now for years Corsair has sold all-in-one liquid coolers for gaming pcs
on the basis of how easy and fast they
are to install with great results well now they're dipping their toes in the
custom water cooling market with their hydro x line and they reached out to
sponsor this video to show you guys just
how fast and easy it is to do a full
custom loop if you go all Corsair so
we're going to be putting it to the test using Corsair's cooling configurator to
design and build a full loop
ball and out tricked out gaming rig as quickly as we possibly can and
go
motherboard model MSI x570 ace CPU model 3900x we're going 12
core baby so the point of the configurator is to make sure that you
order stuff that is compatible MSI helpfully co-sponsored this video so
they sent over their ventus 2080 ti there it is we have one of those and now
we get to see our recommended setup hopefully we have this stuff Jake do we
have an AMD version of the block xc7 RGB yes good cooling performance they want a
stage two configuration your case contains Corsair fence the number of
included fans has been deducted from the total to optimize the cost to you we're
apparently going with light loop rgbs in white and i think we're good on fittings
tools they even sent over they've got their own uh
loop filling squeezy bottle so
we should be pretty much ready to rock all right so step one of this Corsair
sponsored video is to clear all this Corsair stuff off the table
we won't need that until later and i was just teasing my bros over at Corsair we
actually do need their stuff almost right away here now by default it comes
with the Intel mounting hardware but you can see that Corsair has
faithfully borrowed the acetech ring mounting system so
changing it over to AMD is as simple as popping that on there like that oh
i went and inserted an extra step there um the
thermal compound is pre-applied
swamp now this is a bit of a tight fit but i
think it's going to be worth it i'm going to route the RGB
cable for my CPU block that's the challenge with RGB yes it looks cool
but you run the risk of adding a whole bunch of wires and stuff that do not
look cool that's pretty clean i'm still waiting for the next
innovation motherboard manufacturers putting holes in their motherboards so
that you can pass through RGB like directly from your CPU and GPU and stuff
now it's time for RAM naturally we've gone with Corsair's vengeance pro this
kit right here is a four by eight gig 32 gig kit that clocks in at 3600 megahertz
not too shabby as you guys probably saw in one of our previous videos for third
gen ryzen that is a great middle ground for price to performance
you won't be really leaving anything on the table but you don't have to spend a
fortune on a top spec memory kit now this next step is highly optional but
because Corsair did happen to send over some of their white light loops
and i have not yet had a chance to check them out i wanted to integrate them into
this machine i'm into it all right so we're going to throw four of these in
one at the back i'm into it and then three at the front i'm into it now one
of the trickiest aspects of building any water cooled system is getting the
radiator mounted with all the fans if you can avoid it don't put your fittings
at the bottom it's much more difficult for your pump to push the air bubbles
down against gravity to bleed the air out of your loop so fittings at the top
if you can second while having the fans on this
side pushing air through or having them on this side pulling air through doesn't
actually make that much of a difference to performance for maintenance it can be
quite a lot easier to have the fans on this side pulling air through because
then cleaning off the dust or cat hair or whatever else
is that simple now this is a filtered case i'm going to say it's probably not
going to get that much dust in it now here's another little trick to watch out for Corsair actually includes three full
sets of mounting screws for their radiators in the box and this can be a
little bit confusing for new users you've got your short one that's pretty
obvious that's for if you're mounting the rad directly to the case boom there
you go but then there's two long ones there's one that just barely
extends past the frame of the fan so that's the one in my left hand here and
then there's one that extends quite a bit past the frame of the fan such that
it would actually dig into the radiator fins if you didn't have something like a
thick piece of acrylic or a big thick
case in the way on the other side so that
is what that longer one is for we're going to use the medium length one the
anti-vibration pads on these light loop fans are actually so thick that i ended
up needing the longer screws so we're going to switch over to those and i'm
going to do the opposite corner here in order to get the radiator mostly in
position here you know it's funny i was sitting here thinking this build isn't
so simple or fast after all is it but it's not the water cooling that's taking
all the time it's actually all the RGB lighting that we're putting into it wow
we are actually making great progress on this thing so with our fans and our
