Water Cooling a Network Switch!
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
4,055 words · ~20 min read
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recent recently alex and i shot a video
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assembling what is the very first
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Linus media group manufactured
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CPU water block now of course our
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objective though in all of that was not to build a CPU water block because quite
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frankly we could call up our friends at alphacool ek swift basically anyone and
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they would do a much better job of it than we did no offense yeah not taken
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the objective was for us to water cool a
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red 8k camera but baby steps right so
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this was doing something pretty normal where we could basically clone a chinese
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design and then just put it on the cnc
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today we kick things up a notch with this
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we're gonna water cool something a little unusual our 10 gigabit 12 port
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network switch from netgear that was actually the first 10 gigabit piece of
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equipment that we got well not counting like network cards
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like like a switch
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the hot docs uses the ergodox design which keeps you comfortable typing away
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for long periods of time and features qmk firmware and hot swappable key
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switches check it out at the link below uh so this is it
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um they don't get
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their network switch anymore in the camera then yep just unplug it yep all
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right well oh crap we were supposed to do the sound
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test first that's kind of the whole point if you guys
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it's really loud yeah this is going to be a very inexact
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unscientific test here
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56 decibels sure on boot up okay let's
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water cool it
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how much does steve pay us for all this product placement that he gets on our
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channel like nothing
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so the reason that network switches are
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really loud and run really hot is not necessarily because the hardware inside
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them it has a ton of power draw or anything like that it's because cooling
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them is a real challenge most network switches even at the prosumer level are
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in what's called a single u which is the
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i don't know the universal unit that's where the u comes from
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i'm just kidding i made all of that up for height in a rack so that means you
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can only use these wimpy 40 millimeter fans
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and a lot of the time you also don't have a lot of ventilation holes for
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whatever reason what's funny i actually brought my own
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handle because i was using this for something
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before we started so i can help
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oh man i just stripped that bit
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that took a long time i'm gonna go get a bigger screwdriver
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oh there's the one he stripped oh
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bloody hell i just stripped this one too
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see i just had to go in straight that's what my mom always said what i'm
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actually really looking forward to this i have it's it's a funny thing because
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like computers the first thing i do with them is open them up like laptops and
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stuff but it's never occurred to me to open up
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our 10 gig network switch is this one that's still not oh
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oh there we go so up and back cool holy crap there's a
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lot of stuff to cool in here what is this are they ripping us off huh is
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there another port that they don't put on the front maybe they're just afraid
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of having it be 13. so here's our power supply that we're definitely not going
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to touch or even get close to so my intention had been to keep it 1u
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mountable though oh okay yeah but then just have like
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tubing out like quick connects or something and then like an external rad
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okay i mean that's one option i'm not married to it though for whatever reason
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in my mind i was picturing kind of like this goes on here yeah
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and we just like cut two holes for tubing
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and then mount a rad like right here
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like full like like engine blocks showing through the top of the hood
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muscle car muscle switch and then i guess if you really wanted to we could
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put like some t-connectors in there so you can make it a 1u have it go out the
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side so it looks like every one of these heat sinks
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is hard mounted so there's screws going in from the
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bottom of the pcb and this whole main board needs to come out before we're
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going to be able to remove any of this now to be clear this is not as
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expensive as a red camera but this is still today
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what like an 800 network switch or something like that i have no clue yeah
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let's be careful with it because i can't remember how much it costs either it's not cheap though i always wonder if we
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could just get away with putting little copper things on here sort of like you
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said but then run a heat pipe just straight across all of them if we used a
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ball nose bit that was the right size we could cut a channel
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right in the top of it the right size for the heat pipe yep and then just
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solder it on and and then we managed to spread the heat out that way okay and
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that way we've just got this big spreader that'll carry the heat
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theoretically hopefully towards our cooling yeah
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okay wait a minute what oh those all soldered on there's no way how
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could they possibly be
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that's gonna be a pain in the butt should i go get the soldering iron yeah
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all right what do you think the chances are that they're soldered on and then epoxied
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underneath i was just thinking oh we do have a wig how hard do you
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think it is just snip those
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oh ah
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there easy as pie
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i should have been wearing eye protection for that brandon you're wearing glasses right
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yeah i think we can get in there and just give her like a little snip
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you got to be kidding me oh you you're doing it you actually did it
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you actually did that works so well
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everybody's got eye protection on me everybody's going to be screaming so
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much like they got so mad when i just like hacked off the dvi connector and
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that's like a bunch of pins
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that one hit over there and then landed over there this is that is so dumb what we're doing
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wow yeah not bad so you got a couple challenges
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these look like they're up a little high so we might end up having to kind of go
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around them um also not all these holes came clear so we
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might have to either pop them back out or actually desolder them properly if we
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want mounting points for our block yeah your copper slab to cover it
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is probably the simplest way here's our main CPU block
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and then we do a short heat pipe here and a long
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heat pipe here this is actually going to be pretty difficult
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yeah i don't know why i wasn't thinking it would be difficult
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but it's going to be quite difficult
