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Intel's core i9 12900k in performance mode gets hot too hot to cool with the

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traditional heatsink too hot even for an all-in-one liquid cooler ugh smells

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nasty surely our mighty custom loop can

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save the day all right so we're getting there but

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what if we had three tubes instead of

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two luex is a newcomer in the custom water

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cooling space and claims that their tri-swift water block is the best on the

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market surpassing the latest and greatest from well-known brands like ek

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and swiftek their approach divide the coolant to conquer the heat according to

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tynan from our engineering department their theory does hold some water but

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there's only one way to see if adding extra speed holes to your water block

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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

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performing blocks on the market and like our challenger the fluix tri-swift it

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can cost a whopping 200 plus us dollars

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depending on options like material choice that's just for the block which

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means that to test these monsters we first had to dig up all the other

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components of a quick custom water cooling loop then we grabbed our CPU

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frame from thermal grizzly cranked our Noctua fans and d5 pump to their max

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speeds and configured the classroom blender benchmark to a whopping 3 000

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path samples with our CPU in the default power profile our ek block here barely

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cracked 72 degrees once our loop reached thermal equilibrium that's a tough mark

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to beat it's significantly better than some of the air and all-in-one water

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coolers that we've looked at recently but fluix is going to have to do it because

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when you're spending this kind of money on cooling every fraction of a degree

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matters and as i learned in my product management days the demand for the

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second best custom water block is essentially zero i don't think that's

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going to be a problem though since fluix promises to win by a lot more than a

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fraction of a degree i mean look at this two inlets instead of one that's right

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double the water flow to your

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wait it's just a y splitter

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we're back sorry they explain this better than i can here's the product

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description emphasis mine the fluix tri-swift is the highest performance

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block on the planet 1.5 millimeter microchannels proprietary sinusoidal

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pattern jet plate great turbulence mixing chamber something something this

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allows our tri-swift water block to lower CPU temperatures by 8 to 10

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degrees celsius during intensive workloads compared to substitute water

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blocks here's the thing guys we don't really

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review water blocks anymore but these are some bold claims almost as bold as

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my claim that you'll find all the best behind the scenes extras and exclusives

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over on Floatplane.com like alex making joystick condoms anywho

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buried in that long-winded marketing spiel that you just endured are some

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actual grains of truth tynan is gonna fill you in

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they're basically saying that their twin inlets assisted by these wavy jet plates

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will increase their fluid turbulence improving the thermal transfer between

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the copper fins and the water in your loop it's a fundamentally sound theory

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because turbulent flow does help to prevent the formation of boundary layers

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a boundary layer is a thin zone where the friction between the fluid and the

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solid slows down the flow causing the already warm fluid to kind of stick to

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the copper slowing down thermal transfer you can see this in action for yourself

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with a simple experiment the room you're sitting in right now almost certainly

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contains weak air currents but you probably can't feel them this is thanks

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to the natural friction between your body and the surrounding air that creates a zone of pre-warmed air next to

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your skin a boundary layer simply wave your hand in the air like this to

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disrupt this boundary layer and you'll feel an immediate though temporary

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cooling effect neat right certainly but what it isn't is new

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fluix's first mistake was citing the deep water cooling magic to me which i

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was there when it was written first generation commercial water blocks from

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the early 2000s did suffer from lackluster performance for a number of

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reasons first up their simple maze style

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designs did almost nothing to increase surface area directly over the CPU die

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and second because most diy water coolers were using low pressure cheap

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aquarium pumps they intentionally used very wide water channels to avoid

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restricting flow that means that much of the water flow inside them was laminar

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rather than turbulent that's bad because you'll find substantial boundary layers

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basically well everywhere in a danger den maze 3

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from 2002 but then something happened our water cooling lord and savior

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certified extreme systems legend stu cathar forster created the little river

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white water it was the first commercial block that intentionally restricted the

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flow of water at the block inlet creating a jet of water that blasted the

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copper cold plate why did he do this turbulent flow to say

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that it was a game changer would be an understatement with a high pressure pump

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the white water and its successors the cascade and the storm would absolutely

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dominate the custom water cooling scene for the next few years the storm was

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super cool but devilishly complicated to manufacture the high volume version

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actually used a mid plate with 35 micro

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jets that fired into machined cups to create a hyper turbulent zone directly

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above the CPU die it left everything else in the dust and when truly stronger

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competitors finally emerged nearly all of them leaned on the same fundamental

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design principles out competing the storm only by increasing surface area

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directly over the CPU die optimizing the shape of the cooling patch for the heat

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spreader designs of contemporary processors or by bowing out the base for

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extra mounting pressure these evolutionary changes yielded a grand

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total 6 degree improvement over the 10-year span that we tested back in

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2016. since then skived copper bases

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where they actually shaved the copper and bended up to make the fins have

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taken over for cast or machined micro pins so while i haven't personally

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tested them i suspect that the top designs today like this one from ek are

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probably at least a couple degrees better than what we saw that means then

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long story short by my rough math the

