with 600 watts of chilling goodness according to the seller this thing
should be able to take even a top-of-the-line gaming PC to Heights
never before imagined but then given that the seller didn't even manage to
include an essential control board in our order I have some strong doubts
about our chances here so then why are we doing this for years we used City
skylines as a CPU Benchmark because its complex simulations could bring even the
stoutest of processors to a boil and today City skylines 2o will carry on
that proud tradition in a big way taking advantage of and this is a direct quote
all the available processing power of the multicore CPUs that's right
developer colossal order has created a simulation engine that is so detailed
and nuanced that it raises the question are we living in it so when the
publisher Paradox reached out asking to sponsor a video showing off their new
hotness we knew what we had to do build the absolute fastest computer we could
and then put their scaling claims to the test by making it even faster with this
incredibly sketchy Chiller from AliExpress now that we're all caught up
let's get into
it the inspiration or blame depending on
your point of view for this idea belongs to user tap tap tap tap on on the LTD
forum who linked us to this Chiller on AliExpress but as it turns out that was
just the tip of the cooling Iceberg and there's a whole company called FS Thermo
that sells MINI chillers like this for all kinds of applications including CPU
cooling and after looking at some of the options we went with a chiller that is
for spot cooling because it looked like it would be easier to integrate into a
computer cooling Loop and has a tasty
600 watts of cooling potential on tap
the only problem is that the seller FS Thermo only has a
66.7% positive rating on AliExpress and
our chiller arrived looking sorry one second like this which is fine I mean
the chiller itself seems wholly undamaged but there was almost zero
documentation other than what we could find online and even there the
specifications are basically non-existent other than they did clarify
that the certification for this is none
so I guess it's up to us to explain what you're looking at here on your left is
our compressor which takes Vapor refrigerant in this case R134a and well
compresses it from there it travels through this tube to our condenser where
the refrigerant turns from a gas into a liquid with that change of phase dumping
a bunch of thermal energy from our system into the air using this big fan
and the attached radiator from there the
liquid refrigerant travels to the sensing bulb which lets the correct
amount of refrigerant through this tiny capillary coil here until it hits the
expansion valve where the pressure drops and the refrigerant begins to turn back
into vapor this liquid Vapor mixture
then enters our heat exchanger where the vapor gets super heated by the water
that is Flowing to our CPU and presumably our GPU nope just a CPU just
a CPU oh okay this is going to be fun
then that superheated Vapor gets sent back to the compressor and the cycle
continues at least that's how it should work in theory but as I alluded to
before the chiller arrived at our offices missing two key Parts the first
of which was a power supply but that one was easy enough we bought this 24volt DC
meanwell power supply off Mouser Electronics and we should have been good
to go except we were also missing a
control board which we discovered the hard way when we spent several hours
trying to figure out well if we have all the pieces why the heck can't we figure
out how to turn this thing on we'll have a cutdown version of that misadventure
at LMG Dogg flat plane but long story
short as it turns out this board here only does compressor power fan power
dual temperature readings AKA literally
everything you need to have a functioning Chiller except the ability
to turn it on which requires a art command to be sent to this header right
here so if you happen to be watching this FS Thermo first of all thank you
for the excellent customer service taking my call at 7:00 in the morning
and getting us this main board within a week but secondly can you please just
let customers know what they need in advance so that they don't have to call
you in the first place of course all of that's in the past and now that we have
everything we need we should be good to go to do a test run right oh yeah which is great why is it that when he tells me
something's not going to work I'm afraid it's not going to work and when he tells
me something is going to work I'm even more afraid it's not going to work it's
going to work it's 100% going to work let's go pump how's our temperature
looking brilliant probably tap water temperature so about 21° cool now
theoretically if we fire up the chiller
do I just do it yeah oh yeah got this
this is so much more promising it made noises and stuff this time then it says
