Cooling an 18-Core CPU with NO FANS!? - Case Made of Radiators
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,303 words · ~6 min read
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you could say it's been a lifelong journey of mine to build the quietest pc
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possible my old tj07 build used two radiators so
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that i could run my fans at just 600 RPM and my current setup has the pc
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literally in a different room with a cable running through the wall
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but that is both expensive and kind of a pain in the butt
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what if there was another way
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a way that looks super cool but that may or may not be even more
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expensive and with even more butt pain
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i'm going to tell you about it but first something that comes with no butt pain
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the be quiet! dark base 700 is a versatile case that features RGB
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lighting and a tempered glass side panel check it out in the link below to learn
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more
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so this idea was actually pitched months ago in a writer's brainstorming meeting
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when well let's just say we got totally off
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topic discussing old computer hardware memes but instead of making a case made
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of fans we should do a case made of radiators right and it should have no
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fans at all yes
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well somehow that made it onto the production
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calendar with the original plan actually being to basically no actually to
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exactly just jury rig together every
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radiator in the warehouse with some l brackets we had lying around and zip tie
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in a motherboard power supply and graphics card that got canned pretty
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quickly and the project evolved into its second form a bunch of radiators
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attached with l brackets and some metal mounting brackets for the
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internal hardware courtesy of our friends with the machine shop that
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totally isn't the only reason we hang out with them after school proto case
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then by this point if we're gonna get some custom mounting hardware we might
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as well create our own frame for the radiators right
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yeah obviously so it was off to autodesk
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inventor where a bunch of time was spent measuring and mocking up the brackets
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required for our build as well as for the case frame itself
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we ended up with a shape that's actually sort of reminiscent of a pc case but
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without front fascia or side panels
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or a bottom i guess it is to a case kind of what a
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go-kart frame is to a car but
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these uh feet that we got from mnpc tech are pretty cool and anyway it's perfect
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for our purposes since it is perfectly
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sized for ek's ultra thick xc series
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radiators in the 360 millimeter variant
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and then it's also got another spot on the back for the three by three 120
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millimeter rad that we've had sitting around unused in the warehouse since
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2013. for style points for this build we went
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with hardline tubing using fittings for all of the bends giving us a finished
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product that i wouldn't think would be
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beautiful to most people in like a traditional sense but that has a raw
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industrial look to it that i personally absolutely love
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and the real story here isn't beauty anyway but rather pushing the limits of
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performance and cooling so let's take a look then at the insane specs that we
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loaded it up with for testing we started with 18 cores of pure Intel
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core i9 power then we threw in 64 gigs of quad channel
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sodium ddr4 from g skill 64 gigs and a
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whopping 3 by 960 gigs of NVMe SSD raid
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0 goodness though we actually ended up needing
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those high capacity drives for another project but
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their 240 gig siblings look pretty much the same oh and then we threw in a gtx
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1080 because come on what i9 rig doesn't have a bitching GPU
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finally at the heart of all that the way that we fit this much radiator power
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into this much space was asrock's brand new x299e itx with a custom bits power
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full cover block that thankfully replaces the micro sized vrm cooler on
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this puppy okay then enough about that how does it
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perform we decided to test our creation a couple
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of different ways first with no fans in
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it at all except for the one that was built into our silverstone 800 watt
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modular sfxl power supply
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and that idle mission accomplished our temps were near
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ambient with our pump handling all of these radiators like a champ with that
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said a system like this when it's not doing anything doesn't
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kick out a lot of heat so we added a CPU load measured the
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results and ended up even more impressed
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even at this power level we are easily dissipating all of the heat and keeping
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our processor at a safe temperature but then what about the graphics card
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no problem so i think at this point it's safe to
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call the project a success it should be noted that the fan in the power supply
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did spin up while gaming adding to the noise already being made by our d5 pump
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but thanks to the massive radiator surface area this is still among the
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quietest systems we have ever encountered even at full load and
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perhaps the coolest thing about it is that by borrowing a page from the build
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that originally inspired it we can take it of course to a completely new level
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now we weren't able to fit fans onto all of the radiator spots but
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even running at a low RPM we ended up with some seriously impressive cooling
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results so then conclusion i guess
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if this was a product sent to us by a manufacturer asking for an objective
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review what would we say well in this exact configuration we're
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looking at almost twelve hundred dollars worth of water cooling hardware
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so we'd start by saying that you might wanna think about saving a few bucks by
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using soft tubing at the very least
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but we'd also say that you cannot question the performance of what is
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effectively an 18 by 120 millimeter
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radiator setup and you can't question the fact that it
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not only ran passively but also did so
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with performance that wasn't far off what you'd expect from decent
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aftermarket cooling systems so
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it's not a great value but it's definitely rad
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oh that's awful we have partnered with tesoro to give
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away 10 limited edition gram spectrum
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keyboards modded by the people over at modders inc simply vote for your top
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three limited edition designs and be entered to win one of these keyboards
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who knows maybe the most popular design will be produced as a magnetic overlay
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for more people to enjoy as well on their gram spectrum keyboards
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also if you purchase a gram spectrum keyboard through the link below before
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the end of the holidays you'll receive two magnetic overlays like this one to
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quickly and easily mod your keyboard without any hassle so check it out and
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get more details at the link below
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so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get
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subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy some of the stuff we featured today like these fantastic
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radiators that super sick motherboard at the link in the video description also
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down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one yep
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when did that come up whatever also linked in the description
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is our merch storage has cool shirts like this one and our community forum
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which you should totally join