Whole Room Water Cooling Project - Day 1
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2015-05-07
·
1,596 words · ~7 min read
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we are going to liquid cool all five of
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our editing workstations together so those are like core i76 cores and gtx
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titans then we're gonna take that water we're gonna take it out of the building
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and then we're gonna put that on a massive radiator so we're actually
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taking all that heat and dissipating it outside causing not only our systems to
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run cooler but also our room in which we
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do our work to be cooler well the whole actual goal of the whole
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room water cooling project was to cool down the room
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where you could have done a much cheaper and easy solution of actually installing a
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like ac unit but instead we've decided to go along with this how effective will
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it actually be not hugely
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but hopefully it'll help a little bit and be really cool at the same time
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one system in particular was the main inspiration for this project and that's
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edsel's machine which had a couple of problems number one is that the system
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itself was always overheating because he always had his six core processor pinned
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at 100 so they were kicking out a bunch of heat into his
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quite inadequate CPU cooler which was then not keeping his CPU cool enough so
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problem number one was that his system was actually overheating so much like 80
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90 sometimes even above 90 degrees that it was thermal throttling and he wasn't
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even getting all the performance out of it and then problem number two was that
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the person sitting in front of it was constantly complaining about the heat in
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the room so with the whole room water cooling setup
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we can cool the system make it more powerful because we got a 12 core xeon
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for it and make that person complain less by making the room cooler nope
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originally i hadn't planned to paint the room the project was going to be much
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smaller scale and it was going to be just about liquid cooling the machines
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but i realized that if we're going to take the room apart
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clean it up presumably and pull all the systems out of it well this is a great
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opportunity to take it from a place where we all sit at our computers and
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work and turn that into like a really cool
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workspace that really feels like Linus
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tech tips make it feel like like home and like a place that's really cool to
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be in and work on our craft for some reason
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i got the drop sheets in the heart
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oh my god it fell off that's why what
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look it detached on the side yeah
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unfortunately
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really turn oh my god yeah this is terrible
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so i drew upon my experience painting houses and training painters to
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get that done in kind of the Linus tech tips gray and then as much as i've got a
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fair bit of painting experience i'm a little bit rusty and i have some
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experience training people who've never painted before but nick has really never
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painted before keeping the quality level up was a bit
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of a challenge as well nick did his best though and between the two of us we
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managed to get the whole job done although
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by the second coat i did pretty much most of it myself since it was uh you
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know the second coat is when you clean up the mistakes from the first coat a
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lot of the time
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finishing the first coat of paint was really nice i was able to put down the roller and kind of step back and go yeah
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this is starting to look really cool and i wanted to kind of turn to my sides and
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say hey guys don't you think this is great but i realized everyone was gone
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so i wandered downstairs and found out that while i was painting instead of
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everyone else kind of proactively figuring out how we can move the project
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forward they were doing arts and crafts and making a shield for luke and pinning
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buttons to turn his shirt into like Intel button armor
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all that might have been okay if at least they had done a decent job of
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making body armor it's terrible what
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in battle i am cloning over everyone's old drives so that when they get their
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new computers it'll be like using the same drive so
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brandon can have his viruses which he refused to take care of terry can have
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all his slow unoptimized drives and everything and we don't have to
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reinstall anything or waste any time freaking terran this whole time has been
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telling me that he has an SSD in his system and that his slow boot is
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unrelated that's terence drive
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i wonder what the slowness of his computer has been about
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gamma tune
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having a pile of like cases and graphics
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cards and i mean even the water cooling gear alone was a pile like having this
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mountain of hardware that was actually like as tall as me
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was uh really made me better understand
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the scope of what we were undertaking
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so apparently the project was pushed up a day i actually had no idea was not
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told by anyone but that seems to kind of be a Linus media group thing there's
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like you have to do this at some point in time somehow no one
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knows no one's gonna be helping you and we're not really sure when but you won't
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have enough time so just make sure you do it really quickly like thankfully
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this actually gets finished before we move on to something else
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well it turned out Linus didn't actually check the specs for the radiators before
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he bought them so when i tried to mount it on the top there's fittings that
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would normally be on the bottom of it that then pressed against the top of the
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case so i put it up on an angle and you couldn't actually get screws all the way
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through the fan the top of the case past the fitting and into the radiator so i
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had to drill holes in the top which was fantastic thank you thank you Linus
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so luke actually ended up having to drill
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holes for each of the radiators before we could even start assembling the
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systems that took up a ton of his time
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that otherwise he would have been able to spend helping me build systems it got
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to the point where we actually had to recruit edsel to help us build computers
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even though his system building experience is not really that much
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hey this is pretty nice to me
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glittery nice that one was mostly painless the
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next one should be the second easiest of all of them so
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all right and then it was pretty much time to
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water cool the systems something that i ended up doing the vast majority of
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myself so that's getting the tubing on the fittings for the CPU and GPU block
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running it outside of the case and then at that point i handed them off to ed
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who was the one who actually figured out how the fittings worked for the quick
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disconnects to install the uh the quick disconnects at the back on both the top
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radiator as well as the tubing coming out of the inside of the case
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installing everything in the systems was a monumental task and everyone had to
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chip in in ways that they haven't really done before i even had edzel helping me
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assemble GPU water blocks onto the titan
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cards because that can be very time consuming and i needed to move on to the
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next thing that i could do and luke was drilling holes in cases so
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we had to parallelize the workflow a lot
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just to account for how time-consuming everything was going to be
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well because i'm a plumber i deal with this sort of sort of situation of
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soldering copper together and dealing with pex lines and
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different fittings for myself i would say maybe a two
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the typical homeowner or
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a person that would try to tackle this on themselves would probably be closer
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to eight or nine maybe even a tick higher it all depends
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on your skill levels this project
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after i understood what they were wanting i thought it was a very
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interesting project
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these are all what you call a dry fit
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just to see if everything fits in the right places
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and then we'll hold it up like that solder it and then these are all three inches
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apart three inches apart nice and neat
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uh so we got the vinyl decals in and
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they're actually pretty huge almost life
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size for Linus it is life-size we had to
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pay some guy in the parking lot sure oh uh radiators
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yeah i was just doing the exiting for the camera oh i was next
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okay
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i think a little bit of confusion was bound to happen and i think overall um
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we're a little confused