Intel reached out to sponsor a video where we water cool one of their wicked
fast Raptor Lake HX gaming laptops and Alex had lots of wild
ideas and you chose the worst one hey I
mean for one thing this was your idea in the first place and for another unlike
what we usually do this is something you may actually want to replicate at home
if all goes according to plan this $30
laptop water cooling kit from AliExpress should take about an hour to install
should boost performance when it's hooked up to water and it should allow
our machine to operate normally when it's not filled with water though not
going to lie I kind of expected more what are you talking about we've got so
many things in here we have pump we have plastic tubes we have these cool little
copper tubes and even a free gift wow we're going to be voiding our
warranty aren't we oh yeah every time and we're going to tell you about our sponsor wait our sponsor is Intel why
did we put a sponsor Segway in here hi Intel as much as we meme on AliExpress
for all the silly things that you can get there it can be a legitimate way to
get electronics and other goods for relatively cheap and we found it to be
much more reliable than competitors like wish and teamu so let's have a look at
what we got this time this is a 5.5 to 12vt submersible pump based on the
suction cups probably intended for aquarium use at some point but should
serve our purposes very nicely this is some inexpensive flexible tubing
and this is the star of the show what appears to be a couple of flattened heat
pipes or other copper tubes that have had the ends hacked off and then
replaced with what appears to be threaded inserts for woodworking wait
what look oh my God they are well
they're plastic inserts overall the Kit's a little on the improvised side
there's no instructions just a bunch of zip ties but our plan is pretty simple
simple for a change we just need to somehow attach this flat copper tube to
the existing heat pipes in the underside of this laptop get the threaded inserts
to the outside somehow then run some water through it cooling the
aforementioned heat pipes this is not going to work as well as directly water
cooling the CPU and the GPU but believe it or not we've seen commercial
Solutions not dissimilar to this from companies like xpg and electronics and
they work surprising ly well now let's
take a closer look at our test subject it's the ASUS Rog strict scar featuring
an RTX 49 Mobile with 16 gigs of GDDR 6X
memory and a 175 wat tgp this is effectively as fast
as a laptop gets in the GPU department and honestly we're not expecting our
water cooling to help it go any faster because NVIDIA limits how much power
laptop makers are allowed to give to the GPU not so for the CPU at the heart of
this machine is Intel's core I9 13980 HX
I'm talking 24 cores 8 performance 16
efficiency a maximum turbo of 5.6 GHz
this is effectively the same as a desktop core I9 13900 K but with a
tweaked version of the Intel 7 process that's tuned for lower power which makes
sense given it has a 65 wat TDP in this
chassis and a maximum power of 157 WTS
and it's unlocked meaning we should have
some room to overclock it's also got a 240 HZ 1000 nit mini LED display that
runs at 1600p it's got RGB all over the place thing looks awesome enough about
that though let's get this cooler ripped off is this a chassis intrusion thing
dang it ASUS I think it's at least easy to fool no really oh that blows wow
they've given a lot of thought to airflow Management in here look at all
these little foamy bits they are making sure that when these fans draw an air
they're pulling fresh air from the outside only fresh air actually not
quite only fresh air it'll pull a little bit from over here drawing it across the
RAM uh the SSD other more different SSD
and then this guy right here is really cool that's drawing fresh air in and
then blowing it across the vrms here what a cool design and we're going to
rip it all out maybe before we do that we plant out the heat pipes and bend
them now tell me what you're thinking in one side out the other we go kind of
swamp like that or are you going to try and just run this across here and reach
the outside right next to each other I was thinking that we would do one for
CPU one for GPU have them coming out
each side seriously yeah about little y
Splitters so we can run them in parallel I mean it's not the dumbest thing we've ever done how far from it how flexible
are these things well they're quite
flexible they're quite flexible until you Flex them they work Harden and then
they become brittle got it I was also imagining this kind of sticking out like
that much what well like we can try and oh Alex but also like realistically we
have to just gouge this whole thing so
the exact Z placement doesn't really matter okay this I got this i got
this it's actually really easy to bend so yeah no no this is fine do you want
