Gadgetory

so all this work we've been doing on scrapyard Wars 3 which is started by the way definitely you want to check that out up there it's awesome has gotten me thinking about previous scrapyard Wars that we did in scrapyard Wars - the highlight for me was constructing my own water block with the help of my neighbor who has a C&C and I realized that while we did benchmark the actual cooling performance of my system we never determined if it was cooled so poorly because of the copper coil that I was using to dissipate the heat or because of the neighbor nader 5000 CPU water block so today I'm going to be doing a review of my own water block that I built well with a lot of help in scrapyard Wars - so come along for the ride let's find out just how practical building your own water block can be compared to a pre-done solution the Logitech G 303 features a lightweight design and advanced optical sensor with delta0 technology for precise tracking and RGB lighting check out the link in the video description to learn more so I guess this is how reviews usually start right is taking a look at the product now if you watch scrapyard worse to you'll already know a lot about the construction of this block but if you haven't then I'll give you guys a quick rundown it was cut on a custom made CNC that my neighbor actually uses for his solar-powered scoreboards business that he runs out of his garage and is constructed out of two pieces of metal so there's an aluminum plate at the bottom I had originally intended to use copper so that we wouldn't be mixing metals but due to the ease of working with aluminum we opted for aluminum so there's an aluminum block on the bottom that actually has a cutout for some capacitors that would otherwise interfere with it specifically on this motherboard so these are these are a match made to go together then there's a copper plate on the top and copper was chosen in this case because soldering on copper barbed fittings was going to be a lot easier than tapping out threads for normal barbs so yes we're mixing metals no that's not recommended for the long term even if you have an anti corrosive additive even though that will help quite a bit but it was more about the temporary operation of the thing than anything else anyway so on the inside which I unfortunately can't show you but we should have some footage to pop up here there are actually fins or channels cut into the copper now there's a lot of engineering that goes into the optimal thickness of the base plate compared to where the channels start the optimal thickness of the fins themselves and the direction of the water flow inside we didn't do any of that but what I want to know is how much that actually affects the end result so for comparison we are going to be using an ek supremacy MX the included water block in their predator all-in-one liquid cooler so we'll also be using the rest of the predator so that's a DD C plus I believe pump as well as a dual 120 millimeter radiator and a couple knock to a 10 ff12 fence to get the best apples to apples comparison that we can on our core i7 930 CPU so without further ado let's get this party started assembling the test bench was pretty straightforward we're using a classic style bolt through mounting system than just a couple of thumb nuts over the top to hold it on tight the only real key thing here is don't go too tight because you can actually crack or at least flex your motherboard and also make sure you're using some kind of insulating cover on the heads of the screws that come up through the back of the board we're not using any clamps on the hoses not because I wouldn't recommend doing this in a permanent install but just because we're only testing very temporarily on a test bench one thing I didn't foresee is that I'm going to have to refill the ek predator oops but that shouldn't be too big of a deal because there is a fill port right up here on the top okay hold on a second we interrupt this compelling footage of me installing a water block to bring you this breaking update this just arrived at the door and actually has some relevance to the project we're working on okay this my friends is our first samples of the Linus tech tips special edition nff 12 and nfa 14 fans from Noctua yes my friends they are here all black plastic and orange accents I'm going to install them on the radiator they'll be available for purchase soon I don't know exactly when and we have retailers lined up in the United States Australia UK / Germany and Canada so yeah going to be awesome so got our water cooler installed we got our block installed we got our sexy new fans installed all that's left is to boot this puppy up and make sure that we're able to get into windows where we can do our comparative temperature testing ok so we're back with some results that I think it's fairly safe to say that the bottleneck was either my copper cooling coil or I had a bad mount last time because this is not bad I'm sitting anywhere from 29 to 33 degrees generally speaking I take the second hottest core when I read via real temp so we'll call it 30 degrees idle on the CPU not too shabby but that doesn't really tell us anything about its performance when the going gets tough so we're going to start up our i-264 stress test and find out what happens to our CPU temps men now we have to give it about 10 to 15 minutes to reach equilibrium and then we'll come back and report our load temperatures with our custom block all right so we've got our load temperatures as usual they're bouncing around a fair bit but I think it's safe to say somewhere in the 55 let's call it 56 degree territory it's going to be our load temperature not bad that's actually going to be pretty pretty challenging for our commercial block to beat by a significant margin so let's go ahead and change out the block and see how it does installation of the second block was fairly straightforward I just had to pop off my homemade one swap the other block onto it just using a bucket to catch some water that spilled then I had to go find a back plate since out of the box this block is not compatible with LGA 1366 and from there I was able to use the stock thumb screws and bolts and screw into the back plate and it was pretty much off to the races after topping up my radiator okay so I think we're there idle temperatures very close but we expected that when the chips not kicking out a ton of heat you can't really expect there to be a massive difference from one cooler to another this is the case for water coolers air coolers whatever so we're looking at about 29 degrees on our second hottest core for our chip now let's turn up the heat and see how our commercial block compares to our DIY one alright so we've got our final results and they're actually looking not too bad we only managed to beat our homemade block by about 6 degrees with a commercial block now with that said the gap will continue to widen as the heat output of the processor Rises so as you overclock the homemade block will leg behind significantly not to mention that it's got a bunch of other problems as well so overall the conclusion of my review is this a plus four effort but it's ugly as sin difficult to mount it's going to corrode eventually and when you factor in all the time that I spent building it as much fun as that was it's just not worth it compared to buying a commercial block but that shouldn't surprise anyone since the whole DIY CPU block thing has gone pretty much completely out of fashion over the last five to eight years so if you thought this project was cool maybe check out squarespace.com it's a pretty cool website where you can build your own website at your own URL with your own content on it whatever that happens to be whether it's your you know homemade water block building service or a portfolio for some great photography work that you do or a corporate website with just information about your staff like we have at linus media group dot-com the way it works is you sign up for Squarespace which is free for the first two weeks by the way you get a free trial in there and make sure you like it you build your website it will look great on mobile desktop or whatever else because all of their templates feature responsive design and you just kind of plop things in and move things around in their templates they've got 24/7 tech support via live chat and email and you build a beautiful website that's always working because their plans start at only $8 a month but they are scalable depending on what you need to do and what kind of traffic you need your site to be able to handle so visit squarespace.com linked in the video description and use offer code linus to save 10% on your first purchase so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you know where that button is but if you liked it hit that like button get subscribe leave a comment below telling us what you thought of our little experiment here and if you did enjoy it then consider supporting us you can buy a cool t-shirt like this one change your amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code instructor they're up there or what's that other thing right you can join our community forum and give us a direct monthly contribution get a cool little badge next to your name I think that pretty much wraps it up thanks again for watching it if you're looking for something else to watch now we did the freakin coolest project ever even better than this one where we took a single gaming tower and ran two copies of Star Wars Battlefront off of it at the same time to gamers running discrete copies check that video out we've got it linked up there see you guys next time