Maybe you missed it, but several months ago, ASUS released the best RTX 4090 ever, the ROG Matrix.
This represents the pinnacle of ASUS's manufacturing capabilities,
with higher clock speeds than any other 4090, liquid metal on the GPU die for maximum cooling
performance, and a 360mm radiator all-in-one water cooler built right in. The only problem?
It costs $3,200. That is twice the price of the Founders Edition card.
Republic of Gamers? More like Republic of Out of Touch?
I bet you could take that $1,600 premium and put it towards building your own custom loop.
I mean, you could probably even pay yourself a fair wage for the research and building the darn thing.
Oh, you're talking to me? Yeah, I bet you could buy a regular RTX 4090 and all of that stuff and still have cash to spare.
Okay, but where will I get the money? Well, here.
Hey, what? This is just a segway. To our sponsor, let's lay out some ground rules.
Adam's budget has to go towards a 4090 of his choosing, planning and purchasing all
components for a water cooling loop and paying himself to assemble it.
He's going to be paid the median wage of a Geek Squad repair agent,
which, according to Glassdoor, is $21.63 per hour.
Ready? Go! I quickly got to researching using resources from Jays2Cents and Reddit,
and I figured I have enough budget that I can splurge big time. So not only am I going to cool my GPU, I'm also going to cool my CPU,
and get an ultra premium water block for both of them.
And to deal with all that heat, I'm hoping a thick 480mm RAD will do the trick.
I spent 90 minutes and a lot of money during my shopping spree, and I think I did a pretty good job.
But let's see what Linus thinks. All right, let me see.
There's definitely some stuff that stands out immediately as not a great value.
However, when you look at what we're comparing it to, I guess I can forgive it.
Before we get into those details, though, I want to see if he outright missed anything that's going to cost him a penalty
once he's assembling the system. Cooling blocks for a CPU and GPU.
Check check. A pump and reservoir to make it simpler to fill the loop and move fluid around.
A big radiator with some fans to go on it. I don't know if these are the ones I would have chosen,
but hey, at least he's got them. Along with a high-performance phase-change thermal pad from LTT Store,
and some tubing and some fittings, both of which raise a couple of questions about his research for me.
For starters, this is his case. And while the Phanteks NV7 is both reasonably priced and attractive,
what it isn't is small. And Adam has only purchased 9.8 feet of this XT soft line mesh-sleeved tubing from Corsair.
It should cover the distance between all of his plumbed-up components,
but when you go with a thin-walled tubing like this one,
the loop layout matters a lot if you want to avoid kinks,
and this length doesn't leave him a ton of room for error.
As for his fittings, it's never a bad idea to buy ones that are explicitly compatible
with the tubing that you bought from the exact same vendor,
and these XF series compressions look pretty nice with recessed o-rings
and a pretty pleasing overall finish. The only thing I'd critique here is that he could have saved probably 20 or 30 dollars
by going with fittings from someone like Bixki. He also paid a butt ton of money for this 4090 water block,
probably about double what I would have spent. But who knows, maybe it's... oh.
Okay, it's very, very pretty.
And in fairness to Adam, even these excessive purchases,
above and beyond buying an RTX 4090, have put him nowhere near the cost of the ROG Matrix Platinum.
And he's still got seven hours of budget left to pay himself to build it.
Maybe he shouldn't have sprung for a $200 CPU block.
Overall though, not exactly how I would have done it.
These quantum surface radiators from UK have a very dense fin arrangement,
and I see nothing to indicate that these Thermaltake fans
have particularly high static pressure to take advantage of that.
But it should still offer good performance for both his GPU and his CPU,
and I don't see any other things here that promise to be a major showstopper.
And he passed one of the biggest stumbling blocks when he bought a block that was explicitly compatible with his exact model of GPU.
Okay.
So now we're going to mount our water block. I got this cool water block from EK.
I bought it because it looked cool. It could have gotten something that was like literally half the price,
and still would have been a great performance water block. But I was so confident about my budget that I felt that we could do this anyways.
We got our PTM7950.
You know, there is a video on lttstore.com
of the best way to put this stuff on.
And I have not watched it. A water block on.
So here is our tough gaming 4090.
While the ROG Matrix Platinum is based on the Strix platform by ASUS,
I figure that if it only gets like an extra 6% performance,
I might be able to squeeze an extra performance out of their tough series if I get lucky.
