This Cooler Makes No Sense - Fluix Tri-Swift

intel's core i9 12900k in performance mode gets hot too hot to cool with the traditional heatsink too hot even for an all-in-one liquid cooler ugh smells nasty surely our mighty custom loop can save the day all right so we're getting there but what if we had three tubes instead of two luex is a newcomer in the custom water cooling space and claims that their tri-swift water block is the best on the market surpassing the latest and greatest from well-known brands like ek and swiftek their approach divide the coolant to conquer the heat according to tynan from our engineering department their theory does hold some water but there's only one way to see if adding extra speed holes to your water block will make your cpu as fast as this segue to our sponsor ridge ridge wallet has redefined their traditional wallet with its compact frame and rfid blocking plates the bulge in your pants shouldn't be from your wallet use offer code linus to save 10 and get free worldwide shipping today this is the quantum velocity squared water block from ek it's one of the top performing blocks on the market and like our challenger the fluix tri-swift it can cost a whopping 200 plus us dollars depending on options like material choice that's just for the block which means that to test these monsters we first had to dig up all the other components of a quick custom water cooling loop then we grabbed our cpu frame from thermal grizzly cranked our noctua fans and d5 pump to their max speeds and configured the classroom blender benchmark to a whopping 3 000 path samples with our cpu in the default power profile our ek block here barely cracked 72 degrees once our loop reached thermal equilibrium that's a tough mark to beat it's significantly better than some of the air and all-in-one water coolers that we've looked at recently but fluix is going to have to do it because when you're spending this kind of money on cooling every fraction of a degree matters and as i learned in my product management days the demand for the second best custom water block is essentially zero i don't think that's going to be a problem though since fluix promises to win by a lot more than a fraction of a degree i mean look at this two inlets instead of one that's right double the water flow to your wait it's just a y splitter we're back sorry they explain this better than i can here's the product description emphasis mine the fluix tri-swift is the highest performance block on the planet 1.5 millimeter microchannels proprietary sinusoidal pattern jet plate great turbulence mixing chamber something something this allows our tri-swift water block to lower cpu temperatures by 8 to 10 degrees celsius during intensive workloads compared to substitute water blocks here's the thing guys we don't really review water blocks anymore but these are some bold claims almost as bold as my claim that you'll find all the best behind the scenes extras and exclusives over on floatplane.com like alex making joystick condoms anywho buried in that long-winded marketing spiel that you just endured are some actual grains of truth tynan is gonna fill you in they're basically saying that their twin inlets assisted by these wavy jet plates will increase their fluid turbulence improving the thermal transfer between the copper fins and the water in your loop it's a fundamentally sound theory because turbulent flow does help to prevent the formation of boundary layers a boundary layer is a thin zone where the friction between the fluid and the solid slows down the flow causing the already warm fluid to kind of stick to the copper slowing down thermal transfer you can see this in action for yourself with a simple experiment the room you're sitting in right now almost certainly contains weak air currents but you probably can't feel them this is thanks to the natural friction between your body and the surrounding air that creates a zone of pre-warmed air next to your skin a boundary layer simply wave your hand in the air like this to disrupt this boundary layer and you'll feel an immediate though temporary cooling effect neat right certainly but what it isn't is new fluix's first mistake was citing the deep water cooling magic to me which i was there when it was written first generation commercial water blocks from the early 2000s did suffer from lackluster performance for a number of reasons first up their simple maze style designs did almost nothing to increase surface area directly over the cpu die and second because most diy water coolers were using low pressure cheap aquarium pumps they intentionally used very wide water channels to avoid restricting flow that means that much of the water flow inside them was laminar rather than turbulent that's bad because you'll find substantial boundary layers basically well everywhere in a danger den maze 3 from 2002 but then something happened our water cooling lord and savior certified extreme systems legend stu cathar forster created the little river white water it was the first commercial block that intentionally restricted the flow of water at the block inlet creating a jet of water that blasted the copper cold plate why did he do this turbulent flow to say that it was a game changer would be an understatement with a high pressure pump the white water and its successors the cascade and the storm would absolutely dominate the custom water cooling scene for the next few years the storm was super cool but devilishly complicated to manufacture the high volume version actually used a mid plate with 35 micro jets that fired into machined cups to create a hyper turbulent zone directly above the cpu die it left everything else in the dust and when truly stronger competitors finally emerged nearly all of them leaned on the same fundamental design principles out competing the storm only by increasing surface area directly over the cpu die optimizing the shape of the cooling patch for the heat spreader designs of contemporary processors or by bowing out the base for extra mounting pressure these evolutionary changes yielded a grand total 6 degree improvement over the 10-year span that we tested back in 2016. since then skived copper bases where they actually shaved the copper and bended up to make the fins have taken over for cast or machined micro pins so while i haven't personally tested them i suspect that the top designs today like this one from ek are probably at least a couple degrees better than what we saw that means then long story short by my rough math the total water block performance improvements from basically flat chunks of copper in 2002 to the skived copper bases we see today is in the neighborhood of 17 degrees with all of that in mind fluix's patent-pending fluid turbulence technology has a lot of work ahead of it to beat anything by 8 to 16 degrees as they claim let alone a modern block that by the way definitely makes use of jet induced turbulence like every other decent design on the market so