laid out in front of me are all the parts for pretty much as ball in a
gaming rig as money can buy but as everyone knows if you want to get the
maximum performance out of your hardware you need cooling that can keep up and
for all its other faults custom loop water cooling is still the way to go if
you want no compromises maximum performance and near silent operation
unfortunately on the path to building a custom water cooled system there are a
lot of pitfalls that at best can waste your time and at worst can actually
damage your components well that changes today this right here
is the singularity rafe a case that was
built from the ground up to make putting a custom water cooled system in it as
easy and painless as possible yeah easiest water cooling my friggin
buttocks so our plan is to throw this thing together
with hardline tubing with hardline tubing in about the next hour
and this video is brought to you by the vue sonic elite xg270 qg gaming monitor
it's 1440p 165 hertz g-sync it's got 98
coverage of the dci p3 color space and you can get yours at the link in the
video description
while alex is assembling the monitor i'm going to run you guys through the hardware for today we've got an aorus
x570i pro wi-fi motherboard this is a mini itx board so even though this is a
bit of a bigger case it still takes a small motherboard because we got to make
room for all that water cooling stuff we're going to be running an AMD ryzen 9
3950x so there's a 16 core processor in
here and we're going to be teaming it up with an rtx 2080 ti aorus extreme from
Gigabyte and what's cool about this one is that it is pre-water cooled meaning
that it is basically slot in tubes in
and go for the rest of our water cooling we're
using a bunch of stuff from ek water blocks so they're cool stream sc240
radiators i believe we've got uh yup their velocity d RGB CPU block a bunch
of their straight hard line fittings as well as their vardar evo RGB fans then
for storage we've got aorus's PCIe gen 4
m.2 SSD as well as a set of g-skill
trident z royale with cheese actually
i think that's junk i think this is actually their uh yep it's trident z
neos so we've got what appears to be a
32 gig kit of 3600 c14 nice that'll be a
really great pairing with our 3950x makes it sound like wine all right uh
well we won't need that until later but thank you yeah let me put it there
i think it looks cool too yes are we for real aiming to do this in an
hour with hardline i don't know
hour and a half should we try yeah i want to try the time is now 3 43 at 4 45
we're gonna be turning this thing on full of water posting you got it we got
this yeah all right let's go so i'll go motherboard you want to unbox
the case yep it's actually kind of amazing to me
that it's taken so long for a case like this to make its way onto the market
because you get all these cases out there that are
designed for water cooling like with a 360 millimeter radiator mount in the
front a 240 in the top can i help you with that
but they give no thought whatsoever to where you're supposed to put a pump and
a reservoir so singularity is actually a super small company but they are really
dedicated to water cooling and building just like
these gorgeous super industrial looking designs so let's walk you guys through
some of the features that we're working with here oh we apparently cheated a little bit it already has an 800 watt
power supply in it you put that in there oh yeah i did that to measure the power
supply like the cable runs that's fine we'll give ourselves a two minute
penalty at any rate so right up here is where our mini itx motherboard goes
we're using pci express risers right here to get our graphics card down to
its um you know vertical mounted show
off position down here at the bottom power supply goes here and then i
believe this spot over here is just for drives isn't it uh that's to hide your
cable management oh is that all it's for yeah knee radiators in the top and the
front and then the entire back of the case
is actually fluid distribution and a built-in reservoir that leads down to
the integrated d5 pump pretty sweet oh
my goodness is there an RGB component to this we have cable mod RGB stuff okay
i'm getting warm this might be the time to it actually hasn't quite happened yet as
of filming this video but uh i promised i would wear marquez's merch
if he hit 10 million before we did so here it is
oh god remove the front led cover by undoing
the three fasteners on the front panel of the case
so this thing here oh but this is gonna light up super cool okay
i can't figure out how this strip goes in though
unless it goes in sideways oh
they recommend their own rigid RGB strip
is that not gonna happen is that for the front only i guess so
i have a lead on that front RGB strip nice so we're good
did you do the back one or am i doing that oh you're doing it okay let's just
peel it unceremoniously
it's safe to guess that i can just cut this anywhere right
so the RGB groove at the back seems quite a bit wider it looks like i'll be
able to get my strip in there quite easily
so that's pretty cool how's our hour coming along here
uh it's 409 i think if we get this done before the end of the day i'm gonna call
it a win that is like two hours for the build i'm
gonna get the motherboard prep then i don't think we're doing as bad as you
think you don't no
we're doing all the hard stuff first that's why the situation looks dire
you already pre-installed the CPU it's like a minute you grabbed a
four-stick kit of memory
