Lower your heating bill... with GAMING
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
1,686 words · ~8 min read
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oh wow you idiot you bought a
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one of these for one of these and
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i bet you're enjoying your pc doubling as your room
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heater that's been a running joke for over 15 years now
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so we figured then why not purpose build a system that is
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specifically designed from the get-go to
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warm your room could this actually be practical and how would it compare to a
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purpose-built space heater stay tuned to find out
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after i tell you about our sponsor noble chairs their icon series real leather
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let's start with some college dropout level physics according to the first law
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of thermodynamics energy can either be created nor destroyed it can only be
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changed from one form into another which means that other than the small amount
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of kinetic energy to turn like your fans and the light energy to run
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your dope ass RGB all of the power being consumed by your gaming rig right now is
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being dumped into the room as waste heat making
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every pc basically a sophisticated space
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heater all right so this is our space heater pc it's got an AMD
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Threadripper processor it's got a gtx 1080 it's got a fanless power supply so
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you know we're not generating any more kinetic energy than
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we absolutely have to and the whole thing has been tuned to match the power
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consumption of this guy right here one of the key aspects of the
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design of the system was using ek's phoenix mlc water cooling kit so it's a
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modular liquid cooler that allows us to quickly connect or disconnect any
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components we want so we can either use an internal radiator for testing
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purposes or unplug the whole thing here
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to connect it to our external cooler this
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is bertha she's a little rough around the
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edges but with this plan
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we think we can use an old radiant heater which would traditionally be
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hooked up to a gas firing something to cool our pc
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and heat our room
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so first order of business whenever you find a radiator behind like a jamaican
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guy's house is cleaning
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now cleaning something like this is not as straightforward as you know
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throwing some water in it shaking it around
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calling it a day we filled the radiator up with water and vinegar let it sit for
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24 hours and drained it the contents
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were
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the worst after the initial flush we filled the radiator up with tap water and let it
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run upside down for a while messing up ivan's LTT adidas in the
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process oh no my shoes uh-oh
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after half an hour of running water at tap pressure through it it started to
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look clean now in order to mate the radiator's
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original piping to our water cooling hoses we needed to thread the stock pipe
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unfortunately the die bit so hard on reverse that the tube disconnected from
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the adjacent elbow and when we tried to vise the tube without the elbow it
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ovalized luckily we had compatible sections from
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another project sitting around so we teflon tape the threads and here's the
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result after rigging the radiator up with an industrial pump in a reservoir we were
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ready to fill it up ivan was so upset that i got his adidas wet that you can
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clearly see him trying to electrocute me here completely okay we have to turn off
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the water ivan there's so much water we're going to kill the pump
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the good news is that he failed better luck next time chump the bad news is
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that with the liquid pumping at an industrial pump pressure oh it's so
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dirty not only did it become brownish again but we also detected a minor leak
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it is a pretty substantial leak that like that will affect no that won't
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work you need teflon tape just tightening it more will not work after
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going gordon freeman on the joint with a crowbar we were able to disconnect it
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and teflon tape it adding a t-line drain in the process you know just in case
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good thing too it ended up taking four fills and flushes before the water
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stayed clear now as those of you who watched our full room water cooling
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project know mixing metals in a loop essentially creates a battery causing
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corrosion this can be mitigated by adding sacrificial anodes to the loop
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but due to our testing being very short term we omitted this step while we were
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doing all that we had our space heater running inside the room that we call the
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sanity closet so in here and we didn't want anybody opening this door because
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that would let the stank out so to speak so in here this is a five cubic meter
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room approximately accounting for the the
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boxes kind of taking up some of it we've got a wirelessly monitorable temperature
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sensor here and then we had our 350 watt
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heater running here so the sanity closet started at 23.7 degrees celsius which is
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our office temperature and then what we've done is we have configured our
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test to stop at 36.7 degrees which is
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the temperature of the human body you wouldn't really want your room any
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warmer than that would start to feel like a sauna so if our pc heats up this
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room from the same temperature to the same temperature in the same amount of
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time then we consider our experiment a success one last thing we needed some
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kind of opening at the back of the case to pipe the quick disconnect through
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finally we just needed to drag our beast into the closet hook her up to the
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radiator via the quick disconnects so all we've got to do is hook these babies
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up to these babies
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and uh let it bake for a bit
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finally time to check on this and see how we did with our pc
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so this is interesting our FPS
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are is lower and even though it's water cooled our
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GPU is over it's over 85 degrees
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oh
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our power consumption is only about 275
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280 watts
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our graphics card is thermal throttling
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okay
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let's have a look at what's going on in here whoa wow
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that is a heat wave and
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i think it's pretty clear what happened
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it looks like oh that's hot oh
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oh i think
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once our system heated up it made it easier
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for it to gather gunk that was still stuck on the inside of the radiator
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oh that's a real shame
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all right come on over here dennis come have a look oh
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so
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here's our gp yeah okay
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our GPU is totally gummed up
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what a shame so that affects the amount of heat
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that we were kicking out into the room actually we found a silver lining here
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so we didn't factor in that this high-powered pump
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consumes a lot of power it turns out that it's actually about 75
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watts so
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our numbers should still be okay
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okay so after importing all the data it
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wasn't immediately obvious
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how it all came together and made sense because upon initial inspection they
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actually look like really different results between
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the space heater and the pc but
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what we didn't factor in initially looking at it
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is the immense thermal mass of the water
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inside the radiator so what's actually happening here
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is that water is taking a long time to
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begin to heat up enough that the radiator itself is able to start
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dissipating heat to the surrounding air
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so in effect all we need to do is time
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shift our graph a little bit and what you can see is that even though the pc
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it lags about two degrees behind the space heater they both heat the room at
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the same rate so
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conclusion time can you use your pc
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as a heater for your room the answer is yes but we don't recommend
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the way we did it because if you do it the way we did it
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you're gonna lag behind by two degrees
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and all gamers know that any amount of lag is unacceptable
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which obviously is totally not the problem like this this this gunk in the
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in the water that's that's the problem speaking of problems
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if you don't already have a vpn
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that's a problem go check out private internet access they support a variety
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an internet kill switch that will block all traffic if the vpn becomes
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disconnected unexpectedly so check it out today at the link in the video
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description and if you've already got pia hey they've got gift cards
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so we'll have that linked below as well
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so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that
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button but if you liked it you can hit like get subscribed or maybe consider
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checking out where to buy the stuff we featured
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uh at the link in the video description also down there is our merch store which
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has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally
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join sometimes we just do stuff you know
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it's like yep we did a thing
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but why