to start working on the other side I think I I think I can do this and then I feel like this is something that's going
to end up kind of montaged SL kind of fast
forwarded it occurs to me that your devious plan of using both of them
leaves us with no backup plan if one of them fails do you have another one of
these kits on him n we just cannot screw this up oh joy what are you doing just
hold on okay like why is it crisscrossed
it's applesauce okay yeah this is very
much not applesauce this is copper that's work hardening that we only have
one of I'm an applesauce Enthusiast you put applesauce in oats and leave them
overnight it tastes really good in the
morning Alex food tips I think I've got
it it's a duck no it's a dinosaur it is
a dinosaur what is
mine wait your plan is to solder this to
the heat pipes out of the laptop y and
then just hope to God the whole thing fits back in it's going to be easy we
just need to solder them to this we know where these need to be cuz it just lines
up with this little heat sink it's going to be
fine problem is we need to remove the paint off this to solder oh I'm crying
out loud Alex I'm super stressed this is not as easy as you made
it out to be an hour he said yeah an hour if
you're using thermal epoxy ah why are we soldering again
uh cuz you said that you really wanted to solder that's what the people came
here to see us soldering to heat pipes and them hopefully not blowing up things
are about to get a little messy now because ASUS uses liquid metal on the CP
oh crap on both of them really guess so
oh wow okay
interesting it's like a cover that looks
sort of like Captain tape that keeps the liquid metal when it inevitably does
leak from shorting anything on the package for these chips then they've got
these little barriers that keep the liquid metal from getting out of their
little cavities that looks an awful lot like K5 Pro it really does I still hate
it it's great stuff fantastic stuff how did you want to strip the P off this
bench grinder oh no do you want me to do
it yeah what about you do it what why
would you even offer if you're just I thought you were going to say no sorry
I'm using this yeah do it somewhere that it doesn't really matter like over here
that'll be nice and easy and you can just see it'll just be like and then the
weo
paint okay all right it's not that
bad okay can I see it I want to like get home on time this evening
what about the foam and stuff it's leaving well wait we can't have the foam
leave it's got the airflow paths yeah but we have more foam I bought more foam
oh god well he doesn't tell me these things I'm sitting here being careful
not to damage the foam and he's like oh you're taking too long there you go wow
that looks awesome yeah fantastic oh
dang it w we didn't even smoo up the bottom that badly yeah and like if we
did it's just copper it'll make it more conductive no that's not how that works
well sure why not also electrically conductive which isn't fantastic
but we did a sanity check because we're careful like that made our marks and now
it is time to get fancy meet Nate from
Creator Warehouse hello I don't think he's been on video before but he's going
to show us how to solder to heat pipes
this is not how you solder to a heat pipe but it's a way to do it thanks Nate
yeah you're welcome step one clamp the heat pipe with non- meltable clamps
that's that's important uh but not too hard we don't want to w w hold on hold
on you got to uh check the other side of what's business is going on I got some
tech tips too liquid metal huh that looks pretty good before we go any
further what am I looking at here this is a rework station commonly used in
reworking electronics it allows you to heat up the board to an ideal
temperature for soldering so just shy of just shy of the melting point of the so
you can very precisely remove components quickly you said this is glass so is it
like in infrared heat y infrared heat we have a bunch of coils under there o um
very cool or
hot I'm proud of that I'm proud of you lus and we will of course monitor the
bottom of this even though this is far overkill for the circuitry we're working
on or the lack of circuitry this really is making that
thermal epoxy option sound pretty good Alex it sounded good the whole time
whose idea was this uh this is me how was you yeah well Alex always told me
it's really hard to solder to heat pipes and every time I've been like oh but you
know we should figure out how to do it at some point because that would be done it when did we do it we did it before
well we didn't do it in the play button PC I know that much remember we didn't
no we did we've argued about this before we didn't I disassembled it after to fix
the thermal issues it was epoxy actually no it was just thermal paste we didn't
even put epoxy in it no there was a combo while these two figure that out
I'm going to start the element heating up how we doing in here 80° oh wow
that's heating up real fast so I should touch it then right radiative heat