well that's fine we can have 16 gigs of RAM yeah i think that's okay
literally doesn't affect performance for gaming at all
how much pre-prep did you do on this because it looks like our m.2 slot is on
the back and that probably isn't going to fit
uh i just assumed that it went here wait there is one on the front yeah yep it's
packed and packed in there pretty tight so i got to figure out how to get this
off looks like it's just these two screws hey i told you we're in great shape okay
so our SSD heatsink goes in there and this
does it just go on top actually no it's not great
it fits well enough though i think we can get away with it all right i'm gonna start running the cables
these are the ones that i got i think they look pretty sweet hey wow i like it
where's my CPU block at alex so here it is
yeah you have a choice so i can go with matte black plus silver or nickel and
plexi i'm gonna have a look at the graphics card and then i'll decide wow
you know your graphics card is hardcore when it includes a tube of thermal
compound in the box okay well based on this
i think the only way to go is the matte black and silver then all right well
this is going to slow me down a little bit my mounting hardware for my block
needs to be removed and reinstalled because it comes with Intel mounting
hardware on it something that made sense for a long time but nowadays does it we
have 15 minutes okay panic mode time
uh i have no clue how the RGB works no if it wasn't for the RGB
we'd be in much better shape right now yeah
all right oh god my block installed
i guess i can mount the motherboard now though right yep so our time's up i am
honestly kind of tempted to abandon our RGB fan pursuit here
yeah that's fair enough okay motherboard's in so here goes our
pci express extension which conveniently covers up our pump here so can i just
plug this into the RGB header on the motherboard
so my plan was to do like splitter on splitter okay so if we're gonna have to
put a mess of wires into it anyway we might as well put a commander into it
yeah i'm gonna tear them out all right
and i'm not gonna try and do it your way there's too much stuff in here now i'm
just taking the rads out and then taking the fans off literally undoing the first
20 minutes of work what a waste
well i guess it's GPU time uh i absolutely hate how gigantic this thing
is oh do we actually have to use that i mean we don't have to it's just
for better or for worse it's an easy way
to manage all the RGB on a bunch of Corsair crap and a bunch of fans in one
go what if i could put it right there
maybe yeah that's not bad i guess it's loop planning time wait do they have
adapters to the one with the spacer
i have no idea how to make those work they're three pin
but they don't have the four pin piece and the gap
this wouldn't have worked at all there's only three wires even though
there's four spots okay fine
forget addressable then we just go with the traditional ones
and we tear those strips out yeah so i'll undo all the work you did at the
beginning while you undo all the work i did at the beginning
so progress commander pro is gonna handle fan
control and the RGB for these fans and then uh how are we doing the RGB strips
again uh so they're just wired up to the cable
mod thing we're gonna have to have a splitter and then their proprietary thing that
plugs into SATA and how are we going to hide all of this
i don't know are we going to have to just cable ties
lttstore.com actually how do we even get into the reservoir is that down there
oh my god is it well the GPU has to come out then
okay we did not think about this at all if
we're gonna make use of the integrated like tubing runs
basically nothing we've done so far makes any sense yeah i have to take this
front radiator off again don't i i think so yeah
there's no way we're hard line tubing this no let's not do that
after an email chain with singularity we now understand how the loop works so
this radiator is supposed to go
this way with the fittings down now the whole thing makes a whole ton more sense
so i'm gonna focus on figuring out the RGB wiring while you start figuring out
how to build the loop and one of the other things that we discovered is that
rather than trying to do hardline bends to reach all these places
which really wasn't going to be feasible we are going to have to rely on some
kind of fancier fittings in order to reach all the
little nooks and crannies we are still doing hard line though right you know
what i'm on RGB duty and you might be thinking like you could come out
straight from here and then do a bend and a bend and then go around but
getting bends that close to each other are actually really hard because when
you heat one of them up the other one unbends itself gets melty so yeah
it doesn't really work well now that we've adjusted our expectations somewhat
this is actually going really smoothly oh did i just twist that
the wrong way wait what the hell is this
oh no i forgot about the RGB strips
we've already submitted to the ridiculous fittings gods why don't we
just put one of these in no no yeah wait wait just hear me this is like the money
shot bend you can't do a huge fitting for him hear me out just hear me out
okay humor me there boom
one bend oh no
no it doesn't even have to go that high okay hold on hold on i went over kill i
went over killed there yeah that's not that bad
it's like yeah yeah that's not that bad so what i've
decided is that the case RGB strips will
be controlled with just like the remote control the CPU block will be controlled
