- Running a PC and a
mini-fridge just doesn't work. You know what does? Hooking up this 3,000 watt refrigeration cooler directly to a CPU, at least I sure hope it does. By the end of this video, with any luck... ♪ Brian the Electrician. ♪ will have transformed
this gutted mini split into a CP cooler and
pull the core i7 down. To what? Like negative 40 degrees Celsius. It's going to be really stupid, and huge thanks to Thermal
Grizzly for sponsoring it. (upbeat music) First thing we need to do is figure out where the heck the thermostatic
expansion valve is. We've got our condenser here. It sends liquid to the evaporator that turns all of your liquid into vapour with a U sends it back to here into the compressor. But if liquid gets sent
back into the compressor, well, you put something
that's incompressible into a compressor and things
got really bad, really fast. That's why you need a TVX. It turns out it's right
here, which is great. Because we were afraid it
would be on the evaporator. The second thing we
had to do is figure out how the heck this turns on and off. So, this part right here
goes into your house, and it's responsible for
like connecting to wifi and sending a signal to the outdoor unit, which actually does
the real cooling stuff. I don't want to go down
the electronics engineering rabbit hole (beep) for the next 16 hours, so we're just going to take
this out and use it as it is. Now, I just need to go spend
a lot of money on copper. Honestly, this is going
to be real expensive. I'm sorry Lance. (laughs) Let's look at what we're
going to turn our $200 of raw copper into, using the turmoil. You're probably familiar with
how CPU water blocks work, and this is kind of like that, but instead of using water
to cool down your CPU, we're using the phase
change of refrigerant. Via a copper tube, our
refrigerant will be aimed directly at the CPU. When it goes
from the small diameter and high pressure of the
tube to the comparatively massive space in here,
the refrigerant should go from a liquid to a vapour
with the phase change absorbing loads of heat in the process. After that, we've created
a maze of copper for the refrigerant to navigate for
making its way back out the top. To create this maze, we will
need to machine four copper layers and then solder them all together, sealing the whole thing
and not allowing any refrigerant to escape, which
might be a bit difficult, given that there might be over
two, 300 hundred PSI in here. - This is my first time
running the 16th inch, so we'll see if we blow it up, I guess. Yeah, it seems to be working. That tool is great for chip evacuation, so I think we're good. Nevermind. - I'm almost wondering if we
should actually put a little bit of an orifice in the
end of the tube because with this sitting here,
you're still gonna have a pretty big opening. - We could just crush the end of that. It's just the most YOLO evapourator. - One thing we are going to
have to be careful to do is make sure we put this
through the top layer before we solder down to the lower layer, because otherwise it won't go in. - It wouldn't be great. And I'm going to have to
get this to sit up a little tighter. It was a.. we're
winding up with a bit of a gap. So off to work on the
end of this a little bit, to make it all fit. - Yup. This is why you
double-check everything when you're running new code. This was supposed to be
a helix and it is there, but there's not enough space. So it decided instead it
was going to plunge the tool right down to the final
depth and then do a cut, which with a 16 inch cutter
would have definitely blown it right up. So
we're going to fix that. - Grill the end down a
little bit, got the end, open it back up and okay,
that's going to fit. So once we get the two major
pieces soldered together here, I can solder the tube
in and that'll seal it into this lower layer.
And then as we add layers, I can solder the tube where
it passes through each layer. (upbeat music) - Oh, final piece of copper. This one looks pretty good
too. The nice stepped edges Oh my tap just broke in there. I guess this was a very (beep) tap. (upbeat music) - That's cool. Now should do. - Oh it's finally time. - I might need the big head This is way too hot for the
flare to figure out what it is. - It's actually soldered to the pipe - We have fire bricks down there
for when you figure out how to get it off. - Yeah I think we're going to need that. I'll try to move it I guess. (tools working) - So what did we learn Brian? - Firebricks are our friends? - Yeah, don't solder it to the base. - That's the first for me. Does anyone want hearing protection? (upbeat music) - Have you ever seen a Firebrick glow red? - It's been real hot. - Oh yeah. - Is that straight? - Close enough. - Yeah. You can feel the
heat just radiating off. - The cool and spraying off of the thing and hitting the screw hole and coming out. Need to fix that at some point. - What do you mean? You
fixed it. There's a bucket. - Still really hot, but the
firebreaks are the hottest part. - I dare you to lick it.
