so it's time for another crazy cooling experiment with Linus and alex this time
our victim is going to be the dell alienware area 51m so this is notable
for having a desktop 900 k 8 core processor in it that runs
at 100 degrees at all times so we are
going to be trying to tame the beast but there's going to be a couple of key
differences today difference number one they kicked us out of the boardroom so
we're in the kitchen and difference number two we have
hello steven burke from gamers nexus
so let's see what we can do with this thing with glass wire you can instantly see
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this is a lot of gear why is there a calculator he never goes anywhere
without his ti-84 are you serious yeah it's just nice if you want to give a
phone yeah but okay so we're not gonna know
what or how we can mount an alternative
cooling solution to this thing until we've opened it up and figured out
exactly what kind of mounting holes dell's using we require mounting holes
that are quite close to the socket and we don't know if we're gonna find that inside yeah we're not going to
i'm trying to put some suspense in the video alex i know that
so is this CPU and GPU are they exposed on this side yeah they are okay does
your plan to leave the motherboard mounted in the laptop
yep the other option is you sit it precariously on its side
and we just look at the screen like this while the cooler is hooked up like that
yeah that could work
do you know the story of my chiller i bought this for the sole purpose of
hooking it up to my daily driver e6600 and you can tell that it's very did it
ever hurt anybody 17 year old me engineered it has not hurt anyone yet
but the possibility of being hurt is definitely real so i would ask that
while it's plugged in you refrain from touching
this i think it's terrifying
is this a ground terminal any of the bare leads here uh yeah yeah that's just
hanging there okay you don't need ground we don't see ourselves as being grounded
type people okay neither of us wants to use our liability
insurance yeah what i think is going to have to happen
is we're going to take these
really really cheap blocks okay and machine a new piece of acrylic that'll
fit the mounting holes does this this doesn't have any micro fins does it no
it's just a flat oh no it's like four dollars on aliexpress
what do you want man maybe six dollars on aliexpress i don't
know i fix it's gonna hate this i couldn't find a marlin so this is their old
precision screwdriver i'm assuming there's no ihs on the CPU
right yeah is it really yeah so it's literally a desktop
okay i know right is it socketed yeah yeah oh interesting i didn't know that
so it's it's two 10 millimeter heat pipes on the CPU and then GPU is here
yep what is the GPU full blown 2080. you said the CPU was
100 degrees uh was that only with overclocking i'm assuming that's at max
so okay just put it in performance mode and it hits 100 degrees wow okay one of
the things that we're probably going to have to figure out because having a look
at the cooling solution here steven identified that there's actually
a fair amount of vrm cooling going on so they're not just cooling the CPU but
this aluminum plate right here is actually making thermal pad contact
with the mosfets and the inductors all of this interesting
so alex this is going to be a little bit
tricky we're going to have to get airflow onto this heatsink somehow even
if we do just go with the stock solution and put this back in here is the GPU
going to be under a chiller also yeah is it chiller like what is it like
zero degrees it's whatever you want it to be baby
okay so it's been a couple hours
uh where are you at uh we're good to cut things um
so it looks kind of stupid this is the GPU one
it does look kind of stupid it's like it looks like you screwed it
up and because we just moved our router yeah i don't know how accurate it is at
the moment and until we test that i'm just making all the holes way bigger so hopefully it fits anyway you have the
o-ring groove and everything's sort of oh right there's no groove yeah no group
just flat so we're just going to reuse the stock o-ring that came with our chinese block yeah how does this compare
to how organized and professional you thought we were steve that's about what i thought
i deserved that hey i get to be the coolest looking one too hey
oh no what up
there you go so that's our CPU mount right yep cool
sorry stephen it's not as bad if you're making the
noise which is why i always volunteer for tap duty
that's fine
this one's a bit off but i think we can just drill through it and it'll be fine
the pcb or the uh acrylic top
isn't it going to be beautiful when you have the mill and it'll actually just be like
how much was it again 5k oh god no i don't know about that
good enough heck yeah
it's not perfect but that's not what we're going for the label on this bin
really does not bode well for the water cooling process sorry steve i
promise we'll get to the part where we really need your expertise the overclocking very soon
just gotta you know fabricate some crap
do you want uh like a vice to secure the block no i
have that would you like to use it no no i'm good thank you just making sure i'm
going to go back to writing my scripts for your next video yeah
oh i wonder if this is how like ek water
box makes theirs yeah ek definitely uses the drill by hand right through the top
oh that was gnarly why is alex not wearing
gloves but Linus has to protect his little baby hands that's why we're
getting close then aren't we yeah hell yeah actually we have a lot of crap
on the floor uh steve around the thing there there's a dyson i know that you're
really good at uh vacuuming i saw you did a review once of a vacuum cleaner is
the money still in it just vacuum right here
