- Most of the time when our viewers send us suggestions for videos, honestly, they're terrible. But when Kishorevenkat
brought our attention to this little gem on AliExpress, my interest was piqued, my dander was raised, my desire to witness a train wreck reached an all-time high. What even is this? This (laughs) is a water
cooling upgrade kit for the Alienware Area-51m gaming laptop that yes, my friends, seems to involve taking the included heat pipe
slash vapor chamber cooler, screwing tubes onto it, and
dremeling holes out of the back of your like, $4,000 gaming machine. (Dremel whirring) Why would anybody create this- How many people on earth bought these, and then what percentage of them would have any interest in this? How many of you wanna
hear about our sponsor? Blockudoku is the free mobile game that combines the fun of
Sudoku and block puzzle games. Match blocks to complete lines and squares to get them removed. Click the link below and stay tuned to learn more at the end of this video. (upbeat music) Let's begin by taking a closer look at what we got in the mail here. This right here appears
to be two contact plates, so one for the CPU, I
believe this is going to be- Mm, hard to say, actually. Ah, no, this will probably be CPU, yep.
- Yeah, it's CPU. - And one for the GPU with
a total of three, four, seven heat pipes running over
to exactly the same kind of rear exhaust radiators, and
sorry, side exhaust as well, that are included with the
original cooler of this laptop. What they've added is that
what might have originally been just a regular metal plate or a vapor chamber on the original device, instead, has two fitting
locations here and here. And then they've actually included- These are similar to, but not the same as any fittings that I've seen before, so these are little tiny- What are these, one-eighth
inch compressions? - Something like that.
- These are tiny. So they've got a nice little
collar on the tube there and a nice little O-ring. This seals up, and it
appears to be that the idea is that you rip open the
bottom of this machine, take the cooler off,
(laughs) and put this on. There's a bunch of thermal
pads, bunch of screws, no instructions, obviously. So had you figured out yet how we're planning to
hook this up to anything? - [Alex] No, it just came out of the box, what do you think? It arrived like 20 minutes ago. - [Linus] You didn't do any preparation? - [Alex] I got some tubes over here. - [Linus] Those are man tubes, these are boy tubes. - [Alex] I didn't know they
looked like that until now. - [Linus] Oh, boy. Holy crap. Did I pay $650 for this? - [Alex] I think it was
slightly less than that, but yeah, basically like $400 and a bit. - [Linus] You know what I'm
really worried about though? Wherever this tubing runs, right? The heat pipes are on the
backside of this, right? - Yeah.
- So there's gotta be some kinda gap in here between where the CPU and
GPU are actually contacting and where these heat pipes are. So our air cooling
performance might be terrible. - [Alex] Oh, probably, yeah. - So do I need to go
try and find something we can adapt this tubing with? Like, you honestly have no
plan or are you kidding? - [Alex] No, I honestly have no plan. There's some gaff tape over there. - [Linus] Oh my God, that's not
going to work. (Alex laughs) New plan. We actually realized that
our water cooled RED camera uses one-eighth inch fittings. So all we've gotta do
is pop off these tubes, throw these new tubes on
here, and then bleed the loop. If I recall correctly, bleeding this loop was horrible.
- Yeah, it's really horrible. - [Linus] The good news is
that we actually didn't do a great job of bleeding this
in the first place anyway, so we don't really have anything to lose by accidentally un-bleeding it. (laughs) You know what? I don't even care. I'm just going for it here. You only live once, Alex. So I'm just gonna-
- Okay, before you do that, let's get a bucket. - [Linus] Oh, sure, yeah, that
makes sense. (Alex laughs) I'm just gonna open it on the table, I'm even gonna drink this water. I'm not gonna drink the water. Okay, you ready? And a one, and a two,
and whoa! (Alex laughs) There you go, there it goes. (speaking gibberish) Okay, all right. As expected, a quick Shadow
of the Tomb Raider benchmark had our CPU at 99 degrees and
our GPU peaking at 75 degrees, so there's clearly a lot
of room for improvement, and improve is what we will do. I can open it up now, right? For those not familiar, one of the cool things about the Area-51m is that it packs a desktop
Core i9-9900K processor and a top tier RTX 2080Ti graphics card. Of course, that would be the reason that aftermarket-
- These guys. - Liquid cooling thermal
solutions might exist for it. Ah, I got a couple more screws there. Are you gonna know which screws go where? Like, have you disassembled this before? - [Alex] I've disassembled
it like seven or eight times. - [Linus] Okay, so you're good then. - [Alex] Yeah, it's pretty amazing that this isn't even like the worst thing that's ever happened to it. Yes, air will create condensation. So I would limit their
access to components. - (zaps) Ow. That's fine.