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can we can we do this where i actually here hold on hold on hold on can can we
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can we pretend that i had something to do with this and i'm like oh god what
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did you do okay you can do it so
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how did you do that over the last week or so he created this fantastic
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well i mean what would you call this
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model yeah it's just like a little model so we have the switch here all the
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critical measurements for our water cooling is in there and you ended up
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buying new calipers for that is that right uh yeah is it the big daddy
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caliper no it's the alex's calipers
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and these are really fancy because they're just very repeatable and
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expensive we had problems in the past where i
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would measure a bunch of things and error would stack up so i guess there
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were a couple problems that we had to solve here
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so the first is that i was pretty concerned that having this many heat
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sources on one heat pipe would cause problems
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so we have this paper here that sort of solved this for us which is an investigation of thermal characteristics
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on a centered wick heat pipe with double heat sources basically tells us you want
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your heat sources to be as close to the condenser as possible
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so our condenser is effectively this
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segment of the heat pipe right here where it will be thermal epoxy to this
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copper plate which is going to be water cooled and then i guess other things
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jonathan from ascend ceiling contacted us uh
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and we have a heck ton of o-rings like
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he's just he's just been raining o-rings on us
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so so we have better o-rings this time yeah and also his card stock is amazing
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like look at this it's quality yeah can we get some of this no and yeah we have
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new o-ring lube so basically
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nothing can go wrong yeah well things can go wrong but that's what we're about
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to get to the hard part though is that we have to actually machine this
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so how do you machine a rounded groove
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so we have a ball-nosed end mill so that's just like it's round on the
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end and you just kind of kind of just like that which was this
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was like surprisingly hard to get to work properly
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so big shout out to cj from autodesk he
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really it's going to be like half a sketchy one
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because we can't go any lower than 78 000 RPM
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on our cnc router so really we should be using a mil for this we should be using
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a mil for this but we don't have a mill because they're expensive yes when
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you're going to cut metal you need to make sure that every single time that
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the tooth comes around you're actually like cutting out a chunk of metal or
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it's just going to rub and it's going to burn it out really fast so since we
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can't make the tool spin slower we need to run it faster
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we're being safe right yep i don't want people yelling at us about our cnc
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yeah do you want to plug in the air compressor yeah i'd love to we do have
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actual mist cooling now so everyone that's saying you should have cooling we
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already have to blanket well you can definitely see the shmoo
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here so is this just getting like more and more legit every time we do a video yeah
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basically this is leaking
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yeah it got dropped so we're ready yep can i press go
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uh
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i like to feel like i'm helping and that's the tool that we have so yeah
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that is not that clean looking no
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no and we're done so what happened there
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was the piece of copper that we're trying to cut
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shifted which means that
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the entire tool path that alex laid out is now offset by
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about three quarters of a centimeter so
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it's possible that we would have ended up with
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something usable but our thermal transfer is not going to be great
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i mean if it had held down we would have something here anyway
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i could that's really bad for the tool and we
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have to make four of them
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and we're back this time with a bit of a new plan
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so now we have bolted
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our copper plate down to the bed
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we have also made some canadian engineering repairs to our reservoir
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down here it no longer leaks thanks to some hand mix epoxy and uh we have done
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away with our plan to make rounded grooves because we don't have a mill we
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only have a router so why don't we just let the work speak for itself instead of
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telling them what's gonna happen i can press go now right um
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hey hey
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let's see the finished product so this is going to be the top of one of our
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blocks this is going to be the top of one of our other more different blocks
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this is the block we made last time which is still here again for some reason we're using the bottom of it oh
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we're just reusing it yeah i mean why dull your bits when you don't have to oh
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is this it yeah so this is
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the moment of truth right now oh perfect it really is actually
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yeah it's 0.1 of a millimeter oversized
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good work i'm happy with that
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um i guess we just need to clean these off and
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tap them look at that it just looks so good underneath completely see-through we
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didn't bother facing it this time
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that should go there yeah that goes right and then we'll have the three that
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go down the middle here
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whoa that's a lot of copper
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now you told me pro mode was gonna have the heat pipe on the bottom so that we
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were like heat pipe direct touch cooling yeah are we doing that with this one no not
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with this one no that's gonna be version two what do you
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mean version two we need to get this done because ed's mad they don't have
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a switch for their ingest crap
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but just crap yeah ingest crap we don't we
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don't need these videos but yeah we're going to have to redesign
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this guy and alphacool is coming up with
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those like the server-sized heatsinks so those are going to like go
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in the side and it's going to look super legit but until then we're just going to
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like have it Linus tech 2 style just like below the ingest station
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do these screws go through
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not quite we don't have to widen the holes in the
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pcb do we are you kidding me
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well it's potentially going to be the quietest and coolest switch on
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like everywhere arguably a switch that doesn't power on anymore is very quiet
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and very cool
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ah this bit might actually be too small that went super well nope we're good
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what that was it yep that's that's all we needed oh
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nice
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we should probably give this a little dusty here yeah
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something
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yeah this is pretty bad yeah it was definitely one of the worser
