it's the drag race of the century on the left we've got the apple mac studio and
on the right the apple mac studio but
with a sick custom water cooling setup like other modern chips apple silicon
processors will dynamically scale their clock speeds depending on how much or
how little cooling you throw at them so did apple compromise on horsepower for
looks again or does the mac studio already unlock the full potential of
their fastest socs just how much performance can we squeeze out of
apple's m1 max max it's time to start the test while i start this segway to
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normally the problem that you run into when you try and water cool something
that isn't supposed to be water cooled is simply space for all of your water
cooling bits in the mac studio that's actually not the issue their heatsink
assembly is just friggin massive we can very easily fit one of these alpha cool
radiators in there not a problem what is a problem though is apple's random
proprietary bolt so as you can see these fans right here have a little ribbon
cable with six pins on it i don't know what those
six pins do but with any luck as long as we can just disconnect these then we can
hook up our water cooling everything will be cool it is very fortunate that
we have two of the exact same mac studio we did that so that we could swap the
ssds and well we didn't swap the ssds because again apple propriety
but it does allow us to very easily you know drag race them later one fan lead
two fan leads this turns on i will be very happy oh yay okay it works fine we
can just disconnect the fans and it does not care at all that's actually kind of
concerning i thought there would be a fan error that would come up and be like
your fans don't work like literally every other computer that checks if your
fans are working but uh it doesn't do that which is great for us but also what
the this is the main board for the mac studio and the primary thing that we
have to be concerned about is cooling this apple logo right here there are
memory chips on either side of it but those i'm a bit less concerned about
they don't use excellent like thermal paste on it in the stock configuration i
imagine it's fine the main reason we don't want to have a whole lot of stuff
over top of these guys because it's going to interfere with our radiator the
radiator is going to be in here something like this our fans that will
be attached there and we will have several
millimeters between these fans and these
memory chips right here so our actual water cooling bit needs to go over top
of it and then you know there'll just be a little bit of copper here it's gonna
get nice and cool anyways it'll be totally fine now instead of just totally
reinvent the wheel we're going to be using this m.2 heatsink from bear well
we won't actually be using it this bottom bit is going to get just put in
the trash but this piece of acrylic will make our lives way easier and we don't
have to worry about you know making our own acrylic piece instead this can
attach to a piece of copper that we machine that will fit here and mount to
those holes it goes over it something like that to make our lives even more
easier what we might do this is extra dirty this is our heatsink and it
already has the proper mounting holes and depth for everything in it maybe we
can just get rid of this completely eliminate these fins get rid of these
heat pipes face this off on the tormach and then our lives are a lot easier and
we don't have to worry about you know custom making this piece that apple
already kindly made for us or maybe we'll just completely screw this up and
have to do the whole thing ourselves here's plan number one take a heat gun
point it towards the heatsink and hopefully we can just chisel off all of
these fins failing that uh we have a backup plan
we're gonna wait until it's around like 220 250 something like that and then we
might actually be able to get this off i don't think this is gonna work but if it
does that would be fantastic yeah i'm just mangling the fins well
plan b we say this every time we've cut aluminum but i'm just gonna go over it
again the dust is very bad to breathe in so make sure you have a mask a good face
shield in case something explodes no you don't want that going in your face also
make sure that you have an aluminum cutting disc it has lubricating stuff in
here to help prevent the gumming up and exploding but not entirely yeah it just
uh kind of sucks to do
and definitely hearing protection
this is pretty brutal the angle grinding was just making a mess so instead we're
just gonna simply get it off exactly like that
i'm pretty sure tynan just sharpened this chisel
my sincerest apologies tim cook next thing we have to do these copper heat
pipes that are right here they are very soldered down they are not coming off
instead we're going to go over to the tormach and just face off this area
right here so we're able to attach a water block to it there's almost definitely a better way to do this but
uh i'm youtuber not a machinist so this is what i've come up with we have this
nice little plate from saunders machine works that has a bunch of stuff clamped
down to it this is going to go into our vise because there's not enough space
anywhere for this just mount to our table and this is going to be kind of
scary although it should be totally fine
if the tool just decides to do anything that it shouldn't it's going to hit
something all right i have checked and double
checked everything i believe we are good to go
as long as this doesn't decide to do something random
