most of the time when our viewers send us suggestions for videos honestly
they're terrible but when kishorev and cat brought our attention to this little
gem on aliexpress
my interest was peaked my dander was raised
my desire to
witness a train wreck reached an all-time high what even is
this this
is a water cooling upgrade kit
for the alienware area 51m
gaming laptop that yes my friends seems
to involve taking the included
like heat pipe slash vapor chamber cooler
screwing tubes onto it and dremeling holes out of the back of your like 4 000
gaming machine why would anybody create this pro how
many people on earth bought these and then what percentage of them would have
any interest in this how many of you want to hear about our
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let's begin by taking a closer look at what we got in the mail here this
right here appears to be two contact plates so one for the CPU i
believe this is going to be hard to say actually uh nope this will
probably be CPU and uh one for the GPU with a total of
three four seven heat pipes running over to exactly
the same kind of rear exhaust radiators
and sorry side exhaust as well that are included with the original cooler of
this laptop what they've added is that what
might have originally been just a regular metal plate or a vapor chamber
on the original device instead has two fitting
locations here and here and then they've
actually included these are similar to but not the same as
any fittings that i've seen before so these are a little tiny what are these 1
8 inch compressions something like that these are tiny so
they've got a nice little collar on the tube there and a nice little o-ring this
seals up and it appears to be that the idea is that you rip open the bottom of
this machine take the cooler off and put this on there's a bunch of
thermal pads a bunch of screws no instructions
obviously so had you figured out yet how we're planning to hook this up to
anything no it just came out of the box what do you think
it arrived like 20 minutes ago didn't do any preparation i i got some tubes over
here those are man tubes these are these are boy tubes i didn't know they looked
like that until now oh boy holy crap did
i pay 650 dollars for this
uh i think it was slightly less than that but yeah basically like 400 in a
bit you know what i'm really worried about
though wherever this tubing runs right
the heat pipes are on the back side of this
right so there's got to be some kind of gap in here
between where the CPU and gp are actually contacting
and where these heat pipes are so our air cooling performance might be
terrible oh probably yeah
so do i need to go try and find like something we can adapt this tubing with
like you honestly have no plan are you kidding
no i honestly have no plan there's some gaff tape over there oh my god that's
not going to work new plan
we actually realized that our water cooled red camera uses 1 8 inch fittings
so all we've got to do is pop off these
tubes throw these new tubes on here and then bleed the loop
if i recall correctly bleeding this loop was yeah it's really horrible
the good news is that we actually didn't do a great job of bleeding this in the
first place anyway so we don't really have anything to lose by
accidentally unbleeding it you know what i don't even care i'm just
going for it here you only live once alex sorry before you do that let's get
a bucket oh sure yeah that makes sense i'm just going to open it on the table
i'm even going to drink this water i'm not going to drink the water
okay you ready and one
and two and one oh there it goes
all right as expected a quick shadow of the tomb raider benchmark had our CPU at
99 degrees and our GPU peaking at 75
degrees so there's clearly a lot of room for improvement and improve
is what we will do i can open it up now right for those not familiar one of the
cool things about the area 51m is that it packs a desktop core i9 9900k
processor and a top-tier rtx 2080 ti
graphics card of course that would be the reason that
aftermarket liquid cooling thermal solutions might
exist for it i've got a couple more screws there
are you gonna know which screws go where like have you disassembled this before i
would assemble it like seven or eight times okay so you're good then yeah it's
pretty amazing this isn't even like the worst thing that's ever happened to it
yes air will create condensation so i would limit air access to components
i'll let you do that the very best that it could possibly be
is equal it's not going to be and it's not going
to be that until you water cooler and then hopefully it's way better well we
obviously didn't finish this in time and me and Linus both went on vacation so
i need to figure out how the heck we do this
picking up from here
i don't quite remember what we were doing but this goes on here can't be
that hard i don't know i think oh yep
okay yeah you can see that alienware
solutions definitely a bit more sophisticated
well i guess fans have to come off of this now fans go like that
which means boop
on the oem one it had a bunch of tape that
sealed up the fans i guess we're just reusing it don't line up quite as well
like if you look right here there's an additional i'm not totally sure how many
fins that is the actual amount of fins probably isn't
going to be the biggest issue it's that we're going to lose a bunch of air out
the side here this is probably a huge performance boost
just this little bit of tape on the oem heatsink here
you can see they have a bunch of different like heights of the vrm
coolers whereas
in this all of this is the same height and they
just give you a thicker thermal pad so the
thermal resistance of this thing is going to be a freaking lot getting very
close sorry go for the thermal grizzly cry or
not i think that's what we used last time um
no that has a real knock to a paste look to it so let's apply some of this
bigger they go a god better the drop but legitimately on the GPU if you don't get
all of this covered it can be a really bad time
wow this does not spread as well as cry or not that is for sure well it spreads
pretty well under the weight of heatsink it's probably fine right now
then again how much do we trust that we're going to have good mounting
pressure i'd give it about a 6 out of 10. well
it's time oh
this is not wait what so we've got
four screws for the GPU here
and then we've just got these four long fully tapped
that go for the seat you're just go you're just hard mounting it so the
thing is is that with something like this right here