it's not sucking up the dirt we have to cut a new one alex that's not going to
hold well alex is re-cutting our GPU acrylic
top we're going to mount our CPU block as best we can so
in order to make our lives a little bit now you're not using one of
those are you yeah why not thermal paste is going to be better
thermally those are just good for their endurance like because you can use it a long time actually
coffee lake lying down the middle you know what just for you wait what this is
this guy like x technique sir i've read that smiley face has improved
the thermals a bit okay how much are you putting on here
it's just gonna squish out exactly who's gonna clean it i don't
know i won't be here minus one of my longest standing sponsors is thermal
grizzly yeah there needs to be more thermal pain there be
work it back i'm all about the wiggle technique
so what do you think looks really ghetto but like in a good way so our
expectation right now turns on that this will turn on yes
okay you want to throw that uh heatsink back on there yep three two one
wait oh i saw a flash on the keyboard oh no it's powering up
battery that sounds like it wants a battery okay sure let's try putting a
battery in okay you can screw that down no that's fine
like at least one you got to hold the heatsink do you want to hold the
heatsink alex oh it's the heatsink no one's holding it okay are we real i mean
are we reassembling it at this point like no
it's off flicker
yeah fans do like one rotation and stop
so basically here's what happened the problem was that the memory slots are
actually labeled one two three four which is pretty typical what's a little less
typical is that it wasn't booting with memory in slots one and i guess it
would have been four apparently the system is firing up so
all that's left now is to re-tighten up our CPU block mount
our GPU block and then finally
one day later leverage the talents of steven burke here i might actually do
something now how about we start
with just a little below ambient stay above the dew point okay yeah
i'm gonna lift this up and we are going to put this
in there okay you can see this well-crafted cutout right here yep
that's for this right here okay all right okay
yeah that needs to go perfect thank you don't cut yourself that's some very
rusty metal okay tubing here's some scrap tubing we had
lying around with a fitting in
it's not a race alex well if it is i'm winning
seems fine well let's maybe give it one minute i mean remember
these are Linus tapped holes also one of the first um fittings that
you put on just didn't have an o-ring really so are you sure it didn't come
off or something no i really did check
it's just drawing the cables into the fans so they're shredding the
cable sleeving which is creating strands of cable sleeving that
get into them more easily wait what what's going
it's a on solution though well only if it works
we've got our water cooling working our temperatures are great at idle we're
what like 15 degrees 15 and 13 on the GPU and we're at six celsius on the
chiller wonderful except for one small thing no matter what we do in the
extreme tuning utility i'm using air quotes here
it's not applying we're getting lower scores in the CPU test in 3d marks so
we've got core ratio overrides for one to eight cores do you want to just set
those in here no we'll do that next to you if we can okay all right so after
painstakingly applying their in BIOS overclocking settings we are supposedly
at 5.2 gigahertz on any load up to six
cores and then 4.9 for seven and eight core loads
but we're pretty sure that this is nonsense so ideally with overclocking
the biggest limits you run into are thermal and potentially voltage which
triggers thermal and then power limits and so we're running out of power which
i know for two reasons one is because hardware info 64 tells us we're hitting
power limits and the other one is because you can see the core is throttling but we're well under tj maxx
the issue then is that when i try to increase the power limits here and it
doesn't look like they've really changed from that BIOS change when i increase
the power limit to next to you it just says you can't do that or it increases them in such a small way
that it doesn't do anything useful for us all right well see what happens yeah
i was going to tell you this clearly isn't working because we're at 246 watts
we got higher than that before alienware's pre-overclock here is actually doing
nothing so they're pre-overclocked actually it is 52 on 6 cores but it's
actually doing 4.8 on all cores so let's just manually tell it to do 49x
and then i want to change these but i don't think it does anything based on
what we've seen so let's just run this as a baseline and see what the cores are
doing so amusingly enough turning our clock
speed target down to 4.9 but on all cores actually yields
slightly higher power consumption and
a higher score a higher score and there so the reason this happens for
anyone doesn't know is because when you you set the the configuration too
aggressive but you're power throttling it's throttling harder to try and account for that so you might actually
drop your multiplier from something like 49x down to all the way into the 20s or
30s right i'm going to increase the cash ratio now a general rule of thumb is i i
like to keep cash ratio like maybe four ticks below all core but we're going to
push for maybe 47 x and see if that holds and this is also known as reboot
required in xdu on this laptop it seems like reboot required basically means
it's not going to work no wonder you prefer working with desktops at least
they're designed for this sort of thing i think this is designed for it i think
so too i think alienware had this in mind so after beating our heads against the
wall turns out there's a new BIOS for this laptop apparently enhanced the