by the on-board 12-volt RGB header and
then all the fans will be controlled by Corsair software
well i think it's making tubes time like all things considered this really
doesn't look like it's going to be super difficult sweet
i am uh still working on RGB wiring
so i've got it in the right spot
if i pull too hard though i'm just going to unplug this connector down here
shoot it pulled out ah
i'm going to start actually cutting the hard line tubing all that i need to do
is just come in with a little measuring stick like this one
you put it in figure out exactly how long your tube needs to be mark that off
and then cut it for the ones with bends i really like this jig right here that
alpha cool has so you can just come in and then kind of put it up against both
repeating let's say we're doing this one right here the fitting
the fitting thereabouts you lock it
and then you know that it's going to be about 90 by
85 or so in fairness to singularity the instructions did say to do the RGB stuff
first so my personal method for hardline
tubing is you cut it with the saw but i find that it doesn't do a good job all
the time like you can see there's a little chip right here so you just cut it a tiny bit long and then you just
take the belt sander and bring it down to the final dimension if you don't have
a belt sander that's fine it's really easy if you take just like some
sandpaper put it on a table rub it around a bit come on
yes yes i have a dent in my hand
this is peak rat's nest right here
hey alex how is the pump powered uh is there even a pump in there
they're uh that might just be a pump cover uh
there's no pump huh there's packing material
oh man i gotta run more power i come bearing the world's ugliest pump
in goes our pump which now actually contains a pump all right so we have the
super small tube in there so now we can just swing the radiator
down and line it up just like that
and if everything is measured correctly it should oh come on come on
i really wish that we could leak test this right now like just this one fitting so is that lined up uh
not quite okay so it doesn't need to be slightly longer then yeah seems like it
okay do you want the led strips that came
with this case
what they were sitting next to it
you've got to be kidding me you know what though i just noticed the
one at the back is not sitting in the groove right
i just finished the wiring
go ahead and cut so here are the skinnier RGB strips that
those channels were designed for yo alex remember that RGB strip that i dented my
hand putting in yeah so long
what if you're supposed to run the RGB strip through from the other side i mean
the instructions do say run the RGB first but like
holy crap just put a slightly bigger hole there okay i think i've got it in
the right spot now this is gonna be one of our first 90 degree bends we do have
like jigs to get perfect 90 degrees but i think that the radius is going to be a
bit too big for where it needs to go so i'm just going to
do it by hand and then try and fit it and i think it'll be fine yeah that's
gone so well so far on this project alex although it's not going to feel super
duper great is you don't want to wear any gloves because one of the key things
is when you're bending it to make sure if there's any like little
ridges or stuff to get them out and you can only feel that with your bare hand
that doesn't sound like very good advice so i've got this tube in here and
you know it's the right length but i can't quite swing it around because of the fitting so i took the screws out up
here so we can just pull the whole thing up just a tiny bit
and then just lower it down on there and i think we're gonna be perfect alex the
more tubing you put in here the more challenging it's gonna be for me to
finish my RGB runs well it's not my fault that you've been spending what
like four and a half now i don't i don't even
want to hear it you know that this wasn't easy i don't
think i can fit the 24 pin under the plate i have decided
that i'm going to run the 24 pin out here and i'm just going to do this weird
kind of curvy thing here
little crease here do you think that's okay uh yes
yes at this point yes all right i'm gonna trim it
why even ask okay boom
i'm legitimately ready to help now um we need this to
bend from like here to here done okay so that's a simple 90 degree yep see if i
remember how to do this okay do you dare me to just free ball bend this 90
degrees sure
and it bubbled but this just seems to be kind of crappy
tubing okay well i'm gonna try again i think we're ready
three two one
looking fine actually i think this is the point in the video
where we have to admit that this is not easy though
no this is definitely not easy or fast how do i get all the melty stuff out
give it a little go we go and then you should be able to just like blow it up
i think that tube pretty much nailed it yeah it looks pretty good awesome
this is all i can do to tighten the collar on this fitting
try and kind of push against it with one finger
it's home stretch time guys so i'm doing up the power connectors for
the graphics card right here so naturally alex left me the trickiest
bends and one of the tricky things here is that it still has to stay perfectly
round and straight where it goes into the fitting
there i don't really have a way of checking this unfortunately
i think the tubing is good in terms of like the length and the angle i'm going
to call it i got it all right i see your confidence level is
high the system is full of paper towel
yep okay lttstore.com