transfer is cool I mean hot but yeah
he's rubbing off on me I'm getting bored that's not a board that's a heat
gun as you probably can guess this cooler is pretty good at cooling so uh
I'm going to just throw some Rags on it and hope that the rag doesn't light on
fire this is bored
you 100° C I should touch it with my finger now no I'm only half kidding this
is taking a very long time here you hold this oh wait it's 100° I can do that I
told lus to do something it was great what temperature are we aiming for here
in the 130 140 range oh okay with with
this um once we do that I'll apply the thermal paste and uh we'll see how it
how it flows by thermal paste he means paste form solder yeah thermal paste not
thermal paste oh sorry
you're right if you're wondering Tessa tape starts melting at around 200° C
okay I mean we're at 130 that's what you said we were doing right let's let's try it I'm going to squeeze that
in right okay maybe just a little to
start we want it to flow yeah I mean if
she's flowing there you go oh it's doing it it's doing the thing we're going to
use the whole heck yeah oh what just
happened she did a thing I don't know
crap I think she detached from the bottom one that's fine that's not fine
oh wait it detached from like yeah it did oh I think they used the same solder
we used H that's not good so I say we heat it up
and we take the clamp and we clamp it back together the whole thing yeah U
maybe with a little bit of this in between yeah it makes a ton a sense they
would be using the same solder we are I don't know I thought that it made a lot
more sense that they would be using higher temperature
stuff needle noose Vice GPS I know I can get precise with this and what I just
melted again yeah I'm a little worried about giving her too much beans here
because then we might start detaching other things from other things so maybe
we just continue on yeah I think we just do some of that there we go I saw it
attached to the bottom can we get like a bunch raid in here cuz that's I think
like a really key okay hold on hold on hold on let me H you're good no no no no
that's already Lots it's on or I mean like right in here yeah guys I really
don't think we need that much once it's soldered it's soldered it's not thermal
contact area lus thermal contact
area I'm just really worried this thing is going to come apart again probably
will well yep y jeez guys why did we
okay are we calling that good yeah
that's let's cool it down oh Lordy looks
good great even great it's a super
strong word to describe this but I think we might have done it question for you
this is all fine and good but do we have fittings for the ends of these yeah oh
can I see them they're so cute look at
the little ler siiz one oh are these compressions too yep no way wow so
secure won't even leak fresh strategy this time instead of using the heat gun
to melt the solder we are going to use H soldering iron this is more how uh this
tool is meant to be used I'm putting on
less I'm putting on less murders the
whole thing with oh that that's how he did
it ooh well this works great w yeah that
was so much better I breathe that I'm
right in WoW yep hell of a drug someone's going to have hallucinations
this evening oh yeah that's way better yeah I'd let it cool off a little bit no
well you're going to risk delaminating cuz the this temp over here is up to 130
mhm no no I got this damn it it totally
did it didn't it yeah ah crap wait I
can't be adding that much heat with this thing can I it's at 380° C something
just really moved yeah it's it's not happy at all we need more
clamps this heat pipe fell
off okay ah so can we take this we need
the long boy we do need the long or I could just use this oh God I don't know
about that oh God that just moved oh crap oh
that's gone yeah okay this might actually be bad now what about this one
we can't oh this this one isn't oh God I
think that's the GG boys okay this is
detached yeah I think GPU and CPU are fine yeah actually they they do look
fine this one's not looking too good well no yeah thanks for that everything
else here looks not bad yeah it's it's salvageable I think turning a perfectly
good laptop into salvageable
is nothing to be proud of but if only there was another way we could have done
this why did I say I wanted to use the solder one to two more degrees of
cooling no so there would be learning outcomes for the video okay yeah did we
learn yeah
F all right day two here's the plan we have our environmental chamber and we
have gotten rid of the safety limits and it is now at 180° C we have our heat
sink here which has been clamped a whole
bunch I did a little Home Depot run and bought 10 of them today and we should be
able to just Huck it in there and hopefully it's all fine I guess that one
need to be a bit tighter now ideally for this solder that we have here you would
have a curve that looks something like like this to melt it unfortunately uh we
