we're gonna break it we might as well at least get it on camera
okay okay i like ASUS they're a valued partner the
quality of the products is generally pretty good and for the most part they
try and do the right thing for consumers but the quality of their implementation
of Thunderbolt on their motherboards has been so bad for so long that i just
can't put off doing this video any longer because my wife won't let me
because every time this is across multiple docks multiple cables and now
multiple motherboards every time she tries to wake her display from sleep oh
yeah they change the graphics card too it simply won't do it so this is it it's
wife personal rig upgrade time and i am cutting ASUS out of the equation guys
you gotta fix your stuff just like i'm gonna fix this segway to our sponsor you
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one of the best things about having rack mounted pcs in a server cabinet is that
performing maintenance is as simple as we're sliding them out and you're good
to go now the astute among you will probably have noticed that the hardware
in here is not exactly old and shouldn't
really need an upgrade that's because as part of this process of getting my
wife's workstation all cable managed up and upgraded to the latest tech i threw
in an ASUS x299 prime motherboard with
built-in Thunderbolt 3. the problem is that our Thunderbolt 3 is not working
and with the distance between our server cabinet and her desktop monitor i can't
just run a regular displayport cable they're just too flaky because this
wasn't a planned project my parts choices were dictated less by what i
think actually makes sense and more by what i had lying around at the office so
i'll be using this 10 year old swiftech radiator with some screws that i found
in a bin this ice ball
reservoir which was the only res that i
could find that was really designed to be mounted in a horizontal case it's
even got RGB lighting although it uses a weird connector and i don't think i have
any way of hooking it up and finally the z490 aorus extreme water force this is a
motherboard that words cannot describe how little sense it would make to
actually buy but it was one of the few
sitting in our warehouse that happens to be not ASUS and have built-in
Thunderbolt 3. so i'll be equipping this puppy which is the only reason i'm water
cooling the system at all with a core i9 10 900k now i need to put this down
i just looked up how much this thing actually costs it is 2
000 us dollars for that kind of price it
better come with a flippin amazing
accessory package i mean to be clear it's loaded for bear in terms of
features it's got super robust power delivery it's got three m.2s 10 gigabit
networking and two and a half gigabit networking and of course the big
highlight is the included full cover water block
what is going on here part of me feels like no matter how high
end i go this motherboard is going to be shaming me for not spending more on the
things i plug into it this RAM is particularly you know unworthy 16 gig
sticks of 3 200 megahertz
gross good lord that is a lot of thermal
pads it's like a handful this does not
look any less complicated than just buying a normal motherboard and water
blocking it after them look at all these screws oh you've got to be kidding me
here i was all set up to put on the thermal pads you don't have to apply
them the first time that's only if you need to reapply it oh for crying out
loud Gigabyte glad i saw that now i just got to plug the RGB connector in and
line the thing up with the thing
yeah yeah we good oh nice oh oh nailed
it you know it's funny the wife made an offhand comment about how like she's not
getting a five thousand dollar Intel extreme tech upgrade why didn't i get
one of those for her i'm getting it for all the other staff i'm like han you're
getting a 5 000 extreme tech upgrade awkward thing i just blew the entire
budget on your motherboard i feel like a bad person soft tubing water cooling
this thing but like i don't want to spend that much time on it come on this
block has a super cool flow path so it can go down through the CPU and bypass
here or go to the chipset so this helps keep the restriction low while also
allowing it to do a great job of cooling everything involved and now that the
hard part's out of the way all i gotta do is a quick board swap wait a minute
normally when you got thunderbolts on board you have a displayport in how does
that work see this is what i'm talking about you got your displayport
injection here from the GPU a quick google search tells
me this may work or i may need a Gigabyte titan ridge add-in card or
something because it's water cooled there's really no way for me to find out
without actually building up the system which is okay because the other
motherboard that i'll use if this one doesn't work is
also pre-water-cooled which is why i was resigned to just building a water-cooled
system because they were the only two motherboards of Thunderbolt in the entire building can you imagine
engineering a whole motherboard for like six people to actually buy it
and then one of them to put an air cooled graphics card in it
it's crazy how many builds i'm like pulling all the SATA devices out of now
unless you need local storage which if you've got a nas you don't
there's just no reason to have these cables anymore you can get eight
terabyte m.2s i mean they're not affordable but
you already got a two thousand dollar motherboard like
good enough cable management for a wipey pc
time for some water cooling it's got a mounting bracket
