With 600 watts of chilling goodness, according to the seller, this thing should be able to take even a top of the line gaming PC to heights never before imagined. But then, given that the seller didn't even manage to include an essential control board in our order, I have some strong doubts about our chances here. So then, why are we doing this? For years, we used Cities Skylines as a CPU benchmark because its complex simulations could bring even the stoutest of processors to a boil. And today, Cities Skylines 2 will carry on that proud tradition in a big way, taking advantage of, and this is a direct quote, all the available processing power of the multi-core CPUs. That's right, developer Colossal Order has created a simulation engine that is so detailed and nuanced that it raises the question, are we living in it? So, when the publisher Paradox reached out asking to sponsor a video showing off their new hotness, we knew what we had to do, build the absolute fastest computer we could, and then put their scaling claims to the test by making it even faster, with this incredibly sketchy chiller from AliExpress. Now that we're all caught up, let's get into it. The inspiration, or blame, depending on your point of view, for this idea belongs to user TapTapTapTap on the LTT forum, who linked us to this chiller on AliExpress. But as it turns out, that was just the tip of the cooling iceberg, and there's a whole company called FSThermo that sells mini chillers like this for all kinds of applications, including CPU cooling. And after looking at some of the options, we went with a chiller that is for spot cooling because it looked like it would be easier to integrate into a computer cooling loop and has a tasty 600 watts of cooling potential on tap. The only problem is that the seller, FSThermo, only has a 66.7% positive rating on AliExpress, and our chiller arrived looking, sorry, one second, like this, which is fine. I mean, the chiller itself seems wholly undamaged, but there was almost zero documentation other than what we could find online, and even there, the specifications are basically non-existent other than they did clarify that the certification for this is none. So I guess it's up to us to explain what you're looking at here. On your left is our compressor, which takes vapor refrigerant, in this case, R134A, and, well, compresses it. From there, it travels through this tube to our condenser, where the refrigerant turns from a gas into a liquid with that change of phase dumping a bunch of thermal energy from our system into the air using this big fan and the attached radiator. From there, the liquid refrigerant travels to the sensing bulb, which lets the correct amount of refrigerant through this tiny capillary coil here until it hits the expansion valve, where the pressure drops and the refrigerant begins to turn back into vapor. This liquid vapor mixture then enters our heat exchanger, where the vapor gets superheated by the water that is flowing to our CPU and presumably our GPU? Nope, just the CPU. Just the CPU, oh, okay, this is gonna be fun. Then that superheated vapor gets sent back to the compressor and the cycle continues, at least that's how it should work in theory. But as I alluded to before, the chiller arrived at our offices missing two key parts. The first of which was a power supply, but that one was easy enough. We bought this 24 volt DC Meanwell power supply off Mouser Electronics and we should have been good to go. Except we were also missing a control board, which we discovered the hard way when we spent several hours trying to figure out, well, if we have all the pieces, why the heck can't we figure out how to turn this thing on? We'll have a cut down version of that misadventure at lmg.gg slash floatplane. But long story short, as it turns out, this board here only does compressor power, fan power, dual temperature readings, AKA literally everything you need to have a functioning chiller, except the ability to turn it on, which requires a UART command to be sent to this header right here. So if you happen to be watching this FSThermo, first of all, thank you for the excellent customer service, taking my call at seven in the morning and getting us this main board within a week. But secondly, can you please just let customers know what they need in advance so that they don't have to call you in the first place? Of course, all of that's in the past and now that we have everything we need, we should be good to go to do a test run, right? Oh yeah, which is great. Why is it that when he tells me something's not gonna work, I'm afraid it's not gonna work. And when he tells me something is gonna work, I'm even more afraid it's not gonna work. It's gonna work. It's 100% gonna work. Let's go pump. How's our temperature looking? Brilliant, probably tap water temperature. So about 21 degrees. Cool. Now, theoretically, if we fire up the chiller, do I just do it? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Got this board here. Okay, well this is so much more promising. It made noises and stuff this time. Then it says COP. I don't know what that stands for, but if you press up a bunch of times, yeah, it gets more cooler. Okay, theoretically, because we have no heat load going into this whatsoever, this thing should get cold pretty flippin' fast then. Yeah. I'm just gonna increase the COP until- Okay, well, we already dropped a degree, so- 650 is as high as it goes. Now we know. That fan appears to rip. Yeah, there's no fan control. It just, it goes. Are we gonna freeze this water or is it moving fast enough? We're not worried about that. We're a bit worried about that. I say we try. What's interesting is we are below zero degrees and I mean, we're still liquid. It's moving fast enough. Super cooled liquid. I bet it would taste delicious. I've never had a drink that's below zero. You can have all of the nice fibers from the factory in China that made that heat exchanger. I mean, it's probably good for you. Doesn't taste that much colder. Oh, it's very plasticky. I wonder why. It turned to ice. It's all ice now. It's time to build the computer and we definitely have some challenges. We grabbed this out of inventory thinking it was a CPU block. What it actually is is a CPU block reservoir pump combo. This would not be ideal for this. It might be, because I don't know where we're gonna put the pump yet. It's not ideal. It's too much to insulate. I forbid it. Okay, but just look at this though. That is not in any way that. EK tries, okay? They do really well at a lot of things. That picture is not one of them. This will be a little bit easier to handle, but truthfully, not by much. I have my work cut out for me insulating this motherboard. Did you at any point give thought to my idea of reusing the block from the EK Cryo cooler thing? I did, yes. And that's just not gonna work at all. It cools the tech, not the CPU. Bummer. Wait, where the hell did we get a 14900K? Intel. This is out yet? Yeah, as of the video coming out, it will be though. Oh, sick. Well, we've got the 14900K. Yeah, you've already said that in this video. You didn't like clock that it was 14th gen? Not all of us can run over six gigahertz, okay? Well, that can't either, it runs six. You absolutely cannot break it, Gary will kill us. They need to redo some of the testing because BIOS changes, it runs way better now, you know, that kind of stuff. And we only have one? Yeah, only one. What could go wrong? While Linus works on that. I'm going to figure out how the heck we're gonna mount this chiller to our case. Yeah, I thought we were putting it inside the case. No, it doesn't fit. I thought we had cases it'll fit. Well, only the Case Labs, seven gamers, one CPU. Oh, we're not gonna ruin it. Tower 900. Okay, forget it. Before I potentially ruin it, there's a few cool things about the motherboard we're using. This is the Z790 Taichi Lite from ASRock. It has all the goodness of the regular Z790 Taichi. It's wicked fast. This is the same board we used to get to 6.9 gigahertz, but they removed all the RGB and extraneous crap that you don't need, so it costs over $100 less, which means that if I do ruin it, I will feel slightly less bad. This is all the artists' eraser I have. That is not even close to enough. What happened to all of our artists' eraser? I don't know. Why are you looking at me? Because you're the one who always uses it. Yeah, but we've also got nail polish and conformal coating. I don't want to blast it with nail polish and conformal... I do need dielectric grease. I hate this so much. Speaking of things that you potentially hate, what do you think of this pump radiator layout? Looks good to me. All right. I don't think we need the farting sound effects, Alex. They were implied. For those of you wondering, the point of what I'm doing is to prevent any condensation that forms on the CPU from shorting it out. And that condensation is very likely because it's going to be so cold that any moisture in the air is going to turn to liquid as soon as it touches it. Any air pocket is a risk, which makes these LGA sockets extremely troublesome to insulate. I mean, realistically, this is more for if you're going to daily drive sub-zero and we could suicide run this without putting a bunch of grease in the socket, but it's right in the name. Suicide run. Gary wants it to not be broken. So, all right, fine, Gary. Ooh, she's squishy. My apologies, Phanteks. I don't think this is what you expected when you sent this case over, but here we go. Shoot, Alex, this block will not work at all. Why not? This uses their exact mount. I have no room for the foam insulated back plate. Do we need this? I'll make it work. We just slather that in grease, put that down there and call it a day. This is looking a lot more like a suicide run with every passing moment. Tasty. Yeah, this is not what comes to mind when I think tasty PC. To get the water from the outside of the case to the inside of the case, we're using these nice little pass-through thingies. In order to install these, we need to drill some more holes. You're shaking my workspace over here. Nice. For a quick run, I'm calling this good enough. Kryonaut? More like Kryo yes. All right, how does this look? Probably bad. What? This