oh dang pretty sick hey that's our res oh is it even going in
get in slowly get in there oh actually this is a good learnable moment see how
our pump is spinning and it's not technically running dry
there's lots of water in it but it wasn't actually moving much fluid that's
because there's too many bubbles caught so what we need to do find the on off
switch on our power supply where the devil is it there it is
see let that gigantic bubble come out
then fill up our reservoir a bit more
this is really cool you can really see the bleeding process
all right so now the pump can grab that water a lot
better you want to hit the power button metal
oh oh stop stop stop stop stop stop stop stopping i'm stopping what's going on uh
there's there's a really big leak i'm not entirely sure where
a really big o it's the pump the pump the oh god you've
got to be kidding me okay how easy is it to get at the oh
oh no yeah easiest water cooling my friggin
buttocks if you want to be able to easily drain a loop you need to have a drain port at
the very bottom of the system and so conveniently they provide one right here
we didn't put like a proper drain fitting on it or anything so we're just going to use the fill port we're going
to flip it upside down really we might not even have to do that we can
probably just stop her this flip it which will take this gigantic
air bubble and put it in the pump do some o-ring surgery and put it back
on yeah we actually can do that um dare me
to power it on for a couple of seconds to oh i just destroyed our tabletop
oh rip oh come on
um yeah what is that water there oh what's this
how are we gonna dry that i don't know that's like never ever ever
gonna dry i actually don't know if it got all the
way in i put it in really tight last time
because i was hoping it wouldn't leak and now i can't get it off
there we go got it wait
what's that sticker we didn't remove
uh i think that's the sticker that said to read the manual before doing anything
my ARM is stuck okay so now draining the loop is a
little trickier it's fine one second we can just get a little bit just get the
funnel a little bit just get the funnel look i mean this is going to be off in
like a matter of moments here alex it's leaking all over the table
move that way you move move your body that way oh geez
and then i'm gonna there's a lot of water what is stuck there what am i stuck on
okay
see that would have been fine i don't remember the last time i had a
water cooled build go this poorly it's still very very very full of water
oh god where's the water coming out uh must be the pump cool
okay yeah that's basically fine neat let's just get this mains power
away yep
so i just took apart this alpha cool pump here and yeah you can clearly see
that instead of around the outside it's supposed to go on the front just right
there like that oh my god
does the case come i saw them i saw them
i saw them and i was like yup
me o-rings in the case i even saw
them i was like i saw them and i wondered what are they for
i g i can guarantee you that this goes on
exactly where it's supposed to go up right in there and of course it's a
white one too so you so it looks better with the clear acrylic
in fairness to us i just read the whole manual
doesn't mention the pump once pretty sure in revision 1.1 it's going
to okay but that's good news then because
we didn't have any other leaks as far as we know but yeah so we can just put the
pump in and as long as everything works we're basically good to
go i saw them the next day
it's actually shocking how well this dried this out like even the water that
was stuck between this back cover here and the plexi is gone
so i feel pretty good about that the
power supply and stuff is probably dry so let's give you guys an
update then alex has made some modifications one is that the system has
been put back together uh the next is that our funnel
there we go now has an air return channel so it
should pour a little bit easier and last but not least
the o-ring is now clear
and we also leak tested it with the leak tester like we probably should have in
the first bit yeah that would have been smarter okay so theoretically this is
just a matter of dumping water into it and being off to the races yep let's do
it my RGB wiring could still be all wrong
oh geez you got to credit this case with being very easy to bleed the bubbles out of
yeah it's actually a pretty cool reservoir design
because it's so thin here the bubbles kind of come out slam against this wall
and then have to make their way to the top i like it oh okay
i feel like blue channel is not plugged in on this one
yeah because this one's going like RGB and this one's going just like rg i had
to guess one of the things is just like theoretically once Windows boots up this
will be it moment of truth not bad at all so how many hours was this it's
currently noon on the third day yeah we
didn't work on it for the full days though
so you say like eight hours yeah i think eight hours three hours okay but we're
done pencils down final peel
and that is one good looking machine how did you get the RGB fixed on the back
panel i poked it with a stick gorgeous
so for all the pain we actually ended up
with a pretty sick looking machine
and it's pretty compact for something with
quad 120 millimeter worth of radiators too but can it game
so we might have a problem alex but uh we might have officially outgrown doom
as a test title we're running at a locked 200 frames per second i can't
even drop below it on ultra details at 1440.