we can't do that this thing's way too big to do that rapid of heating so we're
just going to Chuck it in there and hope for the best and you
go there oh I bent that heat pipe so bad
okay that's a Burnie boy yeah that's really hot I imagine we have our thermal
probe attached so we know how hot it is and once it gets to around 160° we
should be about good we have solder drops on the bottom of the thing ah nice
all right so we're liquid then we're nearly at 165° when we hit that we're
going to kill the chamber yep turn on
the fan and with any luck we can cool it
down half fast probably don't bre wow that's a lot of heat it's dropping fast
dropping fast okay yep whole thing hasn't exploded yet so that's nice my
first impressions just looking at it are not good oh you want to do it yeah why
not sure that way it can be my fault if it all goes wrong
yep what level of monstrosity have you
unleash on the world it's got more clamps than a tsy and Aura character has
buckles the vrm heat pipe looks like it's come off but the rest might be fine
let's have a look without
clamps yeah it looks like it might just be that one vrm heat sink yeah I'm a
little bit concerned about how flat some of these heat pipes are but overall that
was pretty darn good the vrm heat pipe
right here has come off a bit but that's not super important so I think that we
can just maybe reattach that with some thermal adhesive well maybe it worked I
guess we put it back in the laptop now this is not going to work because these
are bare dyes Y and these need to be
perfectly flat in order to cool them I'm not the most hopeful I've ever
been my thought is we just goop thermal
paste in there K5 Pro K5 Pro works too
oh he already had it ready for the uninitiated K5 Pro is essentially a
liquid thermal pad oh I didn't mean in there oh you said VMS yeah do you see
the bit where the vrm pad is detached from the heat pipe oh like in there yeah
in there oh that'll be fine it'll act as a heat spreader anyway it's attached on
this side I'm not worried about that feels like cake decorating except
grosser is this Intel's laptop uh I think it's ASUS's laptop
that they gave us because Intel asked them to a sorry ASUS
um you guys have definitely screwed some stuff up over the last little bit but
you didn't do anything to deserve this you ready Moment of
Truth oh it seems like it really wants to go in there uh no no that's not how I
would describe it you know what I think
we're well clear and then are we just going to do
the rotary tool just making it happen method I think
so
that's some pretty robust plastic they got there you saw how it flies out last
time right can't hear of the sound of my excellent totally um approved hearing
protection I think it goes Alex oh yeah
not bad okay cool yeah all right I think it's time to
screw this down and see if it actually goes yeah oh this is
messed up dude shoot did I just cross thread that too adding insult to injury
are you sure that's the right screw Noe what are the odds this powers on at all
oh I think it's going to power on I don't know with all the strain we're putting on the
board I've seen it not work yeah true I
have too that's normally when there's like an actual socket okay I think that
screw is free spinning now so that's good oh that just popped out of the
board yep popped right out of the standoff that's a that's a a really bad
sign that's really really bad there is no obvious way to put that back in at
this time I told you about the chassis intrusion thing so we can't even just
boot this up without it all closed up yeah yeah now for this I'm thinking we
put a piece of rubber between the bottom of the chassis and this spot right here
just to push down on it I don't have any better ideas where is this have to
uh balls oh balls balls balls balls balls B you know why that GPU was so
hard to put in oh balls balls balls balls balls balls the fan connector is
in there ah yes oh crap it just pulled up that stand
off okay I really wish we had
spares we do have a spare we have a spare laptop we don't have spare copper
tubes a oh no so we would have to salvage them off
of here let's do whatever it takes to not go down that path this is literally
Des disastrous yeah my hopes are not
high not high at all I'm getting this thing closed I was looking maybe a
little bit of this stuff right here to try and push that GPU down yeah that
seems pretty good to me that is really thick yeah I don't know if it'll work
but we might want to go with slightly smaller pieces more like right on the
the pressure points cuz putting it all across this is just going to put a ton
of the pressure here yeah but we kind of need the
pressure like right here the most part don't we I mean yeah I say we just see
what happens like that and if it feels like it's not going to work we can
remove some okay I have two screws
though left over we're very confident that this laptop's going to
work did that catch yep it's not even
that bulged it's here it's raw did you plug in the battery