is the best looking thing I've ever seen on a computer. Looks like performance, I'll give you that. Now I just need to install the power supply. I made these nice little L brackets here out of a couple of L brackets. But when I designed it, I was thinking that this right here was like in a 5000D where you can take out this piece for the fans, but you can't. So you either get to choose between putting these screws in or these screws in. So we're not gonna put these screws in, they are not zip ties. Nevermind, I use my teeth. Yeah, that's about the vibe of this project. There, that should help a lot. Now all I need to do is stick these four posts through the holes that I can no longer see and hope that this makes contact. I just have to poke these holes better. Now I can even see where the holes are. You're making that look way too easy. I am? It's not easy. I need this last one to catch, I got three of them actually. Come on. Hey, I got it. My torque test for the hold downs is gonna be whether it slips in my greasy fingers or not. I'm gonna go as far as I can. I'm not entirely sure why, but Phanteks put the power supply in this case on a bit of an angle. It's strange and makes me feel uncomfortable, but it's also exactly perfect for this because I put a little grommet here and my other C13 can just go straight through there. To the other power supply. Very nice. A quick note, in a perfect world, we wouldn't be using an acrylic or plexi-topped block for Sub-Zero cooling. In the short term, like what we're doing, it's okay, but if you ever wanted to go chilled liquid for a long-term build, you would wanna get something that is all Delrin or acetal on the top. Are you ready for the board? Sure. Let's hope it fits. I left the top of the block uninsulated so we can watch the ice form. Uh-oh, that CPU socket doesn't quite line up with the CPU cutout. You know what? I think it's fine. It might actually still work. No hurry, but this is requiring a fair amount of force to hold in place. Okay, whew. And then in terms of other ones, I don't know. Maybe- It doesn't look super happy when you push it like that. Well, maybe don't push it like that. Sounds pretty unhappy. Here, let's do this one. To make sure that we're nice and safe and don't have just exposed 120 volt in our case, we're using hot glue. It might seem kind of sketchy, but this is actually a pretty good way to do it. What I wanna know is if this thing still works at all. If this fires up, that tells us two things. One, whether the motherboard still works at all, and two, whether our CPU block is actually mounted correctly or not, because if the CPU instantly hits 100 degrees, it means I probably don't have a good mount and I have to pull the whole thing apart. It's not posting and I have a pretty good guess of why. Oh? No RAM. Oh, got ahead of myself a little bit there. For RAM, we've made a very odd choice. We've gone with these non-spreader crucial sticks that are DDR5 4800, but 32 gigs each. Okay, so we wanted 128 gigs of RAM. Is RAM a thing for Cities Skylines 2? Yeah, so I played the first one a lot, and the only time that I ever ran out of RAM with 64 gigabytes was playing the first one modded. What about second attempt? Did it do a thing? Oh, it lives. Yes, you wouldn't really expect a GPU bottleneck to be a potential thing for a city building game. So what's with the Overkill RTX 4090? Well, this is a new city building game. It can stress the crap out of your CPU and your GPU. Oh yeah, oh yeah. Now we shall see, I don't think it's gonna fit. Oh yeah. Oh wow. Oh, she fits. Sick, not even a millimeter. Oh, fancy. I know, right? New retro color way. You can sign up for a notification, lttstore.com. For these fittings that we're using, they're for servers. So we're supposed to be using these clamp chummies that go on, and when they're attached, they just do not come off. But they're kind of a pain to use. So instead we're just using zip ties. Ideally to control this chiller, we would have thermal probes that would be connected right there and right there. Those would give us our water temperature and the exhaust temperature of the condenser. And that way we would be able to properly have this control everything. We don't have those thermal probes though, so we're going to be doing all of it manually and just using the fluke. For that, I put a tiny little hole in the stop fitting. I'm going to chuck a thermal probe into. To try and prevent too much condensation buildup on our lines here, we are insulating them using this stuff. All right, I'm going to finish topping up the loop. You got the RAM? I only put in half the RAM just to make sure that it would work before we tried to load it up with 128 gigs. This is really not ideal for overclocking, Alex. Nope. Okay, at least he knows. All right, do you want to hit the button? Oh, I turned it off. Oh, try again. Uh-oh, there we go. Oh, geez. Top number is the temperature of our water. Bottom number is the temperature of the exhaust. Oh, okay. And all I do is mash the far left button. Far right. Far right button, okay. So that's on, up. Okay. Hey. Now it should turn on. And