cop I don't know what that stands for but if you press up poo a bunch of times
yeah it it gets more cooler okay
theoretically because we have no heat load going into this whatsoever this
thing should get cold pretty flipping fast then yeah I'm just going to
increase the cop until uh okay well we
already dropped a degree so 650 is as high as it goes now we know that fan
appears to rip yeah there's no uh fan control it
just it goes uh are we going to freeze this water or is it moving fast enough
we're not worried about that uh we're a bit worried about that I say we try well
interesting is we are below 0° and I mean we're still liquid it's
moving fast enough super cooled liquid I bet it would taste delicious I've never
had a drink that's below zero you can have all of the nice fibers from the
factory in China that made that heat exchanger I mean it's probably good for
you doesn't taste that much colder in L spr plasticy I wonder why it turned to
ice it's all ice now it's time to build the computer and we definitely have some
challenges we grabbed this out of inventory thinking it was a CPU block
what it actually is is a CPU block Reservoir pump combo this would not be
ideal for this it might be cuz I don't know where we're going to put the pump
yet it's not ideal it's too much to insulate I forget okay but but just look
at this though that is not in any way
that EK tries okay they do really well at a lot of things that picture is not
one of them this will be a little bit easier to handle but truth
not by much I have my work cut out for me insulating this motherboard did you
at any point give thought to my idea of reusing the block from the EK cryo
cooler thing I did yes and that's just not going to work at all it cools the
tech not the CPU bummer wait where the hell did we get a 14900 K Intel this is
out yet yeah as of the video coming out it will be though oh sick well we've got
the 14900 K yeah you've already said that in this video you didn't like clock
that was 14th gen not all all of us can run over 6 GHz okay well that can't
either it runs six you absolutely cannot break it Gary will kill us they need to
redo some of the testing cuz BIOS changes it runs way better now you know
that kind of stuff and we only have one y only one what could go wrong well I
just works on that I'm going to figure out how the heck we're going to mount this Chiller to our case yeah I thought
we were putting it inside the case no it doesn't fit I thought we have cases
it'll fit well only the case lab seven Gamers one CPU tower 900 okay forget it
I potentially ruin it there's a few cool things about the motherboard we're using
this is the z790 taichi light from ASRock it has all the goodness of the
regular z790 taiichi it's wicked fast this is the same board we used to get to
6.9 GHz but they removed all the RGB and
extraneous crap that you don't need so it costs over $100 less which means that
if I do ruin it I will feel slightly less bad this is all the artist eraser I
have that is not even close to enough what happened to all of our artist
eraser I don't know why are you looking at me cuz you're the one who always uses
it yeah we've also got nail polish and
conformal coating I want to BL with nail polish and
conformal I do need dialectric grease I hate this so much speaking of things
that you potentially hate what do you think of this pump radiator layout looks
good to me all
right I don't think we need the farting sound effects Alex they were implied for
those of you wonder wondering the point of what I'm doing is to prevent any
condensation that forms on the CPU from shorting it out and that condensation is
very likely because it's going to be so cold that any moisture in the air is
going to turn to liquid as soon as it touches it any air pocket is a risk
which makes these LGA sockets extremely Troublesome to insulate I mean
realistically this is more for if you're going to daily Drive Subzero and we
could suicide run this without putting a bunch of grease in the socket but it's
right in the name suicide run Gary wants it to not be broken so all right fine
Gary she swosy my apology is fantex I
don't think this is what you expected when you sent this case over but uh here
we go shoot Alex this block will not work
at all why not this uses their exact Mount I have no room for the foam
insulated back plate do we need
this I'll make it work we just slather
that in grease put that down there and cold today this is looking a lot more
like a suicide run with every passing moment tasty yeah this is not what comes
to mind when I think tasty PC to get the water from the outside of the case to
the inside of the case we're using these nice little pass through thingies and in
order to install these we need to drill some more
holes you're shaking my workspace over
here nice for a quick run I'm calling
this good enough cryon not more like
cryo yes all right how does this look