radiator installed we're gonna go ahead and throw in our motherboard this is a
feature i've always loved about Corsair's cases though that nubbin that
they have in the middle that holds your motherboard in place while you
fish around for the right screw to put it in so i always think storage is last
but nowadays your storage like this mp600 pci express
gen 4 SSD while in most cases we would
install our SSD peel this thermal pad off and then we would throw that back in
our motherboard we're actually not going to do that instead opting to just leave
our SSD exposed that way it will also get some airflow from the air moving
through our system now we can unpack our power supply so i
don't have any scientific evidence for this but in a case where
most of my cooling is being handled by water i do tend to put my power supply's
fan up because the rationale would be that when they're
running fanlessly as this one will when it's under very low load that way they
can passively convect heat up more easily that's my theory i'm sticking to
it now this is a bit of an unusual one but i actually like to run my modular
cables backwards starting up at the motherboard and then ending
down at the power supply and it's just because i find it a little bit easier
to push my cables through this way
than to try to bring them up through the back
next up is our reservoir now this is one of the places where i think Corsair had
to be the most careful
because the reservoir and pump in most
cases are the most difficult to mount
you know cleanly and nicely because for years we've had this incredible
assortment of water cooling ready cases on the market that have radiator mount
spacing but have given no thought whatsoever to where to put the pump and
the reservoir so one thing that makes our lives a little bit easier is that
they're completely integrated as a single unit and they've got a bunch of
different mounting options included so what we could do is we could use this
120 millimeter bracket mounted here but that would look stupid we're not going
to do that we could also actually mount it here
which is far more reasonable we might end up doing that this is a nice little
inclusion so this is one of those jumpers so you can leak test your loop
before you power on your system if you're not comfortable just sticking a
wire into your power supply i'm comfortable sticking a wire into the
end of my power supply so i'll put that away this is our outlet and this one
here is our inlet now this is something i wish i had thought of before i put the
motherboard in this is a very it would be a very unusual build order
for me to put in all my water cooling stuff before i started putting in pc
components but it might have actually been better in this case because with my motherboard installed
it's actually a little bit tricky to get at the mounting screws at the back here
now it's worth noting that you can mount the bracket this way like i have or this
way if you want more vertical play so we're almost totally wired up now
which means it's time for the dark side of RGB
now we don't need the basic lighting controller that came with the case
anymore but it's more work to remove it than to just cable manage it at this
point so we're just going to leave that kind of here-ish
this is a really nice touch actually i never noticed this this particular
Corsair case happens to have exactly the spacing you need for an RGB strip down
the side here freaking gorgeous okay so power connectors for
both our commander pro and our fan hub are taken care of now and we did have to
go and grab a molex connector for our d5
pump
and now we're ready for what is ironically the easy part of this build
we had to go back to water cooling again so something that a lot of people don't
know is that while NVIDIA founders edition
cards have the greatest compatibility with third-party water blocks like this
one from Corsair a lot of the time even
non-founders edition cards use the same reference pcb mounting holes so you can
still use a third-party block all right well let's find out which screws aren't
all the way up MSI's design is different from the
founders edition in that it uses this big gigantic heat spreader
to actually handle most of the mount points
for the back plate that just kind of keep the card
sandwiched together so it's got like a like a heat spreader sand witch so this
part is really important when it comes time to reassemble your graphics card
maybe you need to submit an rma or
you know take the water cooler off it because you want to sell it on craigslist it doesn't matter
you want to put all your thermal pads back exactly where you found them and in
some cases that can even include going through and
scraping the ones that are left on the card off with a knife
and then putting them back on where they came from because otherwise once you
reassemble it a lot of these other components on the board might not have
temperature sensors and the card might not know to thermal throttle if they're
not adequately cooled and you could end up breaking the card even if your you
know GPU temps are very good because you did a great job of repasting it and then
the other key is to carefully put all the screws back