I'll give you 10 bucks. - I have an idea. - Oh yeah. - The top cools down. Oh yeah. It is working. (upbeat music) - Alex. There's enough thermal mass here. You could use this thing as a heater. I would just have to let it
cool for a while and I can clean it up. Get some bare copper again. And then we'll solder on the last layer. You can solder the hookups
and let it cool again. And then we can pressure test it. Definitely going to need
to surface the bottom. - Done - Wow! I don't think it's going to leak. - We did go through about a
quarter tank of a settling. - That's a lot of potato cannon shots. - Would you really want to
use a settling for that? I mean, I've seen potato shot
with compressed air before. - Oh yeah. I used a settling. The
first time we shot it, my dad was like, you guys can't shoot
that on the deck anymore. Cause the windows moved too much. - It's got some good weight
to it, that's for sure. - We're in Brian's truck
to do the last bit here. We just want to pressure test this. - See those jumps... 400 PSI. If there are any leaks that
should actually show up even just my pressure's fairly
fast just because it's such a small volume. We're good. No bubbles. - Good freaking job on the solder. Blocks pressure tested. Now we just need to get
it ready to go on the CPU. Most of the crap is gone now, but during all the soldering heating up, cooling down and so on, this
might be very far from flat. So fortunately we have
a lapping plate here. We're just going to mix up some oil, Oh (beep) not that much and a little bit of this stuff right here. It's just, what would you even call this? And now I just do this for quite a while. The lapping about halfway
through made the bottom look like it was sandblasted, which reminded me that
we have a sandblaster. Why does this thing look like garbage? It should look like a $300 park. So there we go. Look at that Out of the sandblaster, the surface finish on
this thing is incredible. I also went in, locked
the bottom once more. It's not a mirror finish, but who cares? We have Thermal Grizzly. That'll fill in all the little gaps there. And now it's time for
the hardest part of this If you've never seen a
motherboard prepped for Sub-Zero before, this is probably going
to be real hard to watch, but I swear this is much
better than not doing it. Just see the Vaseline squishing
out this poor 8,700 K. I say that it didn't deserve this, but like it's going to
be a real fast 8,700 K by the end of the day. - So what are the chances this dies? - I really don't think we're
going to kill this CPU, especially given how much
Vaseline I just put on here. But there is a reason that
we're doing this on not our best CPU the first time. I
think it'll be fine though, This is so gnarly Brandon. Oh, this is so hard to turn. Everything's so slippery
from all the Vaseline. So we have electrical. It's right in here and now it's time to connect this up and fill it with refrigerant. - First. We have to pull
it all down into a vacuum. - Oh, now it's time to
pull it down to a vacuum. - We pull it into a vacuum to make sure that there's no contaminants Nitrogen doesn't compress
very well at least not in an AC system. You will probably get some condensation on the low pressure side. - Yeah. If it's a problem, we can just insulate the whole thing. Got to use the sponsor of this video. Good old Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut. I'm gonna make sure it's
reading really accurate. So the sensory needs to get taped there, but we also just need to
insulate the whole thing - regardless. - So I'm going to use the
insulation tape stuff. - Oh, we need an Allen
key for those. Okay. What do you think the chances
are that one Allen key we don't have is the one that we need. - That's definitely too big. So I'm going to say chances
are probably pretty good. - You have the electrical connected. This is mostly a box now. We also have our electrical
here running to it, which maybe works maybe doesn't. Hopefully we can get
refrigeration into it all. Are we good? - Yep. - All Right. Let's hit it. - Oh. - Is it on? - Yeah. Oh that's cold. Oh E6 Okay. So it just shut down. But that definitely got quite cold. - Do we have a manual for this thing? - E6 malfunction of indoor fan motor. Exactly what you thought.