probably bad what this is the best looking thing I've ever seen on a
computer looks like performance I'll give you that now I just need to install
the power supply I made these nice little L brackets here out of a couple L
brackets but when I designed it I was
thinking that this right here was like in a 5000d where you can take out this
piece for the fans but you can't so you either get to choose between putting
these screws in or or these screws in so we're not going to put these screws in
they are now zip ties never mind I use my teeth yeah that's about the vibe of
this project there that should help a lot now all I need to do is stick these
four posts through the holes that I can no longer see and hope that this makes
contact I have have to poke these holes
better now I can even see where the holes are ha you're making that look way
too easy I am it's not easy I need this
last one to catch I got three of them actually come on hey I got it my torque
test for the hold Downs is going to be whether it slips in my greasy fingers or
not I'm going to go as far as I can I'm not entirely sure why but fantex put the
power supply in this case on a bit of an
angle it's strange and makes me feel uncomfortable but it's also exactly
perfect for this cuz I put a little grommet here and my other c-13 can just
go straight through there do the other powers apply very nice a quick note in a
perfect world we wouldn't be using an acrylic or Plexi topped block for
Sub-Zero coola in the short term like what we're doing it's okay but if you
ever wanted to go chilled liquid for a long-term build you would want to get
something that is all delin or acetel on the top are you ready for the board sure
let's hope it fits I left the top of the block uninsulated so we can watch the
ice form uhoh that CPU socket doesn't quite line up with the CPU
cutout uh you know what I think it's fine it might actually still
work no hurry but this is requiring a fair amount of force to hold in place
okay and then in terms of other ones I don't know maybe it doesn't look super
happy when you push it like that well don't maybe don't push it like that then
pretty D happy here let's do this one to make sure that we're nice and
safe and don't have just exposed 12 120 volt in our case we're using hwk glue it
might seem kind of sketchy but this is actually a pretty good way to do it what I want to know is if this thing still
works at all if this fires up that tells us two things one whether the
motherboard still works at all and two whe whether our CPU block is actually
mounted correctly or not cuz if the CPU instantly hits 100° it means I probably
don't have a good Mount and I have to pull the whole thing apart it's not posting and I have a pretty good guess
of why oh no RAM oh got ahead of myself
a little bit there for RAM we've made a very odd Choice we've gone with these
non-s spreaded crucial sticks that are ddr5 4800 but 32 gigs each okay so we
wanted 128 gigs of RAM is RAM a thing for City skylines 2o yeah so I played
the first one a lot and the only time that I ever ran out of RAM with 64 GB
was playing the first one modded what about second attempt did it do a thing
oh ha it lives yes you wouldn't really
expect a GPU bottleneck to be a potential thing for a citybuilding game
so what's with the overkill RTX 490 well
this is a new citybuilding game it can stress the crap out of your CPU and your
GPU oh yeah oh yeah now we shall see I
don't think it's going to fit oh yeah oh wow oh she fits sick not even a
millimeter oh fancy I know right new
retro colorway you can sign up for a notification LTT Store.com for these
fittings that we're using they're for servers so we're supposed to be using
these clamp tummies that go on and when
they're attached they just do not come off but uh they're kind of a pain to use
so inste just using zip ties ideally to control this Chiller we would have
thermal probes that would be connected right there and right there those would
give us our water temperature and the exhaust temperature of the condenser and
that way we' be able to properly have this control everything we don't have
those thermal probes though so we're going to be doing all of it manually and
just using the fluke for that I put a tiny little hole in this stop fitting
I'm going to Chuck a thermal probe into to try and prevent too much condensation
buildup on our lines here we have we are insulating them using this
stuff all right I'm going to finish chopping up the loop you got the RAM I
only put in half the RAM just to make sure that it would work before we tried to load it up with
128 gigs this is really not ideal for overclocking Alex Noe okay at least he
knows all right you want to hit the button uh oh I turned it off
oh want to try again uh-oh there we go oh jeez woo top number
is the temperature of our water bottom number is the temperature of the exhaust
oh okay and all I do is mash the far