truth
well that's a plus yeah super easy to take apart now bottom cover just pops
right off there it is okay Moment of Truth
attempt number the
second I've never wanted to hear that stupid swing so much in my life I don't
think she's swinging it's really not looking good is it no I think it's dead
one thing it didn't shut down immediately
which does make oh my God what
no no way after all that time are you
kidding me I was sitting here thinking why don't we try an external display
maybe we messed up the ribbon cable look at this
keyboard don't talk about the keyboard like that okay it's Thanksgiving you had
some dinner full of turkey well there were turkeys involved let's have a looky
Boo Here shall we here's where we're at CPU 70° H
GPU zero zero well that's an improvement
I don't make the rules does it actually exist ice manager display adapters I
mean it's in there do we try and run a game valheim I want to see if this GPU
comes to life oh hey it did who 50° okay
those fans are going they're going but you know what's
kind of wild CPU package power is up to 40 Watts we're at 86° it actually seems
to have it under control GPU temps are 75 holy sh I think it still works holy
crap 170 FPS it's actually not bad the
1% lows they dip I think that may be
something to do with the cooling being kind of messed up but our GPU is at 78
and our CPU is at almost 4 GHz
74° that's actually really impressive should we grab the other one to see how
we're actually doing fine did we have a plan to seal these threads or O-rings or
something uh I was kind of thinking that we would just throw like the smallest
amount of Teflon tape on there or something like that this isn't as far
off as I was expecting really wait what so are GPU is at about
1600 MHz on this one and it's at about
1600 it's actually did it survive Alex tell me it
survived it's doing a lot better than I ever would have expected survived it's
really looking like it survived yeah woo
oh that's so exciting we should try something a little bit more comparable I
don't know why the GPU toemon Tre is broken on that one oh wo wo wo wo check
this out check this out no no Glenn check this out check this out the CPU is turboing to 5.15 almost 5.2 it's cuz
this one has extra heat pipes let's go
okay this only at 3.8 now it seems to be a little all over the
place cuz this one's at 4 this one's at 4.4
interesting 155 average versus 170 but
kind of expected that GPU Telemetry is not working for some reason but it's
clearly running faster but we can fix that wait this is our water cooling
Reservoir yeah really that's what you've got those are the cutest y fittings I've
ever seen for real though guys if it hadn't been for the disastrous outcome
from heating up the heat pipe assembly this wouldn't be that bad I mean it
doesn't look Factory by any of the imagination but I don't know it's pretty
clean huh what what that's not too bad yeah I
know this isn't the world's most perfect Benchmark but we've got frame view
running right now we are rendering the
menu in this game if we pump water through it and FPS go up or attempts go
down we did good yeah okay this is it
Moment of Truth guys watch this water watch wo wo she's full w oh she's
chilling okay okay how's our FPS doing
how's our wait I forgot is this CP or GP it's leaking what do you mean leaking
you pulled the tube out no I don't I don't know what you're talking about is this the CPU side because our CPU is at
70° now oh wow it was at 80 before it
actually working oh our FPS it was a CPU
of cooling issue we're up to the exact same FPS let's go yeah
W water cooling to the rescue I mean it
only solved the problem that we ourselves created but we are 10° cooler
than the air cooled laptop even after we mangled it that is flipping crazy it's
not even leaking I honestly cannot believe it
things were looking desperate a couple minutes ago wow we are 15° clear of this one as
they're both heating up here almost 20
we're not going to be able to compare our GPU temps cuz this one's being a
butt head but what we will be able to measure is FPS and I think we're going
to beat the air cooled laptop okay what's the best way to do this should we
just turn off the pump temporarily yeah I just did Plum this up to the other
side and then we'll just go in cereal oh
I don't want to do cereal cuz this looks really restrictive the Y adapters yes
the Y adapters nice feel this tell me
which side is the cold side and which side is the warm side this is the warm
side oh yeah it's very noticeable you're right then there's no way that we can go
cereal we don't want to be feeding that hot water to our GPU under normal
circumstances in a water cooling Loop the order of the components doesn't
matter at all but this is such a tiny
tiny volume of water and the amount of heat that we're pumping into it is so
much that it does make a difference it's kind of like being peed on what I was a
bed weather till I was like 15 I know it's not weird just give her the old
