What tubing size should I buy?
Well, even though water cooling legend Cathar
addressed this once and for all over a decade ago, it is still a topic of
debate in PC and liquid cooling groups. So, we are going to find out.
So, my answer to this question for the last six or seven years has been 3/8 in
ID. So, that's short for inner diameter, 5/8 in OD, so that's for outer diameter,
and usually from Primo Chill and
whatever color your heart desires. Uh, their tubing's pretty good stuff and
it's been my belief that any bigger than this will make no difference to your
system temperatures. However, I do have to confess that I have never actually
grabbed some big old thick old tubing
and tested this in a controlled experiment. So, it is time to change
that. First, we're going to need a few things. Intel Extreme Edition 5960X.
Check. Three different diameters of tubing,
check. A triple 120 mm radiator, check.
EK Supremacy EVO CPU block, check.
Fittings, check. And check, check. And
the optimal footwear for science. Extra
check. Yes. Pose.
All right. The last thing we need, this is a flow meter. This will allow us to
measure the flow rate of our different loops. And a shout out to the guys over
at Performance PCs for sending this over to us on super short notice. Now, as
much as I love to spend my day building, testing, and tearing down various water
cooling loops with different tubing sizes, there is a reason that I hired
writers. So, I'm going to let Jake take
care of that while I go do very important CEO stuffs.
Really? You put Stoofs in there? Yeah. No, you put Stoofs in there.
Oh, sure. It said stuff before. Okay, sure.
Whatever. Haha. The joke's on me, I guess, because
I still have to record this narration.
So, then to keep our testing relevant to the real world, all of the loops were
built into an actual case, the Fractal Design Define R5. So to establish a
baseline, we're starting with a typical configuration. So we've got our pump
going out to our CPU over to our radiator and then back to our pump which
has a reservoir built into it. The whole thing is running 3/8 in ID 5/8 in OD
clear tubing from Primochill. As for coolant, we're just using plain Jane
water, which is going to be replaced for each one of our tests. I I mean I mean
not because we would expect that new water would affect the results. It's
just because recapturing and reusing it
would actually be very inconvenient. That is how you fill a water cooling
loop. Good thing bro.
So to put a little bit of extra heat into our loop, this will help to
separate the performance between the different tubing sizes. We're going to
set it up at 4 GHz with 1.15
volts. Uh, it's not like an impressive
overclock for 5960X, but it should be stable. And really, that's all that we
need for this kind of an experiment. All right, so let's get IDA going. Uh,
stress FPU and bippity boppity, we will
be back in a while. We ran each of our
tests for a good chunk of time. Start a 15-minute timer. And then we
reset the statistics, collecting them over a 3minut window to get meaningful
averages. In between our 50% and 100%
pump speed tests, we allowed a grace period of 10 minutes with the fans on
full blast to cool our water back to ambient. After the first set was done,
the process was repeated with 12 mm inner diameter tubing and then 13 mm
inner diameter. Okay, so uh Wow, you
made quite a mess here. Yeah. Okay. How are our results then? Well, they're
a little depressing. They're all within margin of error. And I didn't even get
to use the flow meter because there's no way to get any results from the RPM that
it reads. No liters per gallon or liters per gallon. Liters per
So, it's just an RPM. Yeah, it's just an RPM. Oh,
yeah. So, what? It's just no difference. Yeah, it's it's no difference.
What? Why are you going over there? Hey, you stay away from that. What are you?
What are you? Wait a minute. Wait. Hey,
I knew it. You weren't supposed to see that.
It's the workshop. All right. So, you had your fun, Jake.
So, back in the early days of water cooling, enthusiasts would often
repurpose aquarium pumps, which are optimized for flow rate and not head
pressure. So using wider diameter tubing
could make a big difference. But thanks to more pressure optimized pumps like
the D5 and the DDC, even if this might not seem intuitive,
even dropping down to like a 10 mm diameter is a non-issue. I mean, even
1/4 in, which the most basic all-in-one
water coolers use, should not affect the performance of a modern loop in any way
other than the bend radius of the tubing. So, in most cases, it's far more
important to consider other things like the restriction of your water blocks,
any tight bends, the inclusion of restrictive fittings like quick
connects. But even in this worst case
scenario, which we actually built fairly recently, the D5 didn't break a sweat.
So the final answer then, what tubing do you buy? Well, it's the good old same
answer that we started out with. Any good quality tubing like Primo Chill or
EK in 10 mm inner. Uh that would be 3/8
in or 16 millimeter outer diameter. That's 5/8 inch for our Yankee friends.
And the thicker the wall, the kind of better because it'll help with any
kinking in your bends if you don't want to use angled fittings like we've done
on some of our builds. So, thanks for watching, guys. If this
video sucked, you know what to do. But if it was awesome, hit that like button,
uh, get subscribed or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in
the video description. Also, linked down there is our merch store has cool shirts
like this one and our community forum, which you should totally join.
workshop. Get Get that out of here. I like it. It's It's pretty nice,
actually. You know what? We should probably put it up. We should put this in Luke's office. How about like right here?
Oh, man. You're just going to hold it up there for the next That seems dangerous.
How about like right there? That's pretty cool, right? In orange. Never I don't know.