left button far right button so that's on up okay hey now it should turn on and
more up is more better yes in that case I'll have all the up thank you that is
an annoying high-pitched wine that I didn't hear last time we just matched
ambient temperature for our coolant which is the lowest you can
theoretically go without some kind of powered cooling like pelta module or a
phase change cooler uhuh we're at 13° so we do need to actually move pretty
quickly here uh you could just like reduce the power on the thing nope
that's not really an option for me oh I love these panels we used the same
artwork as the cityscape designer mouse pad from LTX this looks flipping amazing
oh I get it cuz City skylines it's a city skyline
yes it's very literal also we're at 7.5
de now this is when like condensation is really an issue I know I'm trying to get
this on one second does this controller support hooking up a temp probe and
saying hey I have a Target temperature I mean it has the inputs for it we just
didn't do that we don't have them now but we do have control over the power of
the chiller we're just choosing not to turn it down yes okay I'm firing up
Hardware info holy crap our core temperatures are 8 flipping degrees oh
yeah we're getting condensation on resir oh my God we're at 1.8 we're
getting condensation on the front of the CPU block hit it hit it with a
load all right there it goes 66° 71
72 okay hold on but is our water temperature going to go up pumping 300
watts of heat into this thing not in this amount of time I don't think no no
give it we're up to 3.5 3.6 our block
4.2 our block is definitely spitting hotter water back into the reservoir 4.7
we are going to need to run a longer test here all right let's uh okay no I
do need I do need a load no no one one second we have I need a load oh right
City skylines too that makes sense yes the whole point of the video hi Paradox
I'm amazed how well that's working yeah the heat is rising right off the back of
the GPU and preventing any condensation
from forming on the CPU block even on the fittings like they're cold to the
touch but they're not sweaty see credit
to lonus Y no cold points in there other
than where we intentionally left it so that you could see the cool acrylic block y we should check the back of the
board though how bad is it it's fine it's all room temp nice this is great
because it means we're not going to be stuck with some short wimpy oh no I'm
afraid I'm going to kill it Benchmark session we're going to be able to overclock this thing and really see how
far we can push it with chilled liquid we might want to
insulate the uh Reservoir though I a
true sweaty gamer I mean it's not going to drip on anything important yeah true
should be fine should be fine also with
cin bench running our coolant up to 10° now oh nice so it's not going to stay
like that for long and I'll be interested to see where this stops because if we land somewhere in the 10
15° range honestly this thing's kind of looking pretty awesome tell me about the
situation with this game we got everything cranked obviously right or do
we have it set to CPU burn preference here we go s simulation
nice wait is this running at 20 frames
per second I have cine bench running in the background C bench would do it yeah
when you have an all core load running in the background that uh is suboptimal
holy crap it's still running at
25 okay I've seen press coverage of this
but I haven't actually obviously seen the game running yet what the actual is
going on here look at the level of
detail I wouldn't even be surprised to find people in the buildings these are
all individual people yeah where's uh this person going home poorly educated
oh lonus I don't live on Victoria Street
so you live in this building this is
amazing well we're up to 40 FPS now yeah you zoomed in a little bit though yeah
when we go to the full 100,000 City she she chugs wow but wait what's the
bottleneck here we are still sitting at 40° on our CPU the GPU is what's
struggling right now interesting okay well why don't we turn down our GPU
details a little bit level of detail if you drop that I guess that will kill
motion Blair too while we're at it oh yeah motion blur hey there we go oh but
now I can't see all the little people from way out here okay well I mean we
can zoom in and see it I guess oh uh did we mention this is an early build of the
game oh did those Shadows fix themselves yeah oh no they're still a little bit
glitchy they get a bit strange did we just not notice it before we might not
noticed it we might have just been marveling at the level of detail and not
worrying about it I've got to admit I've never gotten into City skylines but I am
a fan of the genre and I got to say this looks really enticing okay hold on we
got to we got to alleviate some of our GPU bottleneck here still though we are
at 96% maybe just turn it all the medium or medium cat oh Dynamic resolution turn
