Intel's core i9 12900k in performance mode gets hot too hot to cool with the
traditional heatsink too hot even for an all-in-one liquid cooler ugh smells
nasty surely our mighty custom loop can
save the day all right so we're getting there but
what if we had three tubes instead of
two luex is a newcomer in the custom water
cooling space and claims that their tri-swift water block is the best on the
market surpassing the latest and greatest from well-known brands like ek
and swiftek their approach divide the coolant to conquer the heat according to
tynan from our engineering department their theory does hold some water but
there's only one way to see if adding extra speed holes to your water block
will make your CPU as fast as this segue to our sponsor ridge ridge wallet has
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this is the quantum velocity squared water block from ek it's one of the top
performing blocks on the market and like our challenger the fluix tri-swift it
can cost a whopping 200 plus us dollars
depending on options like material choice that's just for the block which
means that to test these monsters we first had to dig up all the other
components of a quick custom water cooling loop then we grabbed our CPU
frame from thermal grizzly cranked our Noctua fans and d5 pump to their max
speeds and configured the classroom blender benchmark to a whopping 3 000
path samples with our CPU in the default power profile our ek block here barely
cracked 72 degrees once our loop reached thermal equilibrium that's a tough mark
to beat it's significantly better than some of the air and all-in-one water
coolers that we've looked at recently but fluix is going to have to do it because
when you're spending this kind of money on cooling every fraction of a degree
matters and as i learned in my product management days the demand for the
second best custom water block is essentially zero i don't think that's
going to be a problem though since fluix promises to win by a lot more than a
fraction of a degree i mean look at this two inlets instead of one that's right
double the water flow to your
wait it's just a y splitter
we're back sorry they explain this better than i can here's the product
description emphasis mine the fluix tri-swift is the highest performance
block on the planet 1.5 millimeter microchannels proprietary sinusoidal
pattern jet plate great turbulence mixing chamber something something this
allows our tri-swift water block to lower CPU temperatures by 8 to 10
degrees celsius during intensive workloads compared to substitute water
blocks here's the thing guys we don't really
review water blocks anymore but these are some bold claims almost as bold as
my claim that you'll find all the best behind the scenes extras and exclusives
over on Floatplane.com like alex making joystick condoms anywho
buried in that long-winded marketing spiel that you just endured are some
actual grains of truth tynan is gonna fill you in
they're basically saying that their twin inlets assisted by these wavy jet plates
will increase their fluid turbulence improving the thermal transfer between
the copper fins and the water in your loop it's a fundamentally sound theory
because turbulent flow does help to prevent the formation of boundary layers
a boundary layer is a thin zone where the friction between the fluid and the
solid slows down the flow causing the already warm fluid to kind of stick to
the copper slowing down thermal transfer you can see this in action for yourself
with a simple experiment the room you're sitting in right now almost certainly
contains weak air currents but you probably can't feel them this is thanks
to the natural friction between your body and the surrounding air that creates a zone of pre-warmed air next to
your skin a boundary layer simply wave your hand in the air like this to
disrupt this boundary layer and you'll feel an immediate though temporary
cooling effect neat right certainly but what it isn't is new
fluix's first mistake was citing the deep water cooling magic to me which i
was there when it was written first generation commercial water blocks from
the early 2000s did suffer from lackluster performance for a number of
reasons first up their simple maze style
designs did almost nothing to increase surface area directly over the CPU die
and second because most diy water coolers were using low pressure cheap
aquarium pumps they intentionally used very wide water channels to avoid
restricting flow that means that much of the water flow inside them was laminar
rather than turbulent that's bad because you'll find substantial boundary layers
basically well everywhere in a danger den maze 3
from 2002 but then something happened our water cooling lord and savior
certified extreme systems legend stu cathar forster created the little river
white water it was the first commercial block that intentionally restricted the
flow of water at the block inlet creating a jet of water that blasted the
copper cold plate why did he do this turbulent flow to say
that it was a game changer would be an understatement with a high pressure pump
the white water and its successors the cascade and the storm would absolutely
dominate the custom water cooling scene for the next few years the storm was
super cool but devilishly complicated to manufacture the high volume version
actually used a mid plate with 35 micro
jets that fired into machined cups to create a hyper turbulent zone directly
above the CPU die it left everything else in the dust and when truly stronger
competitors finally emerged nearly all of them leaned on the same fundamental
design principles out competing the storm only by increasing surface area
directly over the CPU die optimizing the shape of the cooling patch for the heat
spreader designs of contemporary processors or by bowing out the base for
extra mounting pressure these evolutionary changes yielded a grand
total 6 degree improvement over the 10-year span that we tested back in
2016. since then skived copper bases
where they actually shaved the copper and bended up to make the fins have
taken over for cast or machined micro pins so while i haven't personally
tested them i suspect that the top designs today like this one from ek are
probably at least a couple degrees better than what we saw that means then
long story short by my rough math the