snip there's not that much water in these tubes so doesn't really matter if
it leaks a little I'm having a lot more fun now than I was half an hour ago I'm
sure you're on the same page there too
oh my goodness what a roller coaster this has
been now I suspect the supplier of this kit intends for you to use just one of
those tubes probably and then it's the other one is just because you'll
probably screw up the first one but I
think our solution with the Y Splitters cooling the CPU and GPU on
Independent loops is going to perform better you can see in our screen
recordings that our FPS in the menu here has dropped on the water cooled machine
and that's just because we screwed up the cooler earlier but Alex if you turn
on the water cooler I think we are about to see some spectacular results our GPU
is at around, 1600 MHz right now it's on
which she's getting water now GPU is down 10° already
68 19 2,000 MHz
s oh this is very
interesting we just dropped over 10° on
our GPU we just boosted another 400 2.3
it popped up to 2.3 for a second there
drag race time bear in mind we have screen cap running this time we didn't
last time so this is not meant to be comparable to our first results this is
meant to be comparable to each other
neck and neck but what's not neck and neck is the temps we don't have GPU
temps on this one unfortunately but our CPU is at 82° we are beating that by
over 10° on our water cooled laptop that
CPU is at 5 4 GHz oh
yeah oh yeah I'm honestly really
impressed with ASUS and how much power they just will give you when you have
the cooling I'm so excited to have the same performance as the air cooled one
you know what though is it at least
quieter no not really is okay is it
cooler yes Alex dude this one is too oh wow it
is wow good job Aus yeah they they have a thing that like takes a bit of the fan
and blows it through the keyboard to keep it cool oh what's that
24° on Supply 30 30 like 31 30 2 on return wow
that's crazy it's got to be the same on the other side this is the GPU side I
bet this one's even going to be more this one's considerably cooler on the
inlet I told you with that with that exhaust here I think it's actually
heating it up significant okay okay results time we
won yeah let's
go I honestly can't believe it and now we overclock so we can win more yeah I
spent the last couple hours overclocking these and out to the gate they freaking
rip with just the Windows default power plant and on the air cooled laptop I was
able to immediately get 27,32 points in cinebench R23 for
comparison that is higher than the score we got with the I9 12900 K when we first
reviewed it and we haven't even tried to make it faster yet next easiest thing to
do is go into ASUS's Armory crate right here and just simply whack the power
limits to the max getting us a tasty 17 5 wats on the CPU and heading us an
incredible 30,37 points in cin bench damn although
it was clear by the end of the run that ASUS's thermal solution was becoming the
bottleneck not the CPU itself and like
we just spend a whole video water cooling laptop so let's send it and it
is so good we were able to just look at
175 watts and managed a
31,48 18 on our first run with it not
bad at all although after that things started getting difficult even though
the thermals were in check the current limits on the vrms were just immediately
getting hit which is where the true hero of laptop overclocking comes in
undervolting on a desktop and XTU you can play with all the stuff in here uh
on a laptop core voltage offset just make it lower and it will go faster
basically what we're doing is the CPU will consume less power for the same
clock speed making it more power efficient allowing us to get more out of
those 175 Watts that are available to us
the fastest run I managed was a blustering
32,4 in cin bench with a minus
0125 volt offset curiously I slapped a
minus 0.135 volt offset on the aircool laptop
and broke 32,000 points as well meaning that uh you can just render videos super
fast with this thing even without the water cooling although uh I did prop it
up with the power brick the best part
about undervolting your CPU is that it will also make your laptop faster in
games the largest obstacle in games is just the total power of the laptop in
this case 230 wats and by allowing the CPU to run more efficiently the GPU can
then gobble up more power and Ne more frames at your face our Hots spot at the
top of the keyboard here is 46 47 let's
say 48 48 on this
one 53 oh wow yeah that's
meaningful it no it is just like this
meaningful Segway to wait no Intel sponsored this video If you guys liked
the vibe of this video I have plenty of other options for places to send you but
I think the best one is probably that AliExpress cooler we bought to replace
the cooler in an Alienware that was like a pre-done version of this except it
made it barely even work on air cooling
that thing was a disaster we somehow did better