how's the performance this is bad not just a little bit bad like comically bad hey future line is coming at you fluix responded to our results and said that they have a new cold plate coming for 12th gen it's possible nay probable that this will improve performance but the cold hard truth is that at least some of the things they're doing like accounting for the concavity of the ihs they should have known if they were serious about designing a high performance water block and they were up against a competitor that doesn't even use a skived copper base not to mention that it looks amazing where fluix is at best hoping to get closer in performance and also looks like it came from aliexpress there's not a huge market for ugly custom water cooling hardware either the truth is i i just don't make the rules and that's what they had for sale so that's what we reviewed all right back to the video with our cpu in default mode maximum package temperatures hit 85 degrees with the fluix block with an average of 82. that is over 10 degrees higher than our ek block it pulled about 10 more watts okay so fair enough but our average core clocks were actually slightly worse which would indicate to us that that higher power draw was likely due to higher thermals not higher performance cranking things up with our 12 900k in performance mode letting it turbo to high heaven and pull nearly 300 watts our ek block did manage to pull it off i mean it's hot at 97 degrees but it didn't throttle meanwhile the tri-swift throttled so quickly we didn't even bother letting it complete the full 3000 sample render having not looked closely at this thing before greenlighting this review these results are much worse than i expected so bad in fact that i actually damn it where'd i put it dug up my old storm v2 from the mothballs to test against it the unit i have was manufactured under licensed by swift tech back in the mid 2000s and cost about 80 us dollars it uses a pretty janky mounting adapter that jake made by hand but i cut that with tin snips we had very few tools back then yes at least one a roasted you tried both oh just for lulls i tried swapping it in case i was doing something wrong you're leaking you're looking flaking oh that's not optimal we have not pre-tested this we have no idea what's going to happen so whatever happens happens here we go bring on the stone okay it's not as good as it seems to be so far it's set like 73 74 on the package but the fluid hasn't heated up yet so we're gonna have to give it a little bit we can't take these results this final just yet you can see here i held the fans to speed up the fluid heating up right here and we reached a maximum of 87 but since then it has actually settled back down to 83 to 85 degrees celsius on the cpu package we landed at 84 degrees now i want to show you something here's a better look at the storm we've got our micro jet mid plate there's those finicky little bastards and then we've got the cups on the bottom you can see as i alluded to before this is a really really small cooling patch where there's actual turbulent flow it was designed for direct dye cooling on older cpus that didn't have a heat spreader over top of the dye so the fact that this performs anywhere near the fluix tri-swift which has a gigantic cooling patch and gets to take advantage of much much more modern machining techniques it's kind of hilarious clearly there's more turbulence here than here for comparison i also took apart the quantum velocity squared and oh that's interesting this does not use skiving even though ek is not using skivved fins you can see they are much finer than the ones in the fluix tri-flow oh and this is notable there's this mid-plate here this slotted mid-plate that sits over top of the fence gee i wonder what that does so then by going fluix we not only get performance that's comparable to a design that was optimized for cpus from 2005 we add complexity to our loop with more potential points for leakage thanks to the y-splitter yay it's ugly as hell and yes again with the price it's a whopping 230 us dollars on sale even adjusted for inflation it costs twice as much as the storm with some budget left over for our awesome new swim trunks on lttstore.com the only way that i can imagine flux justifying their turbulent juice marketing nonsense is if they've only ever tested this thing using the anemic pump that they bundle with the aio version from talking to tynan it is possible that with an extremely weak pump their design may actually help to increase turbulence in the cpu block but while i could test this thing frankly i have spent enough of both my time and money evaluating this piece of junk and the reality is that anyone spending this kind of moolah on a water block is going to drop more than 40 bucks on their pump and they're going gonna get a proper d5 so probably the only good thing that came out of this whole video is that it was an excuse for me to talk about water cooling again after so long maybe someday we'll see a wild new block design that nobody ever thought of and it'll be a quantum leap forward in performance but it is not this day if you want to get into custom loops we're going to have everything we used linked down below but for now we would probably recommend sticking with the tried and true ek block it's much less expensive yeah that's the that's the real kicker the 200 one i showed you guys before that's with all the extra bells and whistles it's like actually a lot cheaper and while they're not manufactured in the usa at least they're made in a machine shop rather than in a shoe factory and this segue was made in our segway factory to our sponsor squarespace need a website but don't have the know-how squarespace makes it easy there's a wide selection of award-winning templates all optimized for mobile so it looks great on all devices create members only content for extra revenue using squarespace's member 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Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 1,396,634

Keywords: Fluix, Tri-Swift, Water Cooling, Liquid Cooling, Custom Loop, Soft Tube, 12900K, Intel, Core i-9, CPU, Cooling

Id: YBUqBk17tAI

Length: 14min 23sec (863 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 08 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/bandgeek12345]

thats a big oof

[u/DaPoets_Terrence]

I tested their engineering sample 1 year ago and it showed promise back then, but it was still under development. This was a big letdown as I was rooting for them.

[u/DarkAlly123_YT]

I wonder whether Fluix even bothered trying to verify their "better than the competition" claim before they made it.

[u/ramathore44]

They’ve called me everyday for two weeks trying to buy their blocks for my shop. They said they had some out for review so I waited, and this was the best decision it looks like. Their big claim was USA based lol. They knew what they had I think.

[u/Numenorr]

The Shoe factory image made me chuckle hard.