Whole Room Water Cooling Part 7 - It's FINALLY over!
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
2,039 words · ~10 min read
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karen's graphics card was running at like 100 degrees idle while water cooled
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but the water still has to run through this
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graphics card and see how terrible it is can you see the floater right there
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it moves around if you tip the card
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the metal touched my skin but the problem that i have right now is
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the plan was to just remove the graphics card from the loop put another graphics
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card in there and then have the loop go through this non-powered graphics card
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which would hopefully not add any temperature to the loop and then it would be fine but i don't even want to
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run this computer on the full loop if it's this gunked up
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Corsair delivers real mech or oh here i have one huh real mac or nothing with
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their new strafe mechanical keyboard featuring genuine german-made cherry mx
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key switches click on manchin to learn
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more i'm gonna move my chin now just a three for a loop
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at last my friends it is finally
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finally here the conclusion of the whole
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room water cooling system series of videos that we have waited
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over a year since initially putting
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these systems together to finally talk about whether or not the concept worked
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whether or not in practice it actually worked and the wait is over only a
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couple more minutes it kind of reminds me of that uh that bmw video that i was
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teasing on social media not that long ago about the all-new one series drop a
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like on the bottom of the video if you want to see us finally release that because i think we're very close
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let's go so i want to do a recap of the concept for those who haven't been
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following along the whole time our editing den is in a south-facing room of
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the house that we have been running Linus media group out of for the last
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year and a half and it gets
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friggin hot in here so my brilliant idea was
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what if we took all of our editing workstations and removed the heat from
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the room via water cooling so it started
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with redoing our editing workstations which used to be just a haphazard mix of
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parts that we had left over from reviews and are now pretty much all standardized
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so they've got n600 cases from cooler master water cooling by swift tech and
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i'll explain why there's a radiator on the outside of the system in spite of
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the whole room water cooling i'll explain that later
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we've got 4960x six core processors those are extreme editions 32 gigs of
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kingston memory ASUS x99 deluxe motherboards gtx titan blacks so those
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are six gig vram cards we've also got cooler master v750 power supplies and
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all of them except exiles which actually has two of these a quadro a 10 gigabit
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nick and then a v 1200 because uh his system is kind of balls to the wall and
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then each system has its own pump as well so the way that it all works is
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that at the back we've got kind of a a tangle of of tubing going on here so
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we've got quick release fittings here so we can either
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connect to the radiator on the top which is running quite toasty right now or
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to the whole room system and this was actually all done up by luke's dad who
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did an amazing job of plumbing the
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entire room for us so you can see the terminus station is actually over here
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by nick van berkel's pc so every one of these systems has an inlet and then an
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outlet and they all join together as you go around the room we actually left
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enough space to have up to seven systems water cooled all at the same
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time all on the same loop and in the
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bathroom server room this is where the magic
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happens so here's our mechanical and then uh uv sterilizing filters here is
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our reservoir here are our dual little giant pumps and then those lead to a
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radiator fan setup using Noctua industrial ppc fans so those waterproof
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dust proof ones on the roof of the house
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so that we are actually physically removing the heat from the building in
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order to keep our systems cool we've got a cover on there we've got a power
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supply for all of the fans to run as well
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so with that recapped how does it
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perform so to evaluate our success there's a number of different metrics to
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look at we can look at the cooling performance of the individual systems
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based on how hot their cpus run during an intensive task like video rendering
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we can look at the room temperature inside versus the temperature outside to
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see if removing the heat from the room actually yielded any kind of benefit and
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we can look at the convenience and maintenance factors so let's start with
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CPU temperatures when we're running the
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cpus on their own radiators the room
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reaches a temperature of about 31 degrees so you can actually see that
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right now which is about a three degree difference between the inside and the
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outside and you should bear in mind that that's on a day that's not particularly
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sunny which can cause the room to heat up quite a bit more than the computers
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could possibly affect all the systems
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and the sort of 45 degree plus range on
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the CPU which is reasonable except for terrans which i'll talk more about later