total water block performance improvements from basically flat chunks
of copper in 2002 to the skived copper bases we see today is in the
neighborhood of 17 degrees with all of that in mind fluix's
patent-pending fluid turbulence technology has a lot of work ahead of it
to beat anything by 8 to 16 degrees as
they claim let alone a modern block that
by the way definitely makes use of jet
induced turbulence like every other decent design on the market so how's the
performance
this is bad not just a little bit bad like comically
bad hey future line is coming at you fluix
responded to our results and said that they have a new cold plate coming for
12th gen it's possible nay probable that
this will improve performance but the cold hard truth is that at least some of
the things they're doing like accounting for the concavity of the ihs they should
have known if they were serious about designing a high performance water block
and they were up against a competitor that doesn't even use a skived copper base
not to mention that it looks amazing where fluix is at best hoping to get
closer in performance and also looks like it came from aliexpress there's not
a huge market for ugly custom water cooling hardware either the truth is i i
just don't make the rules and that's what they had for sale so that's what we reviewed all right back to the video
with our CPU in default mode maximum package temperatures hit 85 degrees with
the fluix block with an average of 82. that is over 10 degrees higher than our
ek block it pulled about 10 more watts
okay so fair enough but our average core clocks were
actually slightly worse which would indicate to us that that higher power
draw was likely due to higher thermals not higher performance cranking things
up with our 12 900k in performance mode letting it turbo to high heaven and pull
nearly 300 watts our ek block did manage to pull it off i
mean it's hot at 97 degrees but it didn't throttle meanwhile the tri-swift
throttled so quickly we didn't even bother letting it complete the full 3000
sample render having not looked closely at this thing
before greenlighting this review these results are
much worse than i expected so bad in
fact that i actually damn it where'd i put it dug up my old storm v2 from the
mothballs to test against it the unit i have was manufactured under licensed by
swift tech back in the mid 2000s and cost about 80 us dollars
it uses a pretty janky mounting adapter that Jake made by hand but
i cut that with tin snips we had very few tools back then
yes at least one a
roasted you tried both oh just for lulls i tried
swapping it in case i was doing something wrong you're leaking you're looking flaking
oh that's not optimal we have not pre-tested this
we have no idea what's going to happen so whatever happens happens here we go
bring on the stone okay it's not as good as it seems to be
so far it's set like 73 74 on the
package but the fluid hasn't heated up yet so we're gonna have to give it a little bit we can't take these results
this final just yet you can see here i held the fans to speed up the fluid
heating up right here and we reached a maximum of 87 but since then it has
actually settled back down to 83 to 85 degrees celsius on the CPU
package we landed at 84 degrees now i want to show you something here's a
better look at the storm we've got our micro jet mid plate there's those
finicky little bastards and then we've got the cups on the bottom you can see
as i alluded to before this is a really really small cooling patch where there's
actual turbulent flow it was designed for direct dye cooling on older cpus
that didn't have a heat spreader over top of the dye so the fact that this
performs anywhere near the fluix
tri-swift which has a gigantic cooling
patch and gets to take advantage of much
much more modern machining techniques
it's kind of hilarious clearly there's more turbulence here
than here for comparison i also took apart the quantum velocity squared
and oh that's interesting this does not use skiving
even though ek is not using skivved fins you can see they are much finer than the
ones in the fluix tri-flow oh and this
is notable there's this mid-plate here this slotted
mid-plate that sits over top of the fence gee i wonder what that
does so then by going fluix we not only get
performance that's comparable to a design that was optimized for cpus from
2005 we add complexity to our loop with
more potential points for leakage thanks to the y-splitter yay it's
ugly as hell and yes again with the price it's a whopping
230 us dollars on sale even adjusted for inflation it
costs twice as much as the storm with some budget left over for our awesome
new swim trunks on lttstore.com the only
way that i can imagine flux justifying their turbulent juice marketing nonsense
is if they've only ever tested this thing using the anemic pump that they
bundle with the aio version from talking to tynan it is possible
that with an extremely weak pump their design may
actually help to increase turbulence in the CPU block but
while i could test this thing frankly i have spent enough of both my time and
money evaluating this piece of junk and the reality is that anyone spending
this kind of moolah on a water block is going to drop more than 40 bucks on
their pump and they're going gonna get a proper d5 so probably the only good
thing that came out of this whole video is that it was an excuse for me to talk
about water cooling again after so long maybe someday we'll see a wild new block
design that nobody ever thought of and it'll be a quantum leap forward in
performance but it is not this day if you want to get into custom loops we're
going to have everything we used linked down below but for now we would probably
recommend sticking with the tried and true ek block it's much less expensive
yeah that's the that's the real kicker the 200 one i showed you guys before
that's with all the extra bells and whistles it's like actually a lot cheaper and while they're not
manufactured in the usa at least they're made in a machine shop rather than in a
shoe factory and this segue was made in our segway factory to our sponsor
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if you guys enjoyed this video make sure to check out our easiest water cooled pc
video we are well aware now of how much
time it takes to do a proper custom loop