where they came from so once again part of Corsair's shtick
is that as long as you're willing to strip down a GPU
it's supposed to be relatively simple so it's got pre-applied thermal compound
thermal pads don't even need like covers taken off them or anything you just
go ahead and line up the holes then chuck the back
plate on and screw the whole thing together
and now all that's left is to install it
and plan out our coolant runs in a perfect world we might
have done that a little while ago but we don't live in a perfect world do we
oh i'm excited this is really coming together now we're close
wow that's tight oh boy here comes our GPU power let's see if we can get this
in ah you know what maybe apple's onto something with the whole
extra long pci express slot and no external power connectors ah there we go
let's do some tubing shall we we are going to go straight
from our pump into our CPU block and then we're going
to see how things go from there now we're going to go from the outlet
over to our radiator all right angles
oh yes thank you Jake all right
we just got saved by a wild Jake who appeared yes
oh that's way better nice the wild Jake bearing right angle
and 45 degree fittings saved the day world's prettiest water cooling loop
no but we weren't going for that award we were going for something that's
relatively simple to throw together and the actual plumbing portion of this
build assuming that you're comfortable with you know
installing a CPU cooler or mounting a bracket to a radiator or whatever else
only took what like 10 minutes not too shabby now Corsair actually sent
over a bottle of their red coolant they have a bunch of different coolant colors
but i'm going to take this opportunity to advise against one Corsair product in
favor of another one we're going to be using plain old water because if you put
colored liquid in an RGB setup
you're locking yourself in you're eliminating your options we've got an
RGB reservoir here kids don't squeeze this too hard hey
oh oh oh yeah i don't know if i'm the biggest
fan of this one here we go all right
you got to live a little kids
and there it goes ah
that's more like it why would Corsair choose me
to do their all hydrox water cooled build
whoa that RGB though so the pump won't pump
until the air is out of it and you can see there's still air bubbles coming up
all right come on okay time for a classic Linus live fill
so now that our os is installed all of our fans are lighting up and
we did have to remove one of our RGB strips which is fine because i had only
intended to do three in the first place so we threw an extension in the bottom
and now one two three RGB strips res
block and other block all lit up also
you guys might notice
the system is basically silent so
everything in here can be configured from within Corsair's iq software we can
change colors we can change performance characteristics like oh i don't know
let's say uh we want all of these fans
to be in extreme mode
all red for extreme wait where's my RAM
boom all red on everything once you have the fan curves based on the temps iq
monitors and lighting setup just the way you like it it's super easy to create a
profile with an iq to save the configuration allowing you to quickly switch between profiles on the fly you
can have multiple configs for gaming each with their own color setups a
profile for movie watching and studying where your fans are set super quiet and
my personal favorite an automatic lights out profile for night time so that
awesome RGB setup you just installed doesn't interrupt your sleep so we're
just gonna fire up hardware info and have a look at what our temps look like
i'm just gonna grab a quick blender project we're going to hit our CPU and
see how this thing flies is it all flash
or does it have some dash as well all right so our CPU is comfortably
turboing well past 4 gigahertz which is nice to see let's see how it handles in
all core load now we jumped up to 60 degrees
not bad and we're turboing right around four gigahertz which is exactly what
we'd expect from a 3900x really nice to see one of the coolest things about iq
for me is the profiles though so everything from uh performance of the
fans to temp monitoring to RGB lighting effects
can all be set up as profiles so i've
only adjusted lighting here but you can see i've got my unicorn barf profile
running right now if i want to go fast i need red for that high performance
everything changes over to red or if i'm the kind of person who just doesn't like
RGB i just turn it off
and it's gone so there you have it guys this
whole build took us about three and a half hours and that includes
actually building a pc setting up the RGB lighting which was the single most
time consuming part of it and custom water cooling which i'd say if we were
to isolate that part is maybe an hour to an hour and a half so
yeah it's not as fast or
as budget friendly as an aio water cooler
but if you want the best results i have always said that custom water cooling is
the only way to get it speaking of custom water cooling
custom water cool your body lttstore.com
now that's it that's all i was going to say about that see you at the next video guys