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ideas i've ever seen like am i just going at it with this i like
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legitimately straight up forget how to do it um what about this time we just
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like clamp it like this yeah off the table yeah
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you can just kind of get this on the side like like so and blame obama okay
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there are a lot of people that were really mad last time that we didn't use the drill press to do this so it would
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go down perfectly straight oh yeah that
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would be smart wouldn't it yeah it really would you guys want to do that
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nope nope
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wait what the crap is this crap is what this hole
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doesn't go all the way straight through the drill press had an issue
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yeah it's good okay this is the really bad one i don't know
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about that well you'll be able to tell from the bottom
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oh jeez what did you just do that is that's pure carnage right there
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oh god
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that's a lot of acrylic on the floor
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yeah uh these don't quite line up well like
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do you want to tap those holes again oh they're all the way over here
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oh crap okay so we're just kind of doing the
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same thing as last time then yep
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acrylate me extra cyano on the side
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and theoretically it will seal
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we're asking for a lot of tight tolerances to
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line up here yep we're gonna put
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that through a plastic washer
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okay so that goes there then we do another plastic washer i'm
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assuming um yeah
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okay can we do a nut yup not me
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there so i've realized something really
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unfortunate where this right here screws in i
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thought that it was just like nuts on the back that came up
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yeah but it's actually screwed right into the chassis
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yeah i don't know if these can come off oh
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i can't believe that you got all these holes to mostly sort of line up
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i measured it are you guys as excited as we are to see
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if this thing is still gonna work i am
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i'm amped assuming that we didn't kill it
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it's gonna work pretty well i mean we didn't do anything that bad to it
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not really we're not gonna actually power on the
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switch we're just gonna power this pump and then make sure that nothing leaks
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did you fart yeah but like a couple minutes ago
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it's really lingering oh well i'm sorry about that
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it's awkward all right well given that our system here has
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passed our exhaustive three-minute uh stress test
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would you say we're ready to power it on yeah
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there's a light david oh it's green identifying it's green
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that means 10 gig link oh yeah test
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and there it goes indeed
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boom okay so now what no now we we actually
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get to put it together yeah i guess so okay
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damn i have screen cap going so you don't need to come over here
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there is one more test though it's possible that we're not making good
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contact with uh anything like we actually don't know that just because
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it's working that means it's working well i love that our fans just say
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failure because they're not they're not plugged in question for you though yeah uh did you
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get new like quieter 40 millimeter fans to replace these well i guess if it's
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just open can we just stick like a 140 on top or something
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yes yes we can all right
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yeah so what we can do is we can take this puppy
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put it on do a 140 millimeter cutout
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mount the radiator to that so that nothing could slip through put
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the fan on top and put a fan grill on disassemble this
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and put it in and i'll get a hole in here sure cool are you gonna measure
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where the hole goes yep so i think we're almost done here
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um okay
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speak for yourself because we need to power the pump
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oh i think what we have to do is plug in
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the power supply and start probing
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it's in panic mode and i put it in the ammeter oh
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all right well let's see if anything still works
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12 volts yay wow it's a christmas friggin miracle okay
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so that is
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ground and 12 volt look here
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so ground is the far left 12 volt is the
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third theoretically orange is ground what
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the black is positive 12 volt and yes Jake
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it matters okay i have good news though
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look what i found what in the bowls is that this is a six
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pin pci express adapter see these two pins it's a six to eight pin adapter we
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can use these two wires to find our 12 volt power and then splice that onto the
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power connector for the pump so then as long as we get the right two
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pins then we're good okay so what did i say orange was ground
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black was 12 volt yup neat theoretically
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when i plug in the switch it will turn on with no sparks
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power leds lit
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and theoretically okay more sanity check
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time i have 12 volts here
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oh huzzah
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what a nightmare yeah now it just needs to get connected to this yeah
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other than the hole in beginning this is actually surprisingly like sort
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of properly done yeah like sort of properly
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i mean there's no proper way to do something that's stupid yeah like i guess if we could get a
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couple zip ties in there like yeah 100 pro
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all right a couple LTT cable ties get that
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shilling in there oh yeah um a bit
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concerned about putting this on how come we have to kind of go over the tubes
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and just not slice them
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well but can you get your hand in there when it's like that uh yeah i have small
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hands
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here if you let go here i can help you align this side
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we might as well well have these ones kind of come up similarly you know
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okay
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the best part is that like it looks so good on the inside like it's pretty like
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pro like all machine and stuff and on the outside it's just like straight like ghetto like
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not even the same color tubes hot rodded like
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it's not very space efficient it's very
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heat efficient yeah does it work faster
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no it's a lot quieter yeah did you see how quiet it is i don't
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think i ever actually heard it so that didn't seem like an issue to me but uh
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it was like yeah it was pretty loud
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it's still working temperatures are actually lower but we have a fan running
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on the radiator now so that's an improvement yeah we're looking at 27 and
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28 degrees compared to like 51 and 42 before it's
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