just a just a measuring cup basically and started with about two hundred twenty milliliters the cooler itself I believe has two hundred millilitres in it almost exactly so that's about what you'd want to put in in terms of making sure more in making sure the coolant gets in there faster which is what we really could have used when doing this ourselves probably get a brake bleed kit so I realized that after we did the whole refill that for my bike repair I've got a bleed kit and that's a really fat syringe that with four bikes you would fill with the hydraulic fluid and at the end of it there's a rubber tube and that goes into the brakes the tube before the kit I have is a bit too small for what we were doing but if you got one of those and got a rubber stopper or something or just even a rubber stopper then kind of taped it on the what we'll call the fill port on the enter max unit you'd be able to fill it a bit faster and then you could just kind of hold it up in the air inject and let it go down the tubes so that would be faster now we got the job done and it worked fine at the end of the day there's no pump noise it's technically cooler than it was so it worked you can do it faster with with something like that though for the setup another thing we considered but didn't do was filling through the cold plate instead of the the side screw holes so the reason we didn't do that is because the concern of once you fill the whole thing up how much fluid more do we need to fill that bottom chamber where we're gonna be obviously closing it off with the cold blade and then the other concern is with one set of hands making sure you can actually get the cold plate back on without spilling any coolant while holding everything but I think it probably would be easier to fill through the cold plate next time because then you can more easily get all the coolant down the tubes into the radiator and then close it once it's pretty close to fall you know pull the screw off the side and then fill the rest through that port that would probably be a bit easier as well so those would be the suggestions for improving if you wanted to do this to yourself it was again not a tutorial it was a learning process of looking at how easy is it to actually refill this thing if you wanted turns out it's actually not bad even going about it the way we did which is a brute force method not terrible and considering other units on the market are more or less non refillable almost entirely the animatics one definitely is more serviceable for a long up time so that's it for this one it worked pretty well all things considered and you can do it if you wanted to if things start getting heavily permeated down the line which you can basically tell by listening for gurgling noises or listening for the pump making any kind of grinding noise that means there's probably not as much liquid anymore or it's pulling air through the loop so you can subscribe for more as always patreon.com slash gamers Nexus helps out directly or you can go to store that gamers nexus net to pick up a shirt like this one if you'd rather support us through means that aren't patreon right now thank you for watching I'll see you all next time you