But now I have to take off all of this cooler to put it into this.
The Optimus water cooling. I don't know what the exact model is, but holy cow.
It's heavy. These guys are from like Chicago or something.
They're a pretty small company. And apparently this is one of the best water blocks on the market.
Do you know how I know that? I googled best 4090 water block and everyone said it was this.
I was just thinking, wow, I wish I had a way to organize my screws. But then I remembered that we have these handy dandy mod mats
that are going to be coming soon to LTTstore.com
that are the perfect thing for what I am doing. This is not going to worsen my budget, okay?
I know I might look like the kind of guy you could take home to your mama, but I'm a bad boy.
I void the warranty. Fun fact about these stickers.
Manufacturers put them on devices to intimidate you and make you feel like you're not allowed to tinker with devices you own.
But these warranty void stickers are not enforceable by law anywhere in America.
So if a company is refusing to give you service, you can always, you know, complain to the FTC about it.
Because it's complete BS. You bought the thing. You should be allowed to service it.
For the case, we got this big old Phanteks NV7.
It's massive. It's chonkin. It's got support for a 480 millimeter rad
because that's what I went with because it seemed like it was the best way to get
a lot of radiator for a little bit of budget, as well as it lowered the amount of fittings I needed,
which eight fittings, my God, they eat into your budget.
But I'm a little worried because it looks like my motherboard might not fit.
Yeah, so the ATX motherboard is a problem.
Let's see if we can take this little thing out and maybe we will be saved.
So while this computer has this really cool set of LEDs
that are actually totally cable-less, that line the motherboard tray,
we might not be able to use at least one of them.
But the good news is that I think that means our motherboard fits in.
Hey, look at that. However, we do need to consider that our radiator is going here, I think.
Or does this go along the top? Nope, one of these things is not like the other.
One of these things is a lot bigger.
It's so close. If we mounted it here, it fits.
We docked an hour and change to compensate for the 15 extra dollars for the two radiators
and for the trip to the store.
And now it went from being like, yeah, we got enough time to being like, okay, this is going to be kind of tight.
Let's figure out a pump mount. We got the Xd5 RGB Elite LCD from Corsair.
It's a pump res combo.
And that was just to simplify the number of components.
It's also got a cool screen, but right now it kind of looks like it's screaming.
I probably won't be spending a ton of time doing any cable management because boy, howdy,
I don't have a ton of time.
Yeah, it's tubing time. We've got both of our radiators mounted, one at the top, one at the bottom.
And I think we are going to be just peachy. I use soft tubing because I don't hate myself and I didn't want to do hard tubing and I needed
this to be possible. Also, the ROG matrix, it doesn't use hard tubing.
It uses soft tubing. So yeah, I'm pretty sure you're just going to like shove it on there.
And then these are compression fittings. So what they do is that when you screw them on,
they tighten the edges, they have these little prongs.
And then they tighten around that and then that gets your tube nice and tight and sealed.
And then it don't leak, hopefully.
So I can be too tight of a bend for this tubing.
I guess I can go to the top one and then that can go up.
And that prevents the fear of kinky.
Though I have no fears of kinks.
My phone number is 6-0. This isn't exactly a precise way of measuring things,
but I figure it's good enough, right?
It's got to go a little bit longer than that. So I'm going to go here and that goes on right there.
Maybe it won't matter when I fill it with water.
I don't know, man. Damn, look at this beauty.
What the heck is this tube? Did he decide to buy this?
Oh, I thought this was like sleeving. Oh God, this is terrible.
Dude, look, feel this. Oh yeah, it's actually awful. But like, put your hand right here.
Like she's done, bud. Yeah, that's just not going to work. Yeah, that's a sort of interesting mix and match of brands here.
Got some EK. We got some Corsair. We got some Optimus. These blocks are super nice.
That's a really expensive pump. That's the fanciest pump I've ever seen.
But then why this tubing? Is this Corsair? These are Corsair fittings too.
These are f***ing ugly.
Everything about this build looks great except these fittings and tubes.
Does he have any 90 degrees? Oh, there's not a chance that this fitting right here
is going to work out in any way. Yeah, like he could make this CPU to GPU line work.
It's just too long right now. But you know, you go like that and you're done.
This box cost $40.
