maybe you missed it but several months ago ASUS released the best RTX 490 ever
the Rog Matrix this represents the Pinnacle of ASUS's manufacturing
capabilities with higher clock speeds than any other 490 liquid metal on the
GPU Die For maximum cooling performance and a 360 mm radiator all-in-one water
cooler built right in the only problem
it costs $3,200 that is twice the price of the
founders Edition card Republic of Gamers more like Republic of out of touch I bet
you could take that $1600 premium and put it towards building your own custom
loop I mean you could probably even pay yourself a fair wage for the research
and building the darn thing oh you're talking to me yeah I bet
you could buy a regular RTX 490 and all
of that stuff and still have cash to spare uh okay but um where will I get
the money well
here life can suck sometimes but with the right attitude and tools you can fix
it I'm talking about this poor laptop fix what you can this back to school
season with our sponsor iFixit you may fail your tests but don't fail your
laptop on sale now at ifixit.com let's lay out some ground rules Adam's budget
has to go towards a 4090 of his choosing planning and purchasing all components
for a water cooling Loop and paying himself to assemble it he's going to be
paid the median wage of a Geek Squad repair agent which according to glass
door is $21.63 per hour ready go I quickly got
to researching using resources from J2 cents and Reddit and I figured I have
enough budget that I can Splurge big time so not only am I going to cool my
GPU I'm also going to cool my CPU and get an Ultra Premium Water block for
both of them and to deal with all that heat I'm hoping a thick 400 0 mm rad
will do the trick I spent 90 minutes and a lot of money during my shopping spree
and I think I did a pretty good job but let's see what lonus thinks all right
let me see there's definitely some stuff
that stands out immediately as not a great value
however when you look at what we're comparing it to I guess I can forgive it
before we get into those details though I want to see if he outright missed
anything that's going to cost him a penalty once he's assembling the system
cooling blocks for a CPU and GPU check check a pump and Reservoir to make it
simpler to fill the loop and move fluid around a big radiator with some fans to
go on it I don't know if these are the ones I would have chosen but hey at least he's got them along with a high
performance phase change thermal pad from LTT Store and some tubing and some
fittings both of which raise a couple of questions about his research for me for
starters this is his case and while the fantex nv7 is both reasonably priced and
attractive what it isn't is is small and
Adam has only purchased 9.8 ft of this
XT softline mesh sleeved tubing from Corsair it should cover the distance
between all of his plummed up components but when you go with a thin walled
tubing like this one the loop layout
matters a lot if you want to avoid Kinks
and this length doesn't leave him a ton of room for error as for his fittings
it's never a bad idea to buy ones that are explicitly compatible with the
tubing that you bought from the exact same vender and these XF series
compressions look pretty nice with recessed O-rings and a pretty pleasing
overall finish the only thing I'd critique here is that he could have
saved probably 20 or $30 by going with fittings from someone like bixy he also
paid a butt ton of money for this 4090 water block probably about double what I
would have spent but who knows maybe it's oh okay it's very very pretty and In
fairness to Adam even these exess purchases above and beyond buying an RTX
490 have put him nowhere near the cost of the Rog Matrix Platinum I mean he's
still got 7 hours of budget left to pay
himself to build it maybe he shouldn't have sprung for a
$200 CPU block overall though not
exactly how I would have done it these Quantum surface radiators from Ek have a
very dense fin Arrangement and I see nothing to indicate that these thermal
take fans have particularly High static pressure to take advantage vage of that
but it should still offer good performance for both his GPU and his CPU
and I don't see any other things here that promised to be a major showstopper
and he passed one of the biggest stumbling blocks when he bought a block
that was explicitly compatible with his exact model of
GPU okay go go go go go
go so now we're going to mount our water block I got this cool water block from
Ek uh I bought it cuz it looked cool I could have gotten something that was
like literally half the price and still would have been a great performant water
block but I was so confident about my budget that I felt that we could do this
anyways we got our PTM
7950 you know there is a video on LTT
store.com of the best way to put this
stuff on and I have not watched it a
water block on um so here is our tough
gaming 4090 while the Rog Matrix
Platinum is based on the stricks platform by ASUS I figure that if it
only gets like an extra 6% performance I might be able to squeeze an extra