more up is more better? Yes. In that case, I'll have all the up, thank you. That is an annoying high pitched wine that I didn't hear last time. We just matched ambient temperature for our coolant, which is the lowest you can theoretically go without some kind of powered cooling, like a Peltier module or a phase change cooler. Uh-huh, we're at 13 degrees, so we do need to actually move pretty quickly here. You could just like reduce the power on the thing. Nope, that's not really an option for me. Oh, I love these panels. We used the same artwork as the Cityscape Designer mouse pad from LTX. This looks flipping amazing. Oh, I get it, cause Cities Skylines. It's a city skyline. Yes. It's very literal. Also, we're at 7.5 degrees now. This is when like condensation is really an issue. I know, I'm trying to get this on, one second. Does this controller support hooking up a temp probe and saying, hey, I have a target temperature? I mean, it has the inputs for it. We just didn't do that? We don't have them, no. But we do have control over the power of the chiller. We're just choosing not to turn it down. Yes, okay. I'm firing up hardware info. Holy crap, our core temperatures are eight flipping degrees. Oh yeah, we're getting condensation on the reservoir. Oh my God, we're at 1.8 degrees. We're getting condensation on the front of the CPU block. Hit it, hit it with a load. All right, there it goes. 66 degrees, 71, 72. Okay, hold on. But is our water temperature going to go up pumping 300 Watts of heat into this thing? Not in this amount of time, I don't think. No, no, give it, we're up to 3.5, 3.6. Our block, 4.2. Our block is definitely spitting hotter water back into the reservoir, 4.7. We're gonna need to run a longer test here. All right, let's kill that. Okay, no, I do need a load. No, no, one second. I need a load. Oh right, Cities Skylines 2, that makes sense. Yes. The whole point of the video. Hi, Paradox. I am amazed how well that's working. Yeah, the heat is rising right off the back of the GPU and preventing any condensation from forming on the CPU block, even on the fittings. Like they're cold to the touch, but they're not sweaty. See, credit to Linus. Yeah. No cold points in there other than where we intentionally left it so that you could see the cool acrylic block. Yeah. We should check the back of the board though. How bad is it? It's fine. It's all room temp. Nice. This is great because it means we're not gonna be stuck with some short wimpy, oh no, I'm afraid I'm gonna kill it, benchmark session. We're gonna be able to overclock this thing and really see how far we can push it with chilled liquid. We might want to insulate the reservoir though. I am a true sweaty gamer. I mean, it's not gonna drip on anything important. Yeah, true. Should be fine. Should be fine. Also with Cinebench running, our coolant's up to 10 degrees now. Oh, nice. So it's not gonna stay like that for long. And I'll be interested to see where this stops because if we land somewhere in the 10, 15 degree range, honestly, this thing's kind of looking pretty awesome. Tell me about the situation with this game. We've got everything cranked obviously, right? Or do we have it set to CPU burn? Preference. Yeah, here we go. Simulation speed. There we go. Nice. Wait, is this running at 20 frames per second? I have Cinebench running in the background. Cinebench would do it. Yeah, when you have an all core load running in the background, that is suboptimal. Holy crap, it's still running at 25. Okay, I've seen press coverage of this, but I haven't actually obviously seen the game running yet. What the actual is going on here? Look at the level of detail. I wouldn't even be surprised to find people in the buildings. These are all individual people. Yeah, where's this person? Going home, poorly educated. Oh, Linus. I don't live on Victoria Street. So you live in this building. This is amazing. Well, we're up to 40 FPS now. Yeah, you zoomed in a little bit though. Yeah, when we go to the full 100,000 city, she chugs. Wow. But wait, what's the bottleneck here? We are still sitting at 40 degrees on our CPU. The GPU is what's struggling right now. Interesting. Okay, well, why don't we turn down our GPU details a little bit? Level of detail. If you drop that, I guess that will- Kill motion blur too while we're at it. Oh yeah, f**k motion blur. Hey, there we go. Oh, but now I can't see all the little people from way out here. Okay, well, I mean, you can zoom in and see it I guess. Oh, did we mention this is an early build of the game? Oh, did those shadows fix themselves? Yeah. Oh no, they're still a little bit glitchy. They get a bit strange. Did we just not notice it before? We might've just not noticed it. We might've just been marveling at the level of detail and not worrying about it. I've got to admit, I've never gotten into Cities Skylines, but I am a fan of the genre and I gotta say this looks really enticing. Okay, hold on. We gotta alleviate some of our GPU bottleneck here still though. We're at 96%. Maybe just turn it all to medium. Medium. Okay. Oh, dynamic resolution, turn that s*** off. CPU usage