Alright, let's plug that in. - Oh no. I was thinking, just
pull the motor itself out. - Oh yeah. That's more smarter. I was thinking we just chuck
the whole thing on the table. - Well, I'm in, we could just
for a quick test, but we. - So good to cool. A
whole computer with this. - I actually melted in
the front of a tower. Oh my fans coming on. - So our controller isn't
happy because it's 17 degrees in here and the lowest,
this will go is 16 degrees. So when do you heat up the
temperature probe before it'll kick on. - We don't want to melt the probe. - It's on low. There we go. You can start to see the
condensation on it. -3, - 4. It's still going. - Oh my hands are cold - This whole thing is
frosted up. Well, I guess, should we connect it to a CPU? - I think so. - Okay. - I'm very ready to. This
is getting very cold, very fast and -8 now. - This is really about is
jank as this could ever get. - Oh wait, geez. - Thermal paste? - Yeah. Thermal Grizzly
would not have been happy if we forgot to put it down. So yeah. Thermal Grizzly sponsored this
video and we are going to be using their Kryonaut. They
do have liquid metal as well, but that will just be metal at
these kinds of temperatures. The Kryonaut is good for down to what? Like -200 degrees Celsius. Something absolutely ridiculous like that. - Oh wow. - Nice! CPU temperature of
-3 degree Celsius right now. Not a bad start. Let's try what? 5 GHz. 5.1. Let's try 5.3 and
just see what happens. We have so much cooling.
Let's try 1.36. (beep) We'll probably just get a
blue screen, but whatever. - Oh, it kicked off. - (beep) - Sweating? - Yeah. Sweating pretty bad. Should have encased the whole
board and Vaseline in case something drips down on it.
Oh, Windows is not happy. It's not even a stability
error. It's just stupid. This drive has risen (beep) on it. - It's not our jank cooling
setup. It's a driver's seat. Yay. - Nope. - You piece of (beep).
Well, definitely works. Although we're having
trouble with the electronics, it seems to have some sort
of like a defrost cycle or something like that. For
our purposes it's terrible. So preface. Absolutely do none of this. We have a professional electrician
and electrical engineer, but basically we're ball steep in this. We were hoping just the compressor. - Okay, I don't know if I can say that - Our hope was that the
compressor just ran off of AC. So we could just have a switch. Turn the switch on,
compressor runs. We have cold. - To clarify, We were hoping the compressor
just ran off single phase AC. It's looking like it's
actually a three phase motor. - So what we've figured out is
that most of the electronics garbage is to just feed it. Three-phase AC. We have that here. We could just plug it in and send it. - Full send on the three-phase. - So we thought we
figured it out, but then. - 190 Volts DC at 180 Hertz. - Yes, But basically
instead of making it dumb, it might be easier to scoop
the signal at this point. I just really don't want
to blow up the compressors. - Making a dumb was a lot harder
than we thought it would be Either we can spoof all of
the different thermal probes and just potentiometer them
until everything's happy. Or we can come to this board
here and try to figure out what the enable pin is. So now I
get to spend all of today, spoofing thermal couples,
hoping that works, feed it whatever it wants and it'll run. This is probably going to
be the only mini split in existence with Thermal
Grizzly or it's chips. This is the temperature probe
that was on the evaporator. And it seemed to shut down when we hit about -20 degrees. It
might've been because of this. It might've been because
of something in here, but we're going to test it
out with this just at ambient temperature and see what happens. Oh, there we go. Yep. So that temperature
is dropping and quickly. Now we just give it a minute? Wobble is concerning Hey Jamie I dare you to stick your belly in there. So we're now into the
negatives on the block. This is where we might be
shutting down kind of soon, but we'll see. If it gets all frosty like
this and then shuts off, all of this frost is
immediately turning into water. Cause it warms up pretty
fast. That's really bad. As you can probably imagine