performance of the system perfect thank you BIOS engineers hopefully this gives
us a bit more control oh whoa whoa hold on a second no this is
good power limit one is 210 watts now
oh yeah that's the change okay i have some hope now because if we can get
another 60 watts that should be substantial yeah i doubt you're gonna be
able to actually change it to 230 or whatever
yeah i don't think that's happening then i guess i should note as well i did drop
the chiller a bit more so i forgot where we're at
about 10 degrees fahrenheit i don't really use fahrenheit despite being
american so i'm not sure what that is but our load temps were around 50 to 55
degrees across all corners we're below zero celsius is what really matters so
so we're expecting a better result this time because we got up to almost 250
watts here okay good for the full system CPU temps are also a touch higher in the
mid 60s so it's definitely working harder so
we're changing power management mode for the GPU to performance instead of
optimal power we're changing texture filtering from quality to high
performance kingpin ogs all those real overclockers do this it's permissible so
we've got that done it is actually at what was it 290 yeah okay well that's
very promising this is better than the first BIOS for sure yeah and we haven't
touched voltage yet so if we have to overvolt we might be able
to it's just gonna be a power limitation issue you know what right when you said
that it peaked at 300. so 300 is going to be our new maximum power it looks
like use of throttle stop to bypass these throttling schemes is at your own
risk and can result in permanent damage to your power adapter or computer perfect i'm applying the setting it's
saying reboot required i hit discard i apply the setting and then it works and
if i reboot it doesn't work it gives an error message it's held 295. it's holding up there
longer our frequency was at uh actually like 50 the whole time and
i technically applied 51 but i don't know if it actually worked 106.79
so this is the error that we get every time we try to actually listen to the
software and reboot and then it just doesn't apply anything that was changed
yeah in fact it reset everything else so after playing around with all the dials
in xtu it turns out that the only thing that really changed with the BIOS update
was that the default power limit is higher the good news though is now we
can start pushing our GPU which we should be able to get a pretty good overclock on right yes so gpus NVIDIA
gbs especially are really temperature dependent and for about
every maybe five degrees celsius you drop you'll keep getting frequency
increases without even doing any work we do not have a lot of time uh we're
starting to sweat yes air will create condensation so i
would limit air access to components
i'll let you do that worst case scenario alienware gets back a laptop that
doesn't work so 11 236. we are up on graphics
significantly there's some success
so we are up from 10 000 201 to 11 236
about 10 and seven degrees on the GPU after running
so then let's get this back towards the brm perfect how hot is that
it's getting warm yeah memory was getting a little bit
toasty too and our memory is shoved under there i think so that's
i would like to get a fan kind of this direction oh we need to do we need yeah
light the CPU a bit well that's the best i think we can really hope for right now
i'm going to put some more towel around the fittings up here at the top
is the compressor still running are we still bringing this down yeah you know
i'm gonna i think we're gonna call this the limit because we're starting to sweat more
than i'm really comfortable with we're gonna start getting drops running down the tubes onto the motherboard here
pretty soon so you crank did you crank it all the way
so this is basically it this is what we're going for plus 180 on
the GPU core plus 11 20 on the GPU memory and five gigahertz on the CPU now
to be clear there are other things that steve could do if he had more time
tuning the clock speeds for individual cores because i mean 3d mark especially
when you're running a GPU test actually doesn't hit all the cores so you could
avoid a power limit by not running all of them at 5 gigahertz so we have well
over a ten percent improvement yeah not not bad what do our GPU and CPU temps
look like is that nine on the GPU i see over here CPU so max was about 74
degrees celsius so and then the GPU we don't have it logged actually we do uh
the max was 28 degrees 28 degrees
really not bad that's awesome
so anyway i think we can be happy with this knowing that within the time and
the software parameters we unfortunately have we're at eleven thousand four six verses
um ten thousand hundred eighty-six so that is way outside of margin of error
we've actually improved it yep the graphic score is eleven thousand six
fourteen the CPU wasn't really that great it was 10 360. so we it could
improve there there's a throttling issue so settings GPU core offset was 160
megahertz memory we did 11 20 megahertz i tried 1180 i tried 1220. both of those
really heavily artifacted and crashed maximum performance mode in the power
management for NVIDIA drivers we changed texture filtration to high performance
from quality which is allowed so that's it
massive thank you to uh alienware for
permitting us to do this to their machine i'm just kidding they didn't permit this they did not permit any of
this but uh thanks to steve for coming out and uh having some fun with us it
was a lot of fun first time laptop extreme overclocking yes
very fun and very impressed with alex's cnc
turnaround on the blocks extremely quick water cooling solution for uh you know
laptop that's going to be a new business opportunity for us i think
create custom laptop water blocks lots of money in that
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