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total water block performance improvements from basically flat chunks

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of copper in 2002 to the skived copper bases we see today is in the

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neighborhood of 17 degrees with all of that in mind fluix's

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patent-pending fluid turbulence technology has a lot of work ahead of it

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to beat anything by 8 to 16 degrees as

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they claim let alone a modern block that

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by the way definitely makes use of jet

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induced turbulence like every other decent design on the market so how's the

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performance

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this is bad not just a little bit bad like comically

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bad hey future line is coming at you fluix

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responded to our results and said that they have a new cold plate coming for

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12th gen it's possible nay probable that

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this will improve performance but the cold hard truth is that at least some of

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the things they're doing like accounting for the concavity of the ihs they should

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have known if they were serious about designing a high performance water block

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and they were up against a competitor that doesn't even use a skived copper base

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not to mention that it looks amazing where fluix is at best hoping to get

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closer in performance and also looks like it came from aliexpress there's not

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a huge market for ugly custom water cooling hardware either the truth is i i

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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

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with our CPU in default mode maximum package temperatures hit 85 degrees with

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the fluix block with an average of 82. that is over 10 degrees higher than our

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ek block it pulled about 10 more watts

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okay so fair enough but our average core clocks were

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actually slightly worse which would indicate to us that that higher power

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draw was likely due to higher thermals not higher performance cranking things

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up with our 12 900k in performance mode letting it turbo to high heaven and pull

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nearly 300 watts our ek block did manage to pull it off i

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mean it's hot at 97 degrees but it didn't throttle meanwhile the tri-swift

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throttled so quickly we didn't even bother letting it complete the full 3000

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sample render having not looked closely at this thing

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before greenlighting this review these results are

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much worse than i expected so bad in

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fact that i actually damn it where'd i put it dug up my old storm v2 from the

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mothballs to test against it the unit i have was manufactured under licensed by

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swift tech back in the mid 2000s and cost about 80 us dollars

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it uses a pretty janky mounting adapter that Jake made by hand but

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i cut that with tin snips we had very few tools back then

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yes at least one a

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roasted you tried both oh just for lulls i tried

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swapping it in case i was doing something wrong you're leaking you're looking flaking

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oh that's not optimal we have not pre-tested this

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we have no idea what's going to happen so whatever happens happens here we go

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bring on the stone okay it's not as good as it seems to be

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so far it's set like 73 74 on the

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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

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this final just yet you can see here i held the fans to speed up the fluid

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heating up right here and we reached a maximum of 87 but since then it has

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actually settled back down to 83 to 85 degrees celsius on the CPU

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package we landed at 84 degrees now i want to show you something here's a

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better look at the storm we've got our micro jet mid plate there's those

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finicky little bastards and then we've got the cups on the bottom you can see

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as i alluded to before this is a really really small cooling patch where there's

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actual turbulent flow it was designed for direct dye cooling on older cpus

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that didn't have a heat spreader over top of the dye so the fact that this

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performs anywhere near the fluix

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tri-swift which has a gigantic cooling

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patch and gets to take advantage of much

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much more modern machining techniques

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it's kind of hilarious clearly there's more turbulence here

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than here for comparison i also took apart the quantum velocity squared

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and oh that's interesting this does not use skiving

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even though ek is not using skivved fins you can see they are much finer than the

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ones in the fluix tri-flow oh and this

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is notable there's this mid-plate here this slotted

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mid-plate that sits over top of the fence gee i wonder what that

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does so then by going fluix we not only get

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performance that's comparable to a design that was optimized for cpus from

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2005 we add complexity to our loop with

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more potential points for leakage thanks to the y-splitter yay it's

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ugly as hell and yes again with the price it's a whopping

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230 us dollars on sale even adjusted for inflation it

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costs twice as much as the storm with some budget left over for our awesome

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new swim trunks on lttstore.com the only

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way that i can imagine flux justifying their turbulent juice marketing nonsense

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is if they've only ever tested this thing using the anemic pump that they

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bundle with the aio version from talking to tynan it is possible

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that with an extremely weak pump their design may

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actually help to increase turbulence in the CPU block but

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while i could test this thing frankly i have spent enough of both my time and

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money evaluating this piece of junk and the reality is that anyone spending

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this kind of moolah on a water block is going to drop more than 40 bucks on

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their pump and they're going gonna get a proper d5 so probably the only good

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thing that came out of this whole video is that it was an excuse for me to talk

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about water cooling again after so long maybe someday we'll see a wild new block

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design that nobody ever thought of and it'll be a quantum leap forward in

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performance but it is not this day if you want to get into custom loops we're

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going to have everything we used linked down below but for now we would probably

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recommend sticking with the tried and true ek block it's much less expensive

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yeah that's the that's the real kicker the 200 one i showed you guys before

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that's with all the extra bells and whistles it's like actually a lot cheaper and while they're not

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manufactured in the usa at least they're made in a machine shop rather than in a

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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

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video we are well aware now of how much

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time it takes to do a proper custom loop