the compressor also is starting to frost up. So that's why I'm concerned
that the problem isn't our evaporator, but one of the sensors in
here is making a kick into a defrost cycle. This is where having a proper
shroud on this probably would help a lot. We're having a lot of blow back. It's at - 14 degrees now. It seems to be struggling to
get below 14 degrees. Yeah. It's actually warming up
right now a little bit. Let's put the trial back
on for better cooling and try this again. Come on, eat up, kick off, Come on..do it! That's a lot less sketchy
with it properly secured. So we should now see the
radiator temp go up as the evaporator goes down, which
is exactly what's happening. Wonderful. I wonder if turbo will help us. It's actually so stupid that
just this sensor hitting - 20, shuts it off. That will be amazing. So we need to do two stages. We'll take our other air
conditioner, hook it up to this. We're close to the moment of truth. If we're able to hold -20, that means I can finally
finish this project? Holy Frig This has been a lot of
work. Thermal Grizzly, You really got your money's
worth with this one. Geez. Oh! -20. There we go. Still dropping. Radiator
temp's actually gone up a little bit, which is cool. It looks like we're not
dropping any more though. We're probably just right at
the limit of what this is able to do. Like I can feel a bit of the heat coming through and that
might be enough to stop it from going any lower. It's looking good. If it's
this dumb, I'm really happy. Like they did a good job, I guess. Cause like who wants something That's -20 inside of their house. Look at all that frost. I really hope this works. If this is the last time that
I apply some Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut, I am so sorry, Roman. Going for the hard mount of course. I just want to get ahead of
the comments here. I do know the 8,700 K is still a very good chip, especially when overclogged like this one is going to be it's really fast still. I want to turn the AC on now. Cause it can take a little bit, oh, that kicked on. Our
nice safety shop towels. That's already very cool. Yeah. That's sub zero. All right. So our CPU is currently at 0 degrees. That's that's pretty
good to start off with. It's kind of weird that it isn't lower. I don't know if during a cinnamon Tron, if this has the heat
dissipation to deal with that, but we're about to find out, oh, temperatures increased
to 38 degrees. Oh my God. That's so warm, 4.8 GHz all core. It seems like it's doing fine.
I don't see any condensation. It's holding at 38
degrees. That is fantastic. Well, the overclock isn't
holding quite like I'd like, but it still proves this
works amazingly well I could fiddle with it more, but I want to save all of my
fiddling for the 12th gen in another video. That is cold! So Huge thanks to Thermal Grizzly
for sponsoring this video. Get some Kryonaut or
conductonaut. I don't know. Chuck in your laptop, your
GPU, wherever you want. I don't know. Don't eat
it probably I guess, unless you want to. So I feel like this video hit
like get subscribed and maybe watch your video where we
Sub-Zero cooled the Alien ware Area 51M with Steve. That thing was insanely
cool and very scary.
Liquid line is frosted. LMAO
This was a pretty shifty execution. The txv is still on the unit. They use the same gauge hose for both low and high side. They should have really used #8 automotive reduced barrier hose. It can be hoseclamped onto barbs. The gauge hose for the liquid line is gair enough, but they should have put the txv on or very near the block with a large pipe after the txv.
Not sure if this falls under the ads rule but here's a crazy video of a mini split cooling a CPU.
Back in the day Linus made a chiller using a window AC unit. He put the coil in antifreeze and had a pump feeding the cpu cooler. Was pretty sick.
Probably would have had better results if they used a more traditional compressor/contactor and kept some sort of evap in line after the heatsink so it wouldn't send liquid back to the compressor, but I admire the gumption.
There are phase change coolers that exist so this isn't really a new concept aside from the scale of it i guess.