I Can't Believe This Worked!!! - Concrete Cooled PC (April Fools 2019)
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
2,347 words · ~11 min read
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now whether it's whiskey orangee juice or Mountain Dew I guarantee you if it's
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in fluid form somebody somewhere has
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filled up a loop with it cooled their computer and posted their results online
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so given how done to death this concept is I really never thought that we'd end
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up exploring the whole like weird or
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wacky exotic coolant concept that is
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until I read a comment from one of our viewers Jor leer St who suggested that
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we try using concrete now hold on I know
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what you guys are thinking but based on some of our preliminary testing I have
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reason to believe that this may actually
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work over the last couple of days Alex
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has put together all the materials that we're going to need to build what I
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believe is going to be the world's first
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concrete cooled gaming
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PC all right so the first thing we're going to need is some Hardware so we
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gathered up the parts for a pretty sweet modern gaming PC here we've got
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ourselves a uh cor i7
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9700k uh 16 gigs of memory we've got uh
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RTX uh 2080 not too shabby I mean the
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thing is if we're going to be doing a test like this we want to use something
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that's representative of a high performance gaming machine because if
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you use all low power stuff and then you end up with really great thermal results
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then all you've managed to demonstrate is that low powerered Hardware produces
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less heat and doesn't run as hot as high performance stuff so like what's the
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point of that right exactly which one is this the
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master case something or rather yeah oh the maker 5T oh this is an older one
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they did a bunch of um sponsored stuff
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with it oh no it's not actually locked is it
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um can we unlock it from the
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inside okay my left ARM is a little skinnier than my right for no reason at
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all well problem solved thermal take wins by
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default power for the motherboard there we go man if this
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works I'm going to be
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just it really shouldn't but then like
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you can't deny the initial testing yeah you really can't we weren't even going
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to do this video yeah people might be surprised how many things we try and
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just never makes it to video now normally these days we use a
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triple 120 mm radiator but again if
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Alex's calculations are correct we should be able to get away with just a
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double and get similar or even better results so this is it for our build you
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know it's actually got kind of like an old school charm to it I like
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it oh you doing there that is the heaviest bag of coolant I have ever seen
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before oh wow 34 kgs one part quick
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creep mortar cement two and A4 to three parts Masonry sand yeah we're we're not
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uh putting sand in there well yeah obviously obvious reasons yeah that'd be
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stupid okay I'll bring this guy I'll uh I'll get a bucket of water
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he what did you need my help for exactly I don't know for whatever reason I thought we'd need two people one to like
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sort of hold it and make sure but this is actually working pretty well do we even need such a big
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mixer we need like a liter of concrete
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well um have you ever made concrete before Yes actually it's been a while
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though now that I think about
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it yeah let's make sure we have enough
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yeah I think it needs more concrete okay I mean if we want to take advantage of
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the cooling potential of it then we have to make sure we actually have enough
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Concrete in there okay that's starting to look kind of closer look we're a tech
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Channel okay how the pros do it you want concrete tips you watch a concrete
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Channel just look at this yeah this will be great all right so I guess let's get
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a base line and reading with water first all right I was just going to start
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putting the concrete in no ah shoot
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right yeah good call good call and that way we can make sure the system actually
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even works too you know it's funny you see to be expressing a fair bit of
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skepticism about this whole idea but need I remind you that you were the one
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who did the initial testing like look at this hey it posted nice okay so we've
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got working Hardware now let's just see if we can boot into Windows so we're at
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about 35 to 40° idle let's go ahead and
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start our stress test here okay pretty good not bad it's like about what I'd
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expect so 55 to 60° so everything seems
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to be working normally so it seems like it's basically leveled off like we could
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run it for while longer but we're just at 62° maximum yeah this is exactly what
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we'd expect so all right let's drain it
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we want to blow out as much of the water as we can so that we don't have I mean
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obviously the concrete is just concrete and water so a little bit of extra water
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isn't going to kill it but we don't want to get our ratio off you know I'm beginning to have some
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second thoughts we might need to be a bit water here hold on a second look at
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this as it moves you can actually see it
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turn more liquid that's what you were saying was supposed to help us right see
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that like you can see it's really solid but as it moves it actually turns to a
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liquid so you can see the reservoir is actually filling up a lot better than we