our part on the tormach turned out great although we've actually totally changed
the plan having everything internal was going to technically work in order to
have these fans clear the water block that was going to be on here it would
have to be smaller than the one that i put in the red camera i was just very
concerned that it would not cool as well as the excellent solution that apple has
from the factory so we have completely redone our plan this is what's going to
happen see this wonderful Corsair block right here bam turns out Threadripper
mounting holes almost line up perfectly with the ones that apple has from the
factory so a CPU taken care of now you might be thinking with this big old CPU
block where's all your stuff going to go right on the top radiator pump amazing
it is going to be without a doubt the coolest mac studio in existence now one
of our biggest problems was RGB and fans
12 volts we can very easily get from right here off the power supply all
other voltages not so simple now it is
very crucial on something like this to have just a bunch of RGB because i want
to just annoy apple people as much as possible which means loads of RGB and
that is quite difficult so we went with Corsair stuff because they are the only
ones that have RGB software for macOS
this controller is going to work really really well because i'm able to have it
in hardware mode so it just runs all of our RGB off of it and we have a
temperature probe in our loop that goes into our controller here that controls
our fan and pump speeds so we don't have to worry about you know grabbing it off
of this and then hopefully everything just works really really well one more
thing though uh this is gonna be pretty stupid for five volts we will be using
this buck converter 12 volts in right here adjust this potentiometer until 5
volts comes out of there we are happy yeah i guess at this point we have uh
not many hours to get this done let's do it
there we go there's your cold plate
and now we're left with this which will hold our main board to well it'll just
hold it getting this thing in here was not very simple we are about two and a
half millimeters away from the full travel of the y-axis of this machine
it's really close but we should be able to do it
look at that so precise everything's roughly in place at the
moment including our nice tubes so the main board can go in and out we don't
have though is power going to our RGB and fan controller we know that we're
going to be getting it off of the power supply right here we do not know which
way this voltage goes fortunately apple doesn't tell us the polarity of this
power supply so i have attached some leads now it's either going to just say
plus 12 volts or minus 12 volts on here and then we know which way to wire all
of our stuff yeah don't do this at home please just don't so not only does this
tell us that we have minus 12 volts right now also lets us know that we have
12 volts always on a lot of power supplies you need to like press the
power button on the motherboard before it starts giving you 12 volts this one
just gives it to you right away for some reason oh wait it's dropping maybe that
was just it gave 12 volts while it was charging um i don't know doesn't matter
that is good to know though because i was kind of concerned about the mac being off and our fans and pumps still
just running indefinitely getting everything to fit in this mac studio has
been quite a challenge by getting everything to fit inside of it i mean on
top even our Corsair controller it would not fit inside it technically could it
was going to be very difficult so instead we have denuded it it's going on
the top we've redone our radiator mount it's this nice black 3d printed piece
now that has space for our RGB hub down below because the spirit of this is
really you know pcifying the mac pro i have used juego lever nuts to add
expandability to this loop in the future and as you can see our buck converters
right down in there attach it to a power supply it now spits out five volts one
more thing if you look really closely in here we have two 40 millimeter Noctua
fans and the rest of the holes all blocked off this is for the power supply
actually so it draws air in from the bottom shoots it at the back and
hopefully your power supply does not overheat probably be fine without it but
this is just some good insurance i've added a little bit of vhb tape to the
bottom of the pump this isn't to hold it down the screws are going to do that just fine is to try and stop vibrations
going from the pump onto this top plate here and just turning into a little drum
one thing i feel is under utilized in pc making is hot glue we have a connector
right here for our Noctua fans that just keeps on wanting to come off it's gonna
stay on now as you can see Corsair clearly knows this they have a bunch of
hot glue on here from the factory for string relief here's the power for our
fan hub and RGB controller just simply probed it while it was connected into
one of these figured out what's 5 volt ground
you get it needs to go in which means this molex connector needs to leave
getting a radiator mount on with the Corsair controller underneath it is not
very simple we've pulled all of the excess wires up through the top so we
can hopefully get it down we'll get it bolted on and then we can stuff all of
this back down in and hopefully it'll be fine there we go we've got our little
fan shroud piece that's just printing this easier and way faster on the inside
we're using alphacool's server grade fittings and tubing it's just way better