performance out of their tough series if I get lucky but now I have to take off
all of this cooler to put it into this
the Optimus water cooling I don't know what the exact model is but holy cow
it's heavy these guys are from like Chicago or something they're a pretty
small company and and apparently this is one of the best water blocks on the
market do you know how I do you know how I know that I Googled best 490 water
block and everyone said it was this I was just thinking wow I wish I had a way
to organize my screws but then I remembered that we have these handy
dandy mod mats that are going to be coming soon to LTT Store.com that are
the perfect thing for what I am doing this is not going to wors my budget okay
I know I might look like the kind of guy you could take home to your mama but I'm
a bad boy I avoid the warranty fun fact
about these stickers manufacturers put them on devices to intimidate you and
make you feel like you're not allowed to Tinker with devices you own but these
warranty void stickers are not enforcable by law anywhere in America so
if a company's refusing to give you service you can always you know complain
to the FTC about it because it's
complete BS you bought the thing you should be allowed to service
it for the case we got this big old fantex nv7 it's massive it's Shen it's
uh got support for a 480 mm rad because that's what I went with cuz it seemed
like it was the best way to get a lot of radiator for a little bit of budget as
well as it lowered the amount of fittings I needed which at fittings my
God they eat into your budget but I am a little worried cuz it looks like my
motherboard might not fit yeah
so eatx motherboard is a problem let's see if we
can take this little thing out and maybe we will be saved so
while this computer has this really cool set of LEDs that are actually totally
cableless that line the motherboard tray
um we might not be able to use at least one of them but the good news is that I
think that means our motherboard fits in
hey look at that however we do need to
consider that our radiator is going here I think hm
or does this go along the top nope one of these things is not like
the other one of these things is a lot
bigger it's so close if it's if if we
mounted it here it fits we doed an hour and change to compensate for the $15
extra dollar for the two radiators and
for the um Tri to the store and now it
went from being like yeah we got enough time to being like okay this is going to be kind of tight let's figure out our
pump mount we got the xd5 RGB Elite LCD
from Corsair it's a pump res
combo and uh that's just that was just
to simplify the number of components it's also got a cool scream but right now it kind of looks like it's
screaming I probably won't be spending a ton of time doing any cable management
because uh boy howdy I don't have a ton
of time
yeah it's tubing time we got both of our
radiators mounted one at the top one at the bottom and I think we are going to
be just peachy I use soft tubing cuz I don't hate myself and I didn't want to
do hard tubing and I needed this to be possible also the Rog Matrix it doesn't
use hard tubing it uses soft tubing so yeah I'm pretty sure you just kind of
like shove it on there and then these are compression fittings so what they do is that uh when you screw them on they
tighten the edge of they they have these little prongs and then they tighten
around that and then that gets your tube nice and tight and sealed and then it
don't leak hopefully so that going to be too tight of a bend for this tubing I
guess I can go to the top one and then that can go up and that prevents the
fear of kinking though I have no fears of
Kinks my phone number is 60 this isn't exactly a precise way of measuring
things but I figure it's is good enough
right this got to go a little bit longer than
that so I'm going to go
here and that goes goes on right
there maybe it won't matter when I fill it with
water I don't know man damn look at this
beauty what the heck is this tube did he
decide to buy this Oh I thought this was
like sleeving oh oh God this is terrible
dude look feel this oh yeah it's actually awful like but like put your
hand right here like she's done but yeah that's just not going to work yeah yeah
it's also an interesting mix and match of Brands here we got some EK we got
some Corsair we got some Optimus these blocks are super nice that's a really
expensive pump that's the fanciest pump I've ever seen But then why this tuing
is this Corsair these are Corsair fittings too these are
ugly like I these everything about this
build looks great except these fittings in tubes does he have any 90° oh there's
there's not a chance that this fitting right
here is going to work out in any way
yeah like he could make this CPU to GPU Line work it's just too long right now
but you know you go like
that and you're done this box cost $40
and it's the worst tubing I've ever seen all I got to say is good luck man
because I don't have a lot of extra tubing I need to make sure that every
time I make a cut I can only go this cut
