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 2 the
Highlight for me was constructing my own water block with the help of my neighbor
who has a CNC 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 natator 5000 CPU water block so
today I going to be doing a review of my
own water block that I built well with a lot of help in scrapyard Wars 2 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 g33 features a lightweight design an advanced Optical sensor with
Delta zero 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
Wars 2 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 run down it was cut on a customade
CNC that my neighbor actually uses for his uh 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 Barb 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 that will help quite a bit uh 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 uh 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 DDC plus I believe pump as well
as a dual 120 mm radiator and a couple Noctua n12 fans 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 was pretty straightforward
we're using a classic style bolt through mounting system um then 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
lonus tech tips special edition
n12 and nf14 fans from
Noctua yes my friends they are here all
black plastic and orange accents I'm going to install them on the radiator uh
they'll be available for purchase soon I don't know exactly when and we have
retailers lined up in the United States
Australia uh uk/ Germany and Canada so
uh yeah going to be awesome so we 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 poppy up and make sure that we're
able to get into Windows where we can do our comparative temperature
testing okay so we're back with some results and I 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°
generally speaking I take the second hottest core when I read Via Real temp
so we'll call it 30° 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 Ida 64 stress test and find
out what happens to our CPU temps then 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° territory is going to be our load temperature not bad that's actually
going to be pretty uh 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 SWA 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 Chip's 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° 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 all right 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° 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 lag 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+ for 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 5 to8 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 uh a corporate website with just information about your
staff like we have at linusmediagroup tocom 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 to make sure you like it you build your website it'll
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 247 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 Square
space.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
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badge next to your name I think that pretty much wraps it up thanks again for
watching and if you're looking for something else to watch now we did the
freaking 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 two Gamers running discreet copies check that video out
we've got it linked up there see you guys next time