It's the worst tubing I've ever seen. All I got to say is good luck, man.
Because I don't have a lot of extra tubing, I need to make sure that every time I make a cut,
I can only go, this cut only needs to be shortened. So I always want to have a little bit extra because
if I screw up a cut and it's too short, I lose like this whole length as opposed to like maybe losing like a centimeter
or half an inch or something, you know? Oh, I need to change this.
So this top thing, this needs to go here. This is the outlet port.
This needs to go to the inlet. One tiny little cut.
Holy crap. I think we're done.
Okay, now we just got to turn on and make sure everything's working.
And then we're going to start filling with water. This is amazing. An hour and 15 minutes to go.
Little did Adam know his journey was far from over.
I think we're screwed, boys. Turns out that this pump doesn't just use the USB power.
It also requires to be connected to a Corsair IQ Link box
that of course they don't include, which means I have to make a trip to the store
if I want this pump to work. It doesn't matter if you don't care about any of the smart features.
You can't just run the pump off of the USB header. You have to connect it to a Corsair IQ Link.
I should have expected Corsair to pull this kind of bullshit.
In my defense, Corsair does a great job of not telling you anywhere on the main page on their website.
You actually have to go into the tech specs, I believe,
and then go, no, nothing here that says it's required.
If I go to guides, maybe. So I'd have to look at that. I'd have to review the manual.
They also do a great job of not showing it to you on the box, except for this tiny little thing that says the IQ Link is required.
It costs $60? Are you kidding me?
And it's not even like we can return something like we did with the radiators.
I just have to spend $60 more.
This is how much time I got left.
It's now counting upwards to demonstrate how much time I'm wasting
and how much in debt I will be at the end of this. Okay, we have our funnel and our distilled water,
and this is going to be a pain in the a** to pour, isn't it?
This is kind of terrifying. Do you see any drips anywhere?
So what's wrong here? Like, why isn't...
Basically, what's happening is that there's air in the tubes already,
and that would be preventing the water from going. So maybe if I give it a little bit of a tip...
It's flowing in a circle. You can see it coming down the inlet. Yeah, you see that?
No drips, no drips.
Let's do this. We're finally up and running, and I'm running combustor and Cinebench at the same time,
and I am actually blown away. I was expecting temperatures to not be as good as they are,
but we're running Cinebench 2024. We're at like 70 degrees on the CPU,
80 degrees on the hottest core, and then on the GPU, we're running combustor at 4K.
50 degrees Celsius. We have so much room to crank this thing up another notch.
I am really excited. I didn't think it would go this well. We also haven't even done our heating and cooling cycles,
which benefits PTM7950, so it could get even better.
We could get even cooler than what we have right now. You know what?
I kind of get it. I kind of get why people water cool.
This is so cool, seeing people get it.
It's so not worth the money. So not worth the money.
And this look on his face right now, it goes the other way when it leaks.
You might look at the timer back there, and you'll notice that it's counting up.
We went over budget. Oh no. But we were really, really close,
and I'm mostly blaming Corsair. Tell me about that.
So you buy their pump. Right? You do. And I still do.
Yeah. I mean, I bought their pump. Pretty expensive pump. It's very fancy.
It doesn't run at all without also buying
a sold separately IQ link hub. I also, I saw the braided exterior tubing that you bought,
and I was like, that seems like it'd be a really cool look, but I have concerns about cutting it cleanly,
and then it's still looking good where you tighten the collars on the compression.
Yeah, it looks like ****. When you go here, it looks great,
but when you get right up to the compression fittings, you can see this one I had to do a few times.
I can see that. And it's already worn.
The reason why these aren't on, all these fans connect through these pogo pins,
and this fitting right here interferes with this getting a proper contact
to actually send the signal. They should all run. I just have to flip.
I just have to turn them all the way over here. Yeah, why did you choose thermal take fans?
Um, because I wanted RGB. Okay.
And I didn't want to spend too much money on RGB.
I see. I got six of these for half the price of three-course air fans.
Yep, that's fair enough. Yeah, if you had both of these rads actually running,
you'd have plenty of radiator right now, and you would be getting better temperatures.
You can really tell whether your bottleneck is the thermal transfer between the CPU and the block,
or whether your bottleneck is the dissipation of the heat to the surrounding air
by just touching the side of your radiator,
or just here, touch the fins. Oh yeah, that's warm. You've got to throw some more heat into the air here.
