rces 2019 coverage is brought to you by the dbrand grip super grippy case and
dbrand's prism screen protectors we're here in the ASUS rog component
suite which also clearly is not fully
set up yet but we found some really cool stuff in here so they've got this demo
system that's not running yet oh my god that's heavy
i am not going to mess with that too much but it's clearly water cooled it's
clearly got a motherboard that we have never seen in person before oh let's
just open it up look at that um so this is their dominus extreme i'll show you
that in a little bit more detail later and they've got the first ever
water-cooled video card that doesn't have like an external
radiator with tubing to it that you gotta like put over here anyway that's
that system's not actually running yet but that doesn't matter because i've got
the key components over here so this i was actually thinking of doing a
dedicated video called Intel your desperation is showing or something like
that this is going to run their upcoming 28 core overclockable CPU but the reason
we didn't end up doing a dedicated video even though this thing is nuts look at
this four eight pin CPU power connectors
three pci express power connectors
and two 24 pin connectors like the
entire top of the board is just vrm this
entire thing is just power delivery um the reason we didn't end up doing a
video is because we don't really know anything about it six channel memory
yeah just like the xeon platinums for pci express slots um
we don't know pricing of the board we don't know pricing of the CPU we don't
know what realistic overclocking results are Intel showed five gigahertz but that
was on like very very chilled liquid so it just it's kind of like a it's like a
showpiece right now it's all it really is but
now i'm not going to help ASUS with too much of their booth setup here but i did
find this power brick that is trailing out the
back of this thing that wasn't plugged in that seems to fire up the fans on the
card and there's a usb cable back here that i'm going to go ahead and plug into
my hey my portable power battery bank
hey look at that see i'm helping i am helping i mean i'm not gonna leave my
battery bank here but that that's not the point also i'm gonna unplug this because
guess what i got i got my tool kit
so we're gonna have a look at what exactly
a water-cooled graphics card like this yes
oh man hopefully this even like
can be pulled off because i've sort of committed to it now
no it's fine guys chill i'm not gonna break it
no that's fine look if they didn't want
a bull running around in their china shop
they shouldn't have had
him on the guest list okay so
the crazy thing about this is that from the front
from the bottom from the back from the side everything about it looks
fairly normal to the uninitiated
and you know even to the fairly initiated i would say so i think this
shiny piece here has to come off yeah okay i thought there might be a screw
under there i no longer believe that there's a screw under there anyway
one hint as to what we're about to see though is
this so that is like more of a uh like a a water
block style cold plate down there and then it appears as though they're using
the same kind of pump and water block combo unit that
we've seen in aio coolers and then if we look closely instead of just heat pipes
running to uh aluminum fins we've got a radiator here
it's just bolted to the front of the card now i want to get a better look at
it i'm having a really hard time figuring out where the additional screws
are
you know what i'm doubling down
i'm doubling down on my the screws are under here theory
i have more than one of these here right yep okay
i don't know if they have another one to put back on their little demo stand
though i mean this adhesive seemed to go back on pretty well
i just want to see the radiator i tried to stop it
okay so there were three screws on the bottom we got those up i haven't taken
it apart you haven't taken it apart so so you're okay
so it it seems more dominoes
okay so it seems like there's something holding it over here
yeah gary mentioned you wanted to take it apart something along here i just want to be able to show the radiator and
the block like kind of show how it goes together this adhesive i've had it up and down
once already it seems to be holding together pretty well
in case you were curious you know what
i think i might know what's going on here i think i might not have the right
screwdriver for this there's three screws that are just
barely accessible through the back here yeah
and this is all i have and i can't get to them
you know the ifixit kit yeah i even thought about grabbing my like more
traditional jewelers screwdrivers but they look so much like a weapon i didn't
want to put them in my luggage i am look like the right screws though
really annoyed yeah so i can put this plate back
on um that sucks
sorry whoa whoa hold on okay no no i was just putting the card
back together i had given up i found the screws
so they're uh they're back there but i left my my like traditional jewelers
screwdrivers at home but then this was sitting down here
and it was like that kind of looks like a tool kit but
why does it have this on it apparently
to make sure that no one will open it
because that's exactly what i need
okay so let's try this
this is gonna be really really hard to put back together