only needs to be shortened so I always want to have a little bit extra because if I screw up a if I screw up a cut and
it's too short I lose like this whole length it's supposed to like maybe losing like centimeter or half an inch
or something you know oh I need to change this so This top thing this needs
to go here this is the outlet Port this needs to go to the
inlet one tiny little
cut holy crap I think we're done okay
now we just got to turn it on make sure everything's working and then we're going to start
filling with water this is amazing an hour and 15 minutes to go little did
Adam know his journey was far from over
I think we're screwed boys turns out that this pump doesn't just use you USB
power it also requires to be connected to a Corsair IQ Link Box that of course
they don't include which means I have to make a trip to the store if I want this
pump to work it doesn't matter if you don't care about any of the smart features you can't just run the pump off
of the USB header you have to connect it to a Corsair IQ link I should have
expected Corsair to pull this kind of in my defense Corsair does a
great job of not telling you anywhere on the main page on their website you
actually have to go into the text specs I believe and then go no nothing here
that says it's required um if I go to guides maybe so
I'd have to look at I'd have to review the manual they also do a great job of
not showing it to you on the box except for this tiny little thing that says that IQ link is required it costs
$60 are you kidding
me and it's not even like we can return something like we did with the radiator
I just have to spend $60 more this is how much time I got
left it's now counting upwards to demonstrate how much time I'm wasting
and how much in debt I will be at the end of this okay we have our funnel and
our distilled water and this is going to be a pain in the to pour isn't it this
is kind of terrifying do you see any drips anywhere so what's wrong here like
why isn't basically what's happening is that
there's air in the tubes already and that would be preventing the water from
going so maybe if I give it a little bit of a
tip it's flowing in a circle you can see it coming down the inlet yeah you see
that no drips no drips let's do this we're finally up and
running and I'm running combuster and cinn bench at the same time and I am
actually blown away I was expecting temperatures to not be as good as they
are but running cinebench 2024 we're at
like 70° on the CPU 80° on the hottest
core and then on the GPU we're running combuster at
4K 50° C we have so much room to crank
this thing up another notch I really excited I didn't think it would go this
well we also haven't even done our Heating and Cooling Cycles which
benefits PTM 7950 so it could get even
better we could get even cooler than what we have right now you know what I
kind of get it I kind of get why people water cool this is so cool seeing people
get it it's so not worth the money so
not worth the money and this look on his face right now it goes the other way
when it leaks and you might look at the timer back there and you'll notice that
it's counting uh up we went over budget
oh no but we were really really close and I'm mostly blaming Corsair
tell me about that so you buy their pump right you do a nice do yeah I mean I
bought their pump pretty expensive pump it's very fancy um it doesn't run at all
without also buying a sold separately IQ link Hub I also I saw the braided
exterior tubing that you bought and I was like that seems like it'd be a
really cool look but I have concern about cutting it cleanly and then it's
still looking good where you tighten the collars on the compress yeah it looks
like is when you go here looks great but
when you get right up to the compression fittings you can see like this one I had
to do a few times I can see that and it's it's already worn the reason why
these aren't on all these fans connect to these Pogo pins and this fitting
right here interferes with this getting a proper
contact to actually send the signal they should all run I just have to flip I
just have turned them all the way over here yeah why did you choose thermal take fans um because I wanted RGB okay
and I I didn't want to spend too much money on RGB I see I got six of these
for half the price of three course air fans yep that's fair enough yeah if you
had both of these RADS actually running you'd have plenty of radiator right now
and you would be getting better temperatures you can really tell whether your bottleneck is the thermal transfer
between the CPU and the block or whether your bottleneck is the dissipation of
the heat to the surrounding air by just touching the side of your
radiator or just here touch the fins oh yeah that's warm you got to throw some
more heat into the air here yeah even your Reservoir feels hot uh-oh what's
the coolant temp at we can see 43 oh that's getting up there yeah So
eventually we're going to be getting saturated right and then it just keeps freezing or what happens is the bigger
the Delta the bigger the difference in temperature between the surrounding air
