AliExpress Water Cooling DOESN'T Suck?!
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
2,292 words · ~11 min read
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on multiple occasions we have tried liquid cooling a computer with the
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cheapest parts we could find be they from ebay or the local hardware store
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but the problem always comes back to this building a loop with parts designed for
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something else like say using an aquarium pump is pretty jank
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so we endeavored to track down some parts that are actually designed
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for cooling pcs but are as inexpensive as the
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non-purpose-built stuff and thanks to the power of aliexpress
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they are finally here and a total mess
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origin pc offers beautiful custom desktops and laptops such as their evo
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15s that weighs only 4.3 pounds and is under an inch thick featuring smooth 144
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hertz 1080p or 4k displays and an NVIDIA
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GeForce gtx 1070 max q be sure to check them out at the link below the first
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step on our journey was of course to source the parts
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and because of that the surprises actually started early on i mean little
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did i know that there is a massive
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market of off-brand water cooling gear
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like brands i've never heard of like cis cooling and uh
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barrow and my two fang
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and some of it surprisingly like actually looks pretty legit
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so naturally we did what any sane person would do and ordered a freaking
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whack ton of it like a whole bunch of them including a few parts that i would
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describe as decent looking and a few that were
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not so much just sort of like a like a auto shoddy approach
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you know fire at the wall and see what sticks so once we had everything on order
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i figured yeah okay probably like a month for free delivery on a boat from
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china right wrong so we actually ordered most of the
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parts back in september of 2017
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and the last one arrived in january of this year
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so needless to say that was quite the setback
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while we waited we also ended up buying a couple more odds and ends like uh
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which radiators are you talking about these radiators
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like these radiators and a couple of pumps so that's why it has taken us
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until july almost an entire year
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to actually make this video so like
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yay free international shipping you get
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what you pay for and what exactly is it that we did get
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Jake like do i why do i just like go through this stuff yeah go for it holy
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crap look at this thing so this is just a copper plate
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a piece of plexi uh a gasket that doesn't even seem to be
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made of like any kind of malleable like soft material this is
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hard plastic and it's just a straight up like flat piece of copper on the bottom
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this one is based on a very similar
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design if you can call a flat piece of proper
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design this one's almost the same
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this is the same thing this is the same thing with a different
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bracket this bracket is stupider so i guess
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these guys are the the engineers of the
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dumps class okay but then these look all right
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the postings on the internet they don't give you that great description of what
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you're getting these guys went to school
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uh and this one actually looks not bad too so these are both kind of pin array
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style blocks that again are based on very similar
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designs so they are direction agnostic they just go in pass through some fins
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and then come out so is that all the CPU blocks oh yeah okay let's kind of this one looks ballin
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how much was this i think it's like 15 bucks 15 bucks it's cheap wow i mean and
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not including these ek of course right but like that's not a performance nickel
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plated these pumps look pretty freaking sketch
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though like look at this thing
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it's got some weight to it so i will give it that it's got some weight too
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it's not just a fragile little piece of trash but i don't know that that's
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necessarily meaningful so like these two are basically the same just a different
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top you see this a lot when you order stuff from china where this is the same
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company it's like designs that are clearly you know
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borrowing from each other or straight up produced at the same factory and then
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just rebranded with like
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chinese companies rebranding chinese products in the same way that like
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international companies just rebrand chinese products
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so it turns out these radios are actually aluminum
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okay so heads up for you guys you don't want to mix metals aluminum plus copper
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equals corrosion but the good news is that we did follow
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up the aluminum radiator orders like sometimes when you're ordering stuff from china you don't even know exactly
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what it is like one of the uh one thing we thought was a block
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is just an led to go in a block
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so you can get copper and brass radiators with just aluminum fins that
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don't touch the water for like five bucks more even if you're going the
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aliexpress water cooling route spend the extra five bucks now one thing you might
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notice that we didn't order any of is fittings and reservoirs and the reason
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for that is that while there are some really cheap options out there
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they don't affect performance so using them in this kind of a test where we're
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evaluating the performance serves no purpose other than to have more
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potential points of failure where we can
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leak water onto our hardware so we just stuck with the stuff that really affects
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performance like this led but how much did we pay for this
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it was like five bucks five bucks but then given that we probably paid about
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five bucks for this it's into one of these oh really uh
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oh it's the nice one so you can actually stick so this is just leds for this for
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blocks for blockers yeah okay of course no i've seen this kind of thing before
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probably worth the five bucks yeah it's not bad and not fun and haul videos for
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now though we need to actually test these things but before we can do that
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we need something to compare our numbers again some kind of standard luckily Jake
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keeps his test bench water cooled for some reason
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so we can just use that this is actually