- I'll let you do that. - [Linus] The very best that
it could possibly be is equal. - [Alex] It's not going to be. - [Linus] And it's not going to be that. - [Alex] Until you water cool it and then hopefully, it's way better. Well, we obviously didn't
finish this in time, and me and Linus both went on vacation, so (laughs) I need to figure
out how the heck we do this picking up from here. I don't quite remember what we were doing, but this goes on here, it can't
be that hard, I don't know. (clicks) Oh, yep. Okay. Yeah, you can see that
Alienware's solution's definitely a bit more sophisticated. Well, I guess fans have
to come off of this now. Fans go like that, which means, boop. On the OEM one, it had a bunch of tape
that sealed up the fans, I guess we're just reusing it. Don't line up quite as well. (laughs) Like, if you look right
here, there's an additional- I'm not totally sure
how many fins that is. The actual amount of fins probably isn't going to
be the biggest issue. It's that we're going to
lose a bunch of air (laughs) out the side here. This is probably a huge performance boost, just this little bit of tape. On the OEM heatsink here, you can see they have a
bunch of different heights of the VRM coolers, whereas in this, all of this is the same height and they just give you
a thicker thermal pad. So the thermal resistance
of this thing is gonna be a fricking lot. Getting very close. Decided to go for the
Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut, I think that's what we used last time. Mm, no, that has a real
Noctua paste-look to it, so let's apply some of this. Bigger the gob, better the job. But, legitimately, on the GPU, if you don't get all of this covered, it can be a really bad time. Wow, this does not spread
as well as the Kryonaut, that is for sure. Well, this spreads pretty well under the weight of the heatsink, it's probably fine right now. Then again, how much do we trust that we're going to have
good mounting pressure. I'd give it about a 6 out of 10. Well, (exhales) it's time. Ugh. This is not- Wait, what? So we've got four screws for the GPU here. (laughs) We've just got these four long, fully-tapped screws that go for the- You're just hard-mounting it. So the thing is, is that with something
like this right here, you would only be able to
screw in these a certain amount before either they bottom out, and I trust that these
are the correct length for when they bottom out, 'cause the CPU socket's
actually pretty sensitive to like, pressure variations. You'll get very different thermal results based on if you have like,
30 versus 60 psi of force pressing down on the thermal paste. And also if you press too hard, you can have just stability
issues and kill something. (beep) This is going to be
the worst part for sure. So if you look here, I need
to press down on the heatsink and sort of line up this
screw at the same time in order to mount the CPU. Oh, that feels gross. You can kind of see the whole
PCB flexing as I put that in. We're just gonna have to guess the mounting tension on these. So I think that feels about
good, I guess, just guessing. It's really hard to tell
what's mounting pressure, but also, not all of the
thermal pads are the right size. So if you kind of look
sort of like, right here, you can see that one of
them's super squished down while the other one is
like, barely touching. Not the best engineered
thing I've ever seen. For better or for worse, that's on, and let's call Linus for the next bit. Get out the Dremel. Oh, they're so close to missing. With just a tiny bit of thought and care, they could have made it so you
could just stick it through one of the existing holes, yeah. - [Linus] What a bunch of idiots. - [Alex] (Dremel whirring) Ugh,
why are we doing this Linus? - [Linus] Yeah, seems pretty unnecessary, we all know that the answer
is gonna be it sucks. - [Alex] Wow, you didn't
do a very nice job there. - [Linus] What? What's wrong with it? Oh, you're being such a hater right now. - [Alex] You only needed to
take off a tiny bit on the top, you didn't need to get
all this on the side here. - [Linus] I was rounding it. (whirring) Eh, if we're gonna grind it away, we might as well grind it
away all the way to there. Does that look good to you?
- Yeah, looks good to me. - [Linus] Well, let me
rephrase the question. Does that look like
enough clearance to you? - [Alex] Yes. (both laugh) I just got to put this on and we're good. - (bottle thuds) All right, step one, don't use this.
- Yeah. - Let's see how it holds
up as an air cooler. Oh man, this is gonna be so bad. - No faith. - No, my expectations are incredibly low. 350 bucks I paid for this thing, $350 of e-waste. (slaps table) - [Alex] It was more like $450, but yeah. - [Linus] Look at the original cooler compared to that thing. It's like quality, you know? - [Alex] It was so scary,
like you see how those have like, the nice
springy screws and stuff? - Mm hm.