and the coolant the more efficient the thermal transfer so you reach a point of
equilibrium where as the liquid heats up
the difference from the ambient air gets greater and the heat transfer gets
greater so it flattens out the jibu is
still so far below its thermal limits
okay I can explain that the regular form
factor for gpus is really not conducive
to carrying heat away from them having a a fan blowing down onto a heat sink this
thick with these super skinny low static pressure fans FS sucks we've done
experiments in the past where we put a tower cooler onto a GPU and they run
flipping cool even though the cooler itself weighs less than the gigantic
coolers that we put on gpus these days gpus are actually much easier to cool
even though they're 400 watts compared to you know 200 to 300 for a CPU because
the dyes are so big you have so much
surface area to carry that heat away compared to a CPU like especially on
Intel where the die is this big and it's
250 to 300 watts GPU you know 400 watts
that big no big deal you spent so much
money on your block I had so much money to spend well you could have made up for
the budget overrun on that IQ controller and your time overrun if you had just
gotten a reasonably priced block that's true but I think it's pretty realistic
like when you did your first water cooling did you get every single part correct well maybe you did no I think
that assumption is why people can feel afraid to try new things no I absolutely
screwed up my first water cooling setup was a thermal take big water SE it was a
piece of sh complete waste of money I
thought that what I was buying was an all-in-one setup that could be expanded
in the future to you know Go full custom
I didn't realize that everything about it was complete garbage and I will say
that the information that's out there to help people start water cooling is so
much better it's it's a lot better really great like uh I was referring to
a lot of jay2 sense guides because his water cooling guides were awesome it
helps it they were great for somebody like me but also had depth that I wasn't even bothering to go into like he's like
here's how to Hardline and I was like I'm not not today clearly not so what
you want is one of these oh so this is a
38 in ID 5/8 in od what you have is a
3/8 in id/ in od so you can see how much
skinnier than that wall is so you want thick wall tubing yeah this is the
optimal size but now we need to answer the question does this beat the Rog
Matrix I don't think we can answer that question until we answer did you have
fun you know since it wasn't any of my
own money I had a grand old
time but how does my system compare to the incredible power of the Rog Matrix
it comes close but not as close as I thought across the games I tested I
found the tough gaming GPU lagged behind about 5 to 10% not being satisfied I
decided to put on a quick and dirty overclock I found that I was able to
pretty much match the Rog Matrix not bad
back to spending the money though I think it doesn't really matter whose money it was because that wasn't the
point the point was we're going to spend this money do we spend it on a matrix
Rog 49g or do we spend it on ourselves
do we spend it on learning something and
uh water cooling components that we can carry forward to Future builds and the
experience of diying something so with that in mind who do you think won you
know I think it was a lot more fun to water cool and the idea that the Rog
Matrix could just crap out and then I'm in the same spot I am now with a GPU
that I would have to take apart and water cool anyways I feel like I'm
better yes there's going to be maintenance that I have to do I'm going to have to like make sure that my Loop
doesn't get clogged and there's a whole like maybe in the long run if I keep
paying my myself at $21 an hour the Rog
Matrix might come out on top but this is way more fun way cooler and I can also
sell these if I go oh I don't want to water cool anymore I
can anything but the radiator pump and Reservoir is not worth much okay you
can't sell tubing blocks hold
like a quarter of their value if you're lucky on a CPU and basically nothing for
GPU with all that in mind then would you do it again
yeah it sounds about right but would you tell the people
about our sponsor I fix it back to school is coming and instead of buying a
new laptop repair and upgrade your old one with I fix it their high quality
drivers are assembled with the tinkerer in mind and right now you can get 15%
off their Manta Mahi moo minnow and mor
bit sets that's a whole lot of bits for your every need maybe you want to start
reusing that old Mac laptop that's just collecting dust now's the perfect time
as I fix it as is also offering 15% off Mac laptop parts with I fix it laptop
surgery doesn't require a doctorate degree just their handy guides and high
quality tools go check out iix it at the link in the description save some money
this back to school season if you guys enjoyed this video
you might enjoy the time that Elijah tried his first Hardline tubing
experience yeah I'm not that brave