that off CPU usage just jumped to
40% and we are still at 35°
uh-oh our coolant at 5 Alex we need more
load turn the details down go go go go go we need more people in our city oh
hey they're simple and advanced what's Advanced
whoa okay Fidelity effects this is
awesome proper anti-aliasing controls I
don't remember the last time I saw a details configuration menu that was this
deep in the past for City skyline
we would Benchmark it by just going to a really busy Junction kind of like this
one right here Y and we just look at it
oh wow yeah you can really see the CPU usage Spike yeah cuz it'll become GPU
bound when you're looking at like the whole city like this I don't think we're
going to be able to push it that hard Alex what is this who W go go go go go
look at that it's supposed to be a muscle C it's missing assets still did
we mention this is an early build of the game I think if we want it to go faster
mhm our GPU needs to go faster I don't think that's going to help us enough cuz
that's not going to change the simulation load much yeah no we need a
larger map yeah I don't think we're going to get above 35% CPU usage oh oh I
got 45 there for a sec I love that we have a 14900 K running at 35% usage at
38° our coolant temps are 7° we finally
tamed it Alex Intel's high end defeated
by AliExpress oh God that's sweating a lot now hold on a second boom boom pathf
finding I just hit 43% CPU usage huh
what if I just change a bunch of stuff just plunk them down everywhere I mean
that's a valid city building strategy right who boom roundabout boom
roundabout okay so like I don't know like some overclocking later wow did you
ever spend a lot of money no wait made a lot of money yes things are working
quite well so first of all you know how we were having that weird shimmering on
all of the oh that's all fixed shadows and stuff yeah so if you turn on t TAA
it's fine for whatever reason you can only see TAA in advanced but at least
Advanced is there Advanced is there and you can do a lot with it also I saw CPU
usage is quite a bit higher we're at about 40% sometimes yeah upping the
simulation speed really UPS the amount that the CPU needs to do also over the
weekend it turns out Gary's a really big fan of this game so he was like I need
to babysit the contractors and stuff and I can see if we can get it up to where
it'll fully stress this oh fantastic but maybe we'll see we'll see okay there was
a particular citizen that I wanted to check in on I've only followed one
citizen you can see who you followed over
here he's happy in going home he's poorly educated what what is he walking
home from school why is he at school at
4:30 in the morning and do you see how there's a load of people here uh yeah
you know how you added the uh the bunch of skyscrapers over in that area yeah
yeah I did do that yeah it completely ruined all of the traffic
oh uh so I fixed it mostly by just adding in skywalks here so everyone can
get to the subway cool but there's a lot of people going to the subway I see yeah
no I don't know how to play this game it looks so amazing though oh speaking of
looks amazing I brought Andy over here because the camera controls in this are
insane like if you come down here yeah
sensor size what why do you have a 65 mm
Alexa and so you need to go to focal length to actually have that like change
stuff but then you can just like drag it and make it kind of whatever you want
lens shift it gets pretty funky when you get really wide but you can D in the
sensor side in that's hilarious oh my god when yeting Bloom like motion blur
depth of fil oh my God color adjustment
wi balance brightness all right why can't our camera have those all right
all right get okay all right oh yeah and you can also do uh What's this called
you can key frame animations oh so you
can set up like a drone shot yeah
overclocking not very successful yeah I kind of imagine that would be the issue
I mean this chip is already overclocked it's basically a 13900 K which was
already impossible to overclock in spite of the temperatures being well under
control yeah I did manage getting the temperatures better so stock it was
hitting like 380 Watts or so wow and I was able to
bring that down to about 330 with a bit more performance
okay turns out to undervolt you need to unlock it in the
BIOS but you can so whatever I was able to get a 5% increase mostly on eor okay
oh cool but hey at least the game really impressed us yeah I like the chiller I
love this computer I actually am super happy with the chiller too after we got
everything sorted out CPU is pretty dumb though you notice we didn't even bother
doing a full review of it but you know what we did bother to do oh right we
don't have a segue to our sponsor it's parad
uh City skylines 2 go check it out available now on Steam if you enjoyed
this video you might enjoy the last time Alex and I went Subzero with something
which was in a bed oh God it was