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a pretty standard setup from one of the best in the biz ek water blocks so to
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cool the four gigahertz 5960x we've got ek supremacy evo mated to a 360
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millimeter pe series radiator and a d5 pwm pump and we're gonna crank that pump
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to a hundred percent for the purposes of this test
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now with the baseline test out of the way
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it's time to take some of our aliexpress wonders for a spin
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now we're gonna assume that if you're buying some parts super cheap from
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aliexpress you're probably buying most of them
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there so because of that we're gonna build the whole loop out of these parts
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the only ek stuff we're using again reminder is the reservoir and the
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fittings so what do you want to start with you know i was thinking i really want to
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try one of these just like gross flat blocks sure but
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are we gonna save that for the climax yeah okay i think we should get like a
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proper do we want to do like the really legit looking yeah we can do like a
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baseline of our aliexpress stuff like sure like that's what you would actually
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buy yeah okay i don't think you should probably buy this but you can this is
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actually like have you taken this apart and put it back together or something
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because this is like not an amazing design actually from everything that i
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know about water yeah and it needs like a jet plate while Jake builds up our
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first aliexpress loop let's talk pricing
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that ek config that we showed first with everything included would cost you a
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whopping 380 dollars i know that sounds
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like a lot but for custom water cooling that's not actually that outlandish now
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with that said what Jake's building right now is around 90 dollars including
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everything that you need about a quarter as much
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okay so this is it we're on the
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full aliexpress loop the the express
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loop it sounds like a train or something thanks for the aliexpress loop uh with
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the cis cooling scp-67f
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which Jake found was pretty much the best bang for the buck and we've had ida
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64's fpu test running for about 20
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minutes to give it a chance to reach equilibrium and we're sitting at about
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65 degrees on average pretty darn impressive for the price
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really honestly not that far off our ek
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setup okay now i want to see the worst case
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scenario what happens when we throw this gutter trash that one's not going to fit
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this okay it's the same thing this gutter trash yeah all right try find out
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my favorite type of trash so it's done
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loop number two is set up using one of those completely flat blocks now our
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expectations for this thing
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pretty freaking low most water blocks have channels cut or like
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machined or something into the base to
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increase their surface area because more surface area
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means more heat transfer so we would
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think something with negligible surface area by comparison
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would perform very poorly and
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now that it's been running for about 20 minutes on a 5960x
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it's actually doing okay like
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way way better than i expected so conclusion
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time then custom water cooling has really evolved
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from the days of like basement scientists with their aquarium pumps and
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like you know weird hunks of metal that they got from like some one that one guy
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in australia that makes them and ships them around the world or whatever to
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having tons of options i mean everything from you know super high-end stuff that
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would scare away most newcomers just due to the sheer cost
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all the way down to thanks to the power of chinese
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manufacturing and free international shipping
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low end options where you can actually get
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reasonable performance and that coolness
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factor for about what you would pay
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for an aio from a name brand
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with that said the performance of your aio that would come with a warranty or
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even a high-end knock to air cooler that would also come with a warranty
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would also be pretty good so doing a
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build like this super cool was definitely fun to experiment i'm just
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not sure if we're gonna put the Linus tech tips seal of approval
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especially on the pumps please don't cheap out on your pump
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not recommended it's not that bad i don't recommend it
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okay never recommend it well this thing would buy d5
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nothing else what about ddc nothing else is acceptable no i've seen so many ddc's
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failed where's my d5 what about this thing didn't someone give this to you
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maybe i think so i don't know there's someone at ltx last year tx is like
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tomorrow and then look i fixed it i welded it oh lordy mass drop is back with another
11:52
deal this time on the sennheiser open backed hd hd58x jubilee headphones these
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were tuned by axelgrell met him
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super cool for like an engineering german dude by the way of sennheiser and
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massdrop based on feedback from the community they feature new 150 ohm
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drivers and a colorway inspired by the
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hd 580s they're clear fast with a dynamic sound profile and they've got a
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glossy black headband elliptical earcups and replaceable soft velour ear pads
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they've got a detachable six foot cable and you can get yours today at the link
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in the video description seriously though axel cool guy
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so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button if you liked it hit like get
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subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description or
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maybe also link down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this
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one and our community forum which you should totally join okay hold on hold on
12:48
no i'm gonna get this also link down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and
12:52
our community forum oh no i'm gonna make it and our community forum
12:57
also link down there is our merch tour which which has cool shirts like this one
13:02
which has cool shirts like this one and our
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and our community forum last time last time okay i promise not
13:10
even close also link down there is our merch tour which has cool shirts like this one and
13:15
our community forum which you should totally join damn
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dammit
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oh my god i was waiting for that to happen i knew it was gonna happen
13:30
Linus you really should leave juggling to the professionals and a mac user