just jumped to 40% and we are still at 35 degrees. Uh oh, our coolant's at five, Alex. We need more load. Turn the details down. Go, go, go, go, go. We need more people in our city. Oh, hey, they're simple and advanced. What's advanced? Whoa, okay. FidelityFX. This is awesome. Proper anti-aliasing controls. I don't remember the last time I saw a details configuration menu that was this deep. In the past for Cities Skylines, we would benchmark it by just going to a really busy junction kind of like this one right here. Yeah. And we would just look at it. Oh wow, yeah. You can really see the CPU usage spike. Yeah, cause it'll become GPU bound when you're looking at like the whole city like this. I don't think we're gonna be able to push it that hard, Alex. What is this? Whoa, whoa, whoa, go, go, go, go, go. Look at that. It's supposed to be a muscle car. It's missing assets still. Did we mention this was an early build of the game? I think if we want it to go faster, our GPU needs to go faster. I don't think that's gonna help us enough cause that's not gonna change the simulation load much. Yeah, no. We need a larger map. Yeah, I don't think we're gonna get above 35% CPU usage. Oh, oh, I got 45 there for a sec. I love that we have a 14900K running at 35% usage at 38 degrees. Our coolant temps are seven degrees. We finally tamed it, Alex. Intel's high-end defeated by AliExpress. Oh God, that's sweating a lot now. Hold on a second. Boom, boom, pathfinding. I just hit 43% CPU usage. Huh, what if I just change a bunch of stuff? Just plunk them down everywhere. I mean, that's a valid city building strategy, right? Oh, boom, roundabout, boom, roundabout. Okay, so like, I don't know, like some overclocking later. Wow, did you ever spend a lot of money? No, wait, made a lot of money. Yes, things are working quite well. So first of all, you know how we were having that weird shimmering on all of the shadows and stuff? Yeah, so if you turn on TAA, it's fine. For whatever reason, you can only see TAA in advanced. But at least advanced is there. Advanced is there and you can do a lot with it. Also, I saw CPU usage is quite a bit higher. We're at about 40% sometimes. Yeah, upping the simulation speed really ups the amount that the CPU needs to do. Also, over the weekend, it turns out Gary's a really big fan of this game. So he was like, I need to babysit the contractors and stuff and I can see if we can get it up to where it'll fully stress this. Oh, fantastic. But maybe we'll see, we'll see. Okay, there was a particular citizen that I wanted to check in on. I've only followed one citizen. You can see who you followed over here. He's happy and going home. He's poorly educated. What, what is he? Walking home from school. Why is he at school at 4:30 in the morning? And you see how there's a s**tload of people here? Yeah. You know how you added the bunch of skyscrapers over in that area? Yeah, yeah, I did do that. Yeah, it completely ruined all of the traffic. Oh. So I fixed it mostly by just adding in skywalks here so that everyone can get to the subway. Cool. But there's a lot of people going to the subway. I see, yeah. No, I don't know how to play this game. It looks so amazing though. Oh, speaking of looks amazing, I brought Andy over here because the camera controls in this are insane. Like if you come down here. Yeah. Sensor size? What? Why do you have a 65 millimeter Alexa? And so you need to go to focal length to actually have that like change stuff. But then you can just like drag it and make it kind of whatever you want. Lens shift. It gets pretty funky when you get really wide. What? You can dial in the sensor size. That's hilarious. Oh my God. When you're getting bloom, like motion blur, depth of field. Oh my God. Color adjustment, white balance, brightness. All right. Why can't our camera have those? All right, all right, all right. Oh yeah, and you can also do, what's this called? You can key frame animations. Oh, so you can set up like a drone shot. Yeah. Overclocking, not very successful. Yeah, I kind of imagined that would be the issue. I mean, this chip is already overclocked. It's basically a 13900KS, which was already impossible to overclock in spite of the temperatures being well under control. Yeah, I did manage getting the temperatures better. So stock, it was hitting like 380 Watts or so. And I was able to bring that down to both 330 with a bit more performance. Okay. Turns out to under volt, you need to unlock it in the bios, but you can, so whatever. I was able to get a 5% increase, mostly on E-cores. Okay, oh, cool. But hey, at least the game really impressed us. Yeah, I like the chiller. I love this computer. I actually am super happy with the chiller too, after we got everything sorted out. CPU is pretty dumb though. You notice we didn't even bother doing a full review of it, but you know what we did bother to do? Oh right, we don't have a segue to our sponsor. It's Paradox. Cities Skylines 2, go check it out. Available now on Steam. If you enjoyed this video, you might enjoy the last time Alex and I went sub-zero with something, which was in a bed. Oh God, it was.