so i can put it like there but wow how would that make any sense turns
out it is not well regarded but that's okay because i'll be using a d5 to
assist it so in the event that this does fail i'll be good to go
i just gotta find somewhere to mount this stupid thing so that's it we're
going right there
oh sick yep
oh shoot i kind of wish i'd plugged in the
front panel connectors before i did this we're gonna get some sleep we'll come
back to it tomorrow while i was sleeping a wild helper
appeared as i was test fitting the radiator i was reminded of a couple of
significant oversights in the design of this case which of course are on me
since this is a custom design case in the front bay of fans there is
interference from the usb ports and the power and reset switch so there's
nowhere to really fit this tank without cramming it in there in a way that can
break the power switch which i have done on my case and for this one there's a
ridge here that makes it so that you can't actually get a screwdriver in to
screw in the fans and the radiator and that is unless you like disassemble the
whole thing and then put it together after the fact the boy says we're gonna
go about it this way and just uh
if we gotta sacrifice some cables and mash them then that's what we're gonna
do now this is an older style radiator it's
uh super dumb it has the actual tubes for the coolant right under
where the screws go in can you imagine how that would cause a problem yeah so
that means we have to double check the length of these screws and i think
they're too long you can see they pop out a little bit fortunately we have new
screws that i brought oh yeah
it's absolutely perfect okay don't let it don't let it you got to go in
straight yeah keep going there you go perfect now my boy we need to do
who am i talking to the camera or the kid we need to do tubing because i don't
want to do any maintenance on this ever i'm using an extremely non-porous walled
tubing this is the same stuff that we used for six six workstations one CPU
now that i'm on the last tubing run it can go one of two places it can either
go back to the motherboard monoblock or
we could water cool the graphics card which would make the whole thing
actually look nicer and obviously the graphics card would then be waterproof i
did bring a block it's like right here propping up the case
i just really don't feel like it what do you think boy should we spend a whole
bunch of extra time to water cool the graphics card
no i mean what could go wrong let's actually try a smaller funnel
that's tiny yeah well we're gonna go slow if we're gonna break it might as
well at least get it on camera okay just pour nice and slow okay slow wait wait
wait go back go back come back back okay go okay
you can't dump it like that gotta go slow
oh okay that's not bad now to find out if the thing still works uh boy you want
to hit the power button oh that's not a good sign
after fully stripping down the board it's no more obvious what caused the
failure than before i thought now maybe some liquid got on there that i didn't
notice but nothing it's bone dry
so the only explanation i can come up with now is that maybe the mounting
pressure of the water block was too much and crushed some of the traces inside
the pcb because i can't see any physical damage on the surface i have had this
happen before but i didn't think it was that tight
at any rate back there is the new board a z490 aqua from
azeroth see what i'm talking about the only Thunderbolt boards i had were
water cooled ones so let's give this one a shot now that i'm using a completely
different motherboard it feels only right to tell you a little bit about it
the z490 aqua is from asrock it similarly comes with a pre-done water
cooling solution except it doesn't cool the chipset it only does the power
delivery CPU and 10 gigabit networking chip it also has three m.2s it also has
Thunderbolt three it's got a couple of them it does have the DisplayPort in so
i'm sure that this one's actually gonna work in my experience with asrock's
Thunderbolt 3 at least on their x570 aqua has been pretty positive so far and
it's a veritable bargain comparatively speaking at only 1100 us dollars so
let's let's put it in finally fire this thing up kudos to asrock by the way this
thing is so much more user friendly all the little grommets on the board are
pre-applied there's so many fewer screws i'm
i'm liking it i'm liking it it has not been my day i just realized i
hooked the inlets of both pumps up to each other this thing would have like
burned itself out or not freaking
cooled at all if i had actually managed to turn it on with the previous
motherboard not that that was the problem with the previous motherboard
because we never got that far but
also all these tubing runs just need to be redone now because they're not quite
long enough to reach where they now need to go so what happens when you're like
you know i'm feeling ambitious i'm not just gonna fix the wife's machine i'm
gonna make a video about it and i don't even need no stinking film crew i'm just
i'm yolo in
it find out if it works
all right there we go oh we got a display i just got to get this stupid
reservoir filled takes forever
and it's in the rack so all that remains is to leave this for one minute and let
the screen go to sleep and see if it wakes up
finally test time
yay that was all i asked
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video maybe you just love videos where you see me tearing my hair out um how
about the one where we lost all our data that's a good one that's oh yeah it's
off oh it's a roller coaster