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expected well than I expected anyway I don't know what your expectations were
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so I am more than halfway done check this out oh yeah not bad and what's
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crazy is you can actually see that even though it's clearly a liquid cuz it's
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flowing in there it's kind of solid right now how's that
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going to affect things when we get the pump hooked up uh we might need to power
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cycle it a couple times but it also might just work for those wondering this
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is why we used halfin tubing because you're going to need a pretty thick with
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two C's tube in order to get concrete
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through it so uh how how do I do this without making a mess oh the tubes yeah
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oh that's not a problem spray it down with some water and then just give it wipe down
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with this I mean it's not going to be perfect but yeah do yeah for sure um oh
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this is exciting so we've got two pieces
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of Tu being filled so we can go ahead and attach the
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pump so Alex this is great I've got two of the tubes on already
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mhm and I can actually attach the other one to the res right now oh nice so okay
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I guess this this the uh the moment of
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truth so we do get the uh the Heat and
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the pump going it should like make it more liquidy and just kind of get her on
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through but uh these are like the heaviest tubes I think I've ever felt
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and that that looks really thick in
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there oh that sound do you hear the pump
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yeah like wait oh uh it's moving dang
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it it sounds questionable but uh crap I
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think you were right is it going to boot though no I already
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posted you have got to be kidding me
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this shouldn't work okay so hold on a second I was
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pretty scared up to now but uh why does this work can you are you seeing this no
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no the tubes like are you seeing this
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okay we're idling it's moving idling at 24 we were doing 40 hold on check the
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check the step 28 maximum uh no way
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start we jumped like right up to like 52
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four wait what do you mean 52 you mean on the other one yeah on the last one we
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jumped like holy C crap even though the
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cool in is moving like you can clearly see there's Flex that aren't it's almost
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like there's an inner channel of movement but around the outsides of the
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tubes it doesn't move at all right and now maximum 48° so like we can leave
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this for a bit the thing about water cooling is that normally you only get
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heat being transferred at the Block and
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at the rad yeah because like the great thing about water is that has such a
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high heat capacity right yeah but that's exactly why water is supposed to be the
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best thing for liquid cooling well what the thing is is that concrete is sort of
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like a ceramic of sorts but a ceramic that you can like have sort of flowing
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around right so it not only is like
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heating up there and there but it's also like getting into the concrete that can
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deposit the heat into the water all along here and then like all along here
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it will be just taking that heat away as it after go that makes so much sense
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that's why nobody likes having like a concrete floor in their bedroom like
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when you get out of bed and you step onto a concrete floor immediately it
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draws all the Heat away from your feet and like same thing with like a basement
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then that's why your basement never gets hot in the summer so why has nobody ever
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explored this before we are sitting right now at anywhere from 49 to 50° C
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that is a significant Improvement and if you look at this the CPU temp is
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actually at 28° that's a 10° Delta from just water
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so this is incredible I mean it doesn't look great I mean we could we could
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clean it up a fair bit and everything you know it doesn't look amazing but the
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results totally speak for themselves I mean is it high five time I think so
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just ow my hands are kind of cold from
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working with the the concrete which makes sense again like that's why your
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hands get cold when you work with it like it's so obvious
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now Alex honest you have to come see this
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what's up what's up uh just just come along it's a okay sorry I'll be back
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kind of bad things hold on oh no it's
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not the concrete PC is it you know how
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we just kind of left it last night yeah cuz like you know we were here kind oh
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my God it's not running yeah I think we had like a brown
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out or something last night oh
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no the uh a
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uh oh crap this like doesn't
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Bend but like I don't know if you can see in there but this
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is clearly problematic yeah
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like hold on we we could maybe try uh
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turning it on and seeing if it'll go but I oh I don't think that's a very good
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idea no
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shoot Okay so we've definitely
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identified the downside to concrete cooling but that kind of comes with the
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territory with any sort of Enthusiast
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grade solution and I don't think it's unreasonable to expect people to have a
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UPS so given that we got a 10° improvement in our CPU temps I'm still
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comfortable recommending it we have certainly seen computer hardware
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efficient AOS do more more crazy things
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