you would only be able to screw in these a certain amount before either they
bottom out and i trust that these are the correct length for when they bottom
out because the the CPU socket's actually pretty
sensitive to like pressure variations you'll get very different thermal
results based on if you have like 30 versus 60 psi of
force pressing down on the thermal paste and also if you press too hard you can
have just stability issues and kill something
this is going to be the worst part for sure so
if you look here i need to press down
on the heatsink and sort of line up this screw at the
same time in order to mount the CPU oh that feels
gross and kind of see the whole pcb flexing as i put that in we're just
gonna have to guess the mounting tension on these
so i think that feels about good i guess
i'm just guessing it's really hard to tell what's mounting pressure but also
not all of the thermal pads are the right size
so if you kind of look sort of like right here you can see that
one of them super squished down well the other one it's like barely
touching not the best engineered thing i've ever seen for better or for worse
that's on and let's call Linus for the next bit get
out the dremel oh they're so close to missing with just
just a tiny bit of thought and care
they could have made it so you could just stick it through one of the existing holes yeah
what a bunch of idiots oh
why are we doing this Linus yeah it seems pretty unnecessary we all
know the answer is gonna be it sucks wow you didn't do a very nice job there what
what's wrong with it oh you're being such a hater right now you only needed
to take off a tiny bit on the top you didn't need to get all this on i was rounding it
yeah if we're gonna grind it away we might as well grind it away all the way
to there does that look good to you yeah looks good let me rephrase the question does
that look like enough clearance to use
let's get to put this on and
we're good all right step one
don't use this yeah let's see how it holds up as an air cooler oh man this is
gonna be so bad no faith no my expectations are incredibly low 350
bucks i paid for this thing 350 dollars of e-waste it was more like 450 but yeah
look at the original cooler compared to that thing it's like quality you know it
was so scary like you see how those have like the nice springy screws and stuff
yeah it was just a hard match just all hard mouse mount oh that's not good
that's not good for the kind of tolerances you have on things like a laptop circuit board okay
and the fan is already low ramping did you just run it like right away oh yeah
that does not we already peaked at a hundred
oh man my expectations are so much lower than they were before
it's not just way worse in terms of average FPS like it's it's unplayable
because it's like hitching and stuttering all over the place but of
course you don't downgrade your air cooling so that you can have better
water cooling if you're not gonna water cool
so let's go ahead and give this thing
a hit of adrenaline shall we courtesy of
lttstore.com i mean hey they included pretty good
quality tubing so that's a plus yeah unless you happen to like have a
water cooled red around it'll be pretty hard to adapt to anything else but yeah
do we have a power source for this yes oh my god do we have to use that can we
please just use one of those that wall adapters i couldn't find them ah
okay turn the laser i need to plug it in yep that'll help
confirmed there are air bubbles
just come out there it goes we have circulation
we just need to not breathe on it too hard oh we check for leaks
no well it's leaking a bit oh snap just
give it a little wiggle waggle i also have a really good solution for this we
just tilt it up a bit then the water's just going to fall out of the laptop you
don't have to worry about it brilliant okay so we're idling at 30 degrees 30 to
35 degrees now we just dropped 10 degrees at idle hmm that's really
stuttering it's not looking great jeez that's
not great that's bad enough that i want to see if there's something
else on the go here yeah the CPU was a
maximum of 79 degrees wow
and the GPU got up to uh 71. that's really good so yeah that
is really good so i quit tomb raider we're going to
just restart it i'm going to make sure that everything on the system's working
like we didn't like do anything last time and it just
worked yeah i wonder if it was just from how heavily it was thermal throttling
before or something yeah i don't know i'm
it kind of invalidates our earlier results but it has been a week and i'm
gonna just update everything okay sure fine maybe tomb raider updated
and it doesn't like the old drivers or something i don't know computers are
stupid okay we're back we've installed
the alienware center and the Windows update hopefully that
makes all of this make sense okay we're aiming for 129.
okay sounds good that looks good yeah that's much better
that looks very promising because before it was like 70 FPS and a hitching last
before here this is dead smooth yeah with it not throttling the water is uh
substantially hotter so we go all the way from 26 and a half degrees at the
outlet to 45 at the inlet i think this is going to
crush the stock numbers it seems like it although also like when it's looking at
the sky there you always get a lot of FPS i know but this still looks really
good it does yeah
okay that's not as much better as i had perhaps hoped given the given the
expense and inconvenience 82 degrees on the hottest core and the
GPU is at 71. neither of them is throttling so i guess what you're trying
to say then is that any throttling that this laptop did on its air cooler was
negligible yeah
marginal okay well let's go ahead and drain the
water out of it and get a new air cooled with the aftermarket cooler run yeah
because if that's close or the same i guess with water in
it maybe the issue we were having with performance was related to how hard it
was throttling before fans definitely ramped up earlier this time they're
going they're going boys trying to keep it under control
127 FPS so it's anywhere from marginally
worse to marginally better and you get to spend 450
plus several hours of your time and have a bunch of stuff hanging off your laptop
yeah not recommended
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your high score so thanks for watching guys if you enjoyed this video you might
also enjoy the one where uh steve from gamersnexus and us take this very laptop
for a sub-zero overclocking adventure
poor thing it's been through so much