i legitimately don't know if i'm going to be able to put these screws back in
and but they're already out now so since the ship has sailed
we might as well just proceed
like if you're already going to hell you know
why stop i think i got it
there we go those three screws released this
nice okay where's my screwdriver
get off there off she goes
there it is
so that is how they're doing it and i'm glad that i got this popped off because
there's already at least one thing that i got wrong here
um so i was telling you guys that it
looked like they had used a pump CPU block combo here but what they've
actually done is they've used this
compact pump right here so this allows
ASUS to avoid any issues with the acetech patent that prevents
third parties from using unlicensed
block pump combo units and
it still manages to be small enough to
install directly on top of a graphics card now in terms of the cooling
capacity here crazily enough they actually haven't
compromised much there so as far as i can tell this plate right
here is just a protective piece
so naturally we'll be removing it um no it looks like i'm not going to be
able to get that off that easily so this is a protective piece for the tubing
there's no reservoir so just like a typical closed-loop cooler it's just
pre-filled at the factory and then
it wait what
now hold on a minute
maybe you can help me with this so we've got the inlet on the pump
then we've got the outlet right here going to the GPU block power comes off
the board right here this is a super small pump by the way
then so we've got our cold plate down there which presumably is covering both the
GPU and the hbm memory modules is that correct uh i don't know that for a fact
i mean i can't imagine the vga
that they didn't do that i don't see anything else down here
uh it looks big enough to where it would be yeah it's hard to it's hard to go any
further than this unfortunately you guys we've got vrm over here which is handled
just with downdraft cooling from the fans up here and then this is weird
see this here so unlike a normal radiator there's kind
of uh the end tank is in the middle and
i don't know how the flow path works but out from the GPU block comes in the
underside right here on a normal radiator it goes in the one
side on the end tank down then you have a smaller end tank on the
other end it goes over and then through these thin tubes right here but it's
coming right up here and then it's coming out
here so i can only imagine that they've done
some kind of routing you know what i think i know what they did i think this is how it works so it goes in the bottom
here and then there's a divider here
it goes it fills this tank goes over here
through the skinny end tank and then out here then it's a parallel flow path i think
it goes in here down this side of this one
through this skinny end tank and then up here and then the cooled water comes
together back through the pump over to the GPU again
now i don't have verification of this but i
can't imagine that it would work any other way because it couldn't just go
straight from here to here you wouldn't get any cooling out of it
that is something i did not expect to see
here so while i put this back together
let's talk about what kind of performance you could expect from a 2080
ti that is water cooled
well a lot but
maybe not quite as much as you'd hope because of the way that NVIDIA has
restricted their partners abilities to overvolt their gpus
you're probably only looking at a couple percent faster than a well air cooled
2080 ti now with that said what ASUS claims is that like other liquid cooled
graphics cards which have existed in the past but with a separate radiator this one
will run much cooler and that'll mean
that the card will be able to maintain its maximum power state more
consistently and more stably and another
thing to consider is that while many benchmarkers run their tests in a
room temperature room your room might not be that temperature
so if you're from somewhere that's particularly hot or you don't have air conditioning or whatever the case may be
then something like this might be necessary in order to get the maximum
performance out of your card
this was stressful and there we go
the card is reassembled all that remains
is to oh wow the box that was being used as a stand for this one's pretty beat up
hopefully they have another plan for that all that remains is to see if their
demo still works
yeah hey
do the fans still spin
hey
and we're done so thanks to ASUS for being
really good sports about all of this and thanks to you guys for watching and
thanks to dbrand for sponsoring us here at ces 2019 their dbrand grip cases
which i will be doing plenty of drop tests
with are super grippy their impact
resistant and they're built with the same precision
you'd expect from dbrand with nice accurate cutouts for your camera your
touch sensor anything else you might have like say for example a headphone jack or stylus
did i just break my stylus the stylus popped out is
oh nope never mind still good
that's good and they've got super clicky buttons but the really new thing is
they're prism screen protectors when they told me the demo i'd be doing with
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nail into a piece of wood using the screen of a phone only to have it not
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