the good news is it looks great so this viewsonic elite monitor is actually
using the same lg one millisecond response time ips panel that we've seen
before which means that as you're whipping the camera around you retain a
lot more of the image sharpness than you would on a traditional ips
the other thing that i actually didn't realize about this going into it is that
it is overclockable so we'll just use our little
nipple based navigation system down here which by the way is the best oh geez
that's fine you'll be back soon enough and boom
we can flip over to 165 hertz suckas oh
this is a good chance to check our temps though so our GPU is sitting at a frosty
33 degrees max of 45.
and where's our CPU at max of 59.
nice man the system ended up looking good though oh yeah i'm glad we stuck
with the RGB even though it was a nightmare
you know maybe i'll come around to hardline tubing now it wasn't that bad
especially if you're willing to blow like a hundred dollars on fittings to
make it more palatable now we've got shadow of the tomb raider
loaded up and that looks like freaking
butter that is so smooth yeah even from the angle here looks pretty great well i
mean that's the benefit of an ips display right yeah all right so real
talk time this was far from the easiest
computer build we've ever done on Linus tech tips but
in fairness to singularity the water cooling part of it and particularly
things like the maintenance with the dedicated fill and drain ports actually
wasn't that bad you just need to familiarize yourself with how the layout
is supposed to work and some of the pieces that you're going to need
especially with respect to fittings to make your life a lot easier because this
is a no compromises machine it's in this small form factor with four by 120 mils
worth of water cooling capacity there are 16 processing cores in it so you
could render out huge jobs in a jiffy it's got a freaking rtx 2080 ti that hit
45 degrees after running 3d mark times
by and there's been no compromises on the looks either i think the accents on
the cables actually ended up looking darn good especially with the pink and
purple RGB color scheme that we've got going on in here now and
despite the occasional uh you know green wire visible somewhere
the hard line tubing we managed to cram it in there it doesn't leak
anymore and the best part of this whole build is that it'll cost you just five
thousand dollars with peripherals included wait
that's that's not really a plus nope well okay fine
even if one of these isn't looking good anytime soon maybe you can check out the
monitor and if not maybe you'll get lucky when we give away
two of these at the end of this video the viewsonic elite xg27 is wicked for
people who have anywhere from i'd say an rtx 2060 all the way up to an rtx 2080
ti like our build here that'll easily push out the 165 frames per second that
you'll need to fully take advantage of this monitor's capabilities in every
frame is going to have that nice fast one millisecond response time of course
if your rig can't always maintain 165 then g-sync can step in to lend a
helping hand to ensure that your animations are as smooth as they can be
now lots of frames are good but ones that are crispy
are also great so
head over to store.mkbhd.com
where you can use your awesome monitor
to you know with 1440p resolution to see
those amazing shirts and other merch items that are available on
store.mkbhd.com back to the xg270 qg it's got a built-in
headphone holder on the side which we actually really liked RGB lighting on
the back and of course a robust stand with height adjust swivel pivot and all
that good stuff so big thanks to you sonic for sponsoring this video and
letting us indulge in a build as sick as this one huge thanks to to sven and
daniel from singularity computers for sending us one of the first ones of
their new wraith case as well as a little bit of help via email and ek and
Gigabyte for sending us the vast majority of the hardware and of course
congratulations to marquez for hitting 10 million subscribers again check out
his merch shop.mkbhd.com
and also ltdstore.com