at not coming out and we really given how much this is going to be stuffed
inside do not want a tube popping off the tubing runs for this are a bit on
the unfortunate side if we were smart we would have taken our time and planned it
out so that this hole was directly underneath this and you could just have
a little tube there or a little run we didn't do that because we were rushing
instead we have a run that goes like that another one that goes back and
around and the most biggest dumbest of all look at how close these are there's
no way to get a tube in here so the solution the big ol loop-de-loop it's
kind of gross i don't love it but at the same time it's gonna be able to show off our nice fire orange well this is why
you leak test i figured it was fine but if we have a look at the needle it's
dropping quite rapidly i really hope that the leak is somewhere up here
because if it's on the inside putting in a bunch of the io down here huge pain in
the air and uh looks like i might need to do it all over again found where it's
leaking seems like it's the other side of this right here the through holes are
honestly pretty trash so i'm not super surprised you do things out of order for
filming sake i'm blaming this on you brandon for the record it's not my fault
so i'm going to use the good old soapy water trick i think this might be our
spot i just have soaked water all over the place problem is just this
connection right here look at that not moving at all leak tested working great
gotta stitch it all back together and we should be good to go we're doing it
smarter this time i want to make sure that everything up here works before we
stitch it all back together and i have to take it all back apart again because
that would just be terrible we have mr nick heavy he's going to fill it up i
have a bench power supply that's going to the leads that will be attached to
the mac studio's power supply and this is going to be beautiful this is not
sketchy at all
how did that happen the tube screwed us oh no
we're professionals here i spilled water before
oh oh that looks good that RGB is working
this RGB is working pump's working van's running are these fans we have RGB
internally
thank you that's what i was going for
let's stitch it back together i think we've done it she's absolutely stogged
like you can see right here that doesn't want to go all the way in because the
power leads the whole thing he just kind of was like
get it back but it's so stupid i absolutely love it i really hope it
works oh i really don't want to take this thing apart again but it's kind of
looking like i might it's below 60 degrees and it's very similar to the
air-cooled version which is not what i was hoping for but i was just kind of
like ah maybe they have a bad ihs
spreader or something like that and that's the bottleneck but no we put the
dye in there and it just very slowly meanders way through there's definitely
a kink in there so now i get to just to spend the next hour taking it apart and
reassembling it the benefit of this is that uh the fire orange looks more like
tang so i think we're just gonna get rid of that otherwise hopefully it all works
45 minutes later whole thing's been disassembled and reassembled that might
be a record i don't know if anyone's ever done it that fast before for the
coolant we're going to go with the go chiller premix has a bunch of carbon
particles in it apparently it reduces your temps a bit mostly it just looks
really freaking cool so we're going to use that instead of the tang juice oh
there we go it looks freaking sick
let's start here cinebench we're looking for it to be
under 60 degrees that's about as hot as the other one gets looking at what 55
54. yeah the hottest that i'm seeing is 55 degrees
seems like we're not getting as good of cooling performance as i would have
liked kind of like guess before it probably has to do with apple's ihs just
not being able to get the heat away fast enough but at the same time this thing's
really well cooled so glad i bought two of these yeah otherwise how would we do
an apples to apples comparison ah you guys did a surprisingly professional
job of this is this our new standard of quality now i guess so there's a whole
uh Corsair RGB and fan hub in here that's controlling everything based off
of like the temperature of the water uh
hello okay we're good
yeah i'm sorry holy crap we dropped the temps by 30
degrees not only is it 30 degrees lower
but this fan is barely spinning i mean i guess that's what happens when you put a
giant water cooling radiator on like how many watts is this chip even like 45
watts and it's near silent okay here we go
let's go let's go water cooled back come on i don't want it to do better that's
fair 12056 12016
40 points did we think there was going to be a performance uplift i mean it's
not exactly a macbook air it's not known to thermal throttle right apparently the
m1's like turbo boost is really terrible oh but also it doesn't matter because
they sip power and are well cooled we did a thing you have to admit it looks
great no one else has a mac studio that looks like this this is hot rotted out i
love it it's 20 degrees cooler and it looks like that i think we can call it a
win here we go 12 104
i got another 48 points 12 0 28 so both times the water water-cooled
one was technically faster the best kind
of faster just like this is the best segue to our sponsor
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shipping if you guys enjoyed this video you might also enjoy the one where we
water cooled a red camera that was less pointless