Yeah. Even your reservoir feels hot. Uh-oh.
What's the coolant temperature? We can see it. 43. Oh, that's getting up there. Yeah.
So eventually we're going to be getting saturated, right, and then it just keeps freezing or...
What happens is the bigger the delta, the bigger the difference in temperature
between the surrounding air and the coolant, the more efficient the thermal transfer.
So you reach a point of equilibrium where as the liquid heats up,
the difference from the ambient air gets greater, and the heat transfer gets greater,
so it flattens out. The GPU's still so far below its thermal limits.
Okay, I can explain that. The regular form factor for GPUs
is really not conducive to carrying heat away from them.
Having a fan blowing down onto a heat sink this thick
with these super skinny low-static pressure fans
sucks. We've done experiments in the past where we put a tower cooler onto a GPU
and they run flipping cool, even though the cooler itself
weighs less than the gigantic coolers that we put on GPUs these days.
GPUs are actually much easier to cool,
even though they're 400 watts compared to, you know, 200 to 300 for a CPU,
because the dies are so big. You have so much surface area to carry that heat away
compared to a CPU, like especially on Intel, where the die is this big
and it's 250 to 300 watts. GPU, you know, 400 watts of that big, no big deal.
Oh, you spent so much money on your block.
I had so much money to spend. Well, you could have made up for the budget overrun
on that IQ controller and your time overrun if you had just gotten a reasonably priced block.
That's true. But I think that's pretty realistic. Like when you did your first water cooling,
did you get every single part correct? Well, maybe you did. No, I think that assumption is why people
can feel afraid to try new things. And no, I absolutely screwed up.
My first water cooling setup was a thermal take,
big water SE. It was a piece of shit, complete waste of money.
I thought that what I was buying was an all-in-one setup
that could be expanded in the future to, you know, go full custom.
I didn't realize that everything about it was complete garbage.
And I will say that the information that's out there to help people start water cooling is so much better.
It's a lot better. Really great. Like I was referring to a lot of Jay's two cents guides
because his water cooling guides were awesome. It helps.
They were great for somebody like me, but also had depth that I wasn't even bothering to go into.
Like he's like, here's how to hard line. And I was like, I'm not, not today.
Clearly not. So what you want is one of these.
So this is a 3 eighths inch ID, 5 eighths inch OD.
What you have is a 3 eighths inch ID, half inch OD.
So you can see how much skinnier that wall is.
So you want thick wall tubing. This is the optimal size.
But now we need to answer the question. Does this beat the ROG matrix?
I don't think we can answer that question until we answer, did you have fun?
You know, since it wasn't any of my own money,
I had a grand old time. But how does my system compare to the incredible power of the ROG matrix?
It comes close, but not as close as I thought. Across the games I tested,
I found the tough gaming GPU lagged behind about 5 to 10%.
Not being satisfied, I decided to put on a quick and dirty overclock.
I found that I was able to pretty much match the ROG matrix.
Not bad. Back to spending the money though. I think it doesn't really matter whose money it was,
because that wasn't the point. The point was, we're going to spend this money,
do we spend it on a matrix ROG 4090,
or do we spend it on ourselves? Do we spend it on learning something
and water cooling components that we can carry forward to future builds
and the experience of DIYing something? So with that in mind, who do you think won?
You know, I think it was a lot more fun to water cool.
And the idea that the ROG matrix could just crap out,
and then I'm in the same spot I am now with a GPU that I would have to take apart and water cool anyways.
I feel like I'm better. Yes, there's going to be maintenance that I have to do. I'm going to have to make sure that my loop doesn't get clogged.
And there's a whole, maybe in the long run, if I keep paying myself at $21 an hour,
the ROG matrix might come out on top. But this is way more fun, way cooler.
And I can also sell these. If I go, oh, I don't want to water cool anymore.
I can, anything but the radiator pump and reservoir is not worth much.
Okay. You can't sell tubing blocks whole like a quarter of their value
if you're lucky on a CPU and basically nothing for GPU.
With all that in mind, then would you do it again?
Yeah, that sounds about right. But would you tell the people about our sponsor?
If you guys enjoyed this video, you might enjoy the time that Elijah tried his first hard line tubing experience.
Yeah, I'm not that brave.