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and edsels which has an additional graphics card but no additional radiator
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space for cooling so that one's bound to run a little bit on the hotter side so
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now what we're gonna do is we are going to take the running whole room system
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i'll show you guys how we quickly connect and disconnect them
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so while they're running probably not recommended but we've done it so many
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times anyway that it i've lost all fear of the process
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all we do is use these to hook it up
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to the whole room system now
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what you are likely to see here is a nearly instantaneous drop
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in CPU temperatures so we've gone from 47 on core 1 to 41
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and i'll make some graphs here showing you guys the difference in CPU temps
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under load from system to system to dramatically reduce temperatures across
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the board by hooking up to the whole room system why does that work well it's just a
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matter of radiator capacity we could just as easily achieve great CPU
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temperatures by hooking up much much larger radiators as you'll see in some
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very large towers this will support like quad rads in the front duals in the top
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a single in the back and the like another advantage of this approach by
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having it outside is that you don't end up with a chain reaction of the room
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temperature increasing and therefore the cooling efficiency of your radiator
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increasing because you're always tied to ambient temperatures but
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that's a great question if one of the objectives was to lower the ambient
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temperature in the room with this system how much have you achieved the answer is
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not a heck of a lot we achieved a one degree drop by hooking all of these
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systems up which i would consider within the sort of margin of error the sort of
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a vague sort of concept so being able to align this correctly helps a lot
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on our inlet so that's the cold side we're getting 29.7 degrees
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and on our outlet that's the hot side
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we are getting 30.0 degrees which i'm sure someone out
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there is calculating the specific heat of this you know mass of water or
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whatever the case may be and i'm sure that we are actually dissipating a
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significant amount of the heat outside but that is where the whole
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was it actually practical thing comes into play because by going with copper
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tubing which i think we can all agree is more aesthetically pleasing than
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insulated pvc we actually created a situation where we are dissipating a
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significant amount of the heat we're pulling out of each system
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into the room anyway anyway via the copper piping
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so i guess all that's really left now is
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do we consider the project a success the answer is no um i still think the
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concept could have worked really well but there were a few critical things
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that i really think we could have done differently number one don't use a metal
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reservoir don't use a metal reservoir
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find some kind of plastic reservoir to use because that's where the thing that
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i promised to talk about later comes in terran system has some big problems
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caused by corrosion bits stuck in his system that even cleaning out his CPU
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block which was extremely gunked up that was a picture i posted on instagram
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could not fix and um
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point number two is i would definitely recommend installing some kind of a
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bleed system at the highest point in the loop that way you are not going to have
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as much difficulty filling the system each time uh compared to
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us where we had to add a second pump in order to have enough flow rate and
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enough pressure in order to get the water in and the air out of our tubing
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system uh the other thing that i would do differently next time is um
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wow gee i guess that ties into a question that we've been asked a lot
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aren't you guys moving why did you bother with all of this and are you
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gonna do whole room water cooling at the new place well number one we weren't
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planning to move when we originally came up with this concept and started working
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on it so there's that uh number two no we do not
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intend to water cool our systems let alone whole room water cool our systems
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at the new office we're gonna have air conditioning which is probably the
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solution that we should have gone with in the first place if the objective was
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to lower the temperature in this room
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and have our computers run cooler
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so i think that's pretty much it thank you guys for sticking with us throughout the
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whole room water cooling project we learned a lot i think we established the
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feasibility of it the performance and the silence factor cannot be denied but
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the convenience factor of it leaves a lot to be desired and the
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the execution of it would be extraordinarily time consuming and even
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more expensive than what we did if you were to really do it properly in such a
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way that it would require little or zero maintenance over the long
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run thanks for watching guys uh if you
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disliked this video i think you know what to do but if you liked it and if
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you appreciated the whole series then do please press that like button also
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feel free to go check that out and thanks again for watching i'll see you
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guys on the other side