- Yeah, it was just a hard mount. - Just all hard mount?
- Just hard mount. - Oh, that's not good.
- No. - [Linus] That's not good
for the kind of tolerances you have on things like
a laptop circuit board. Okay, and the fan is already low ramping. Did you just run it like, right away? - Uh, yeah.
- That does not- We already peaked at 100! (laughs) Oh man, my expectations are so much lower than they were before. (laughs) It's not just way worse
in terms of average FPS, like, it's unplayable,
because it's like, hitching and stuttering all over the place. But of course, you don't
downgrade your air cooling so that you can have better water cooling, if you're not gonna water cool. So let's go ahead and give this thing a hit of adrenaline, shall we? Courtesy of lttstore.com. (bottle thuds) I mean, hey, they included
pretty good quality tubing, so that's a plus.
- Yeah. Unless you happen to like,
have a water cooled RED around, it'll be pretty hard to adapt
to anything else, but yeah. - [Linus] Do we have a
power source for this? - Yes.
- Oh my God, do we have to use that? Can we please just use one
of those wall adapters? - [Alex] I couldn't find
them. (Linus groans) Okay.
- Firing the laser. - I need to plug it in.
- Yep, that'll help. Confirmed. There are air
bubbles. (Alex laughs) Just come out! There it goes, we have circulation. So we just need to not
breathe on it too hard. - [Alex] Oh, did we check for leaks? - No.
- Oh, it's leaking a bit. - [Linus] Oh, snap. Just give it a little wiggle waggle. - [Alex] I also have a really
good solution for this. We just tilt it up a bit, then the water's just going
to fall out of the laptop, don't have to worry about it.
- Brilliant. Okay, so we're idling at 30 degrees, 30 to 35 degrees now, we just
dropped 10 degrees at idle. Mm, that's really stutter-y still. - [Alex] Yeah, it's not looking great. Geez, that's not great. That's bad enough that I want to see if there's something else on the go here. Yeah, the CPU is a maximum of 79 degrees. - [Linus] Wow. - [Alex] And the GPU got up to 71. - [Linus] That's really good. - [Alex] So yeah, that is really good. So I quit Tomb Raider,
we're gonna just restart it. I'm going to make sure that everything on the system's working. Like, we didn't do anything
last time and it just worked. - [Linus] Yeah, I wonder if
it was just from how heavily it was thermal throttling
before or something. - [Alex] Yeah, I don't know. It kind of invalidates
our earlier results, but it has been a week and I'm
gonna just update everything. - [Linus] Okay, sure, fine. - [Alex] Maybe Tomb Raider updated and it doesn't like the
old drivers or something, I don't know, computers are stupid. Okay, we're back. We've installed the Alienware
Center and the Windows update. Hopefully, that makes
all of this make sense. - Okay.
- We're aiming for 129. - [Linus] Okay, sounds good. That looks good.
- Yeah, that's much better. - [Linus] That looks very promising. - [Alex] 'Cause before it was like 70 FPS and a hitching mess before here. - [Linus] This is dead smooth. Yeah, with it not throttling, the water is (clears throat)
substantially hotter. So we go all the way from
26 and a half degrees at the outlet to 45 at the inlet. I think this is going to
crush the stock numbers. - [Alex] It seems like it. Although, also like, when
it's looking at the sky there, you always get a lot of FPS. - [Linus] I know, but it
still looks really good. - [Alex] It does, yeah. Okay, that's not as much
better as I had perhaps hoped, (Linus laughs) given the- - Given the expense and inconvenience. - [Alex] 82 degrees on the hottest core and the GPU is at 71. - Nice.
- Neither of them throttling. - So I guess what you're
trying to say then is that any throttling
that this laptop did on its air cooler was negligible. - Yeah. Marginal. (laughs) - Okay, well, let's go ahead
and drain the water out of it and get a new air cooled with
the aftermarket cooler run. - [Alex] Yeah, 'cause that's
close, or the same, I guess. - With water in it. Maybe the issue we were
having with performance was related to how hard
it was throttling before. Fans definitely ramped
up earlier this time. They're going, they're going, boys. Just trying to keep it under control. 127 FPS. (Alex laughs) So it's anywhere from marginally
worse to marginally better, and you get to spend $450 plus
several hours of your time, and have a bunch of stuff
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you might also enjoy the one where Steve from
Gamers Nexus and us take this very laptop for a subzero
overclocking adventure. Poor thing, it's been
through so much. (laughs)
laptop catheter