- Obviously over the next couple of years, we're gonna be building a ton of sick water-cooled gaming rigs, using RTX 3000 series
graphics cards like this one. But while in the past, we were able to use the old rule of thumb, which is about one, 120
millimeter worth of radiator, per heat generating
component in the system, I don't necessarily think that
the rules of "It should work" necessarily apply to the RTX 3000s, particularly the power
hungry and enormous RTX 3090, so today's video is gonna
be us taking you along for the journey of some work, that we would have had to do anyway, figuring out exactly how
much radiator we need for a water-cooled RTX 3090. We're gonna start with a slim single, which probably ain't gonna work and work our way all the way up, to well, realistically whatever it takes. Just like I'll do whatever it takes to transition to our sponsor. Ridge wallet wants to redefine the wallet with its compact frame
and RFID blocking plates. Check out how they can keep
your wallet bulged down and use offer code Linus to save 10% and get free worldwide
shipping at the link below. (upbeat music) - Before we can water cool it though, we need to figure how well the system performs when it's just air cooled. So for the testing we're gonna be using this Asus Strix RTX 3090. You might remember it from our
"Is SLI actually dead" video. It basically is. So, yeah, let's just Chuck it in here and find out how well she goes. Our fan config in this
case is a bit overkill. If I'm honest, we have
three fans in the base that are just blowing straight up into it, and three fans up here and three they're blowing
up there, nine in total. It's a bit ridiculous,
but at the same time like, you know, you want best
case scenario for your card. So we've got our test set up here just a very simple times by extreme, we're going to enable looping
and let it go for 30 minutes. It's been 30 minutes,
just 32 at this point and what, oh my God, you piece of crap. Why is there no monitoring data? Yeah, I have to do it again, well see you tomorrow. Okay, testing's done, it looks like we don't have any issues with thermal throttling whatsoever, so hovering right around 1800 megahertz. And let's see here, come on, oh, what a beautiful card. I haven't been this excited to take something apart
for a really long time. This is my first look at the
inside of an Ampere card, and what a beauty. We're gonna be using the
EK-Quantum Vector today, to water cool it. Here's the back plate. (paper rustling) Oh, that's actually really
nice, damn, look at that. Oh, that's just so nicely machined. The real of the show here,
guys water blocks $175, that's enough to buy
yourself a pretty decent GPU, but you know, you've already
got 3090, so who cares? Everything should be CNC machined. I was hoping that we'd
get a see-through one. This is kind of a pre-production block, so we don't have, you know, the things you might expect it to include, like instructions. This is all that I've got, it's a little PDF that includes
where the thermal pads go, and that's it. That's all we get. It's probably gonna be fine. All right, all the thermal pads are on. Finally get to just apply some thermal paste, get it all over here. Oh wow. ♪ What you workin' with ♪ ♪ Diamonds flexin' on my wrist ♪ ♪ If I hit I won't miss ♪ ♪ Them lifestyle's won't fit ♪ ♪ What you workin' with ♪ Huh? All of these mounting holes
don't quite line up on the block because of these two
capacitors right here. Yeah, this is bad. So should we? - Yes. (metal scraping) - Ooh. Ooh. Gnarly. Okay, we should have the clearance now, but hopefully by the time, you know, actual real people get this,
they don't have to do that. - Even with a water block on it, the thing is still huge. - [Alex] Oh yeah. - Massive shout out to EK, by the way, for sending us over one of
their first Vector Strix Blocks for the RTX 3090 from Asus. It did come with some
(coughs) growing pains in terms of installation, they actually hadn't
accounted for a couple of capacitors here, so we had to make our own clearance for them. But now that it's on, theoretically I think we should be okay. So this is as simple as let's
fire it up and get going? - [Alex] Yeah. - Power this puppy up, we're gonna need not one, not two, but three 8-pin PCI Express Connectors, and then I've gone ahead and
installed the plugs down here, and we're gonna throw
some fittings on here and build ourselves the
dirtiest water cooling loop that you ever did see. I mean, not literally dirty, it's gonna have clean water in it, but just, kind of guts spilling
all over the table style. Obviously NVIDIA's last few
generations of graphics cards have thermal throttled
at about 80 degrees, so effectively that you
can't really use temperatures to determine if a cooling
solution is adequate. Nowadays, you have to just
monitor the boost clocks that the card runs at, to see if it's reaching
its full potential. So this air cooled RTX 3090 from Asus represents the numbers that
we actually already ran on this exact card. Because there are variances
from one to the other and that'll tell us how much
radiator reaches the threshold of the air cooler, and then how much radiator we need to, if there is any more headroom, exceed it. For convenience, we're using one of these pump reservoir combo units. These really are the fastest
way to fill up a loop and get all the bubbles out of it, because the water goes directly
into the inlet of the pump. And you've got this little
anti-vortex thing down here in the bottom, that helps the bubbles make their way out of the liquid. One thing to watch out for, is modern GPU blocks, like
CPU blocks can be directional. So this particular one has
the inlet on the left here, so the water flows down
into the cold plate and then it actually splits and flows along two different paths to help with flow restriction. Boy when we build an ugly loop, we build an ugly loop. - [Alex] Oh, it's not that bad Linus. - This sag is something else. - [Alex] (laughs) That's pretty bad. - This card looks curved. That's okay though, because you know, you can make yourself feel better with a refreshing drink from lttstore.com. Hey, there it is, all right. To keep our results consistent, the pump is gonna be run
at full speed all the time, and then our fan for the
radiator, or radiators, is gonna go to the system fan header and we're gonna configure it in the bios, so that they're all running
at about, I don't know, what's reasonable, like 1200 RPM, I think is a good balance
between noise and cooling. So, we'll go with that. Get out all those bubbles in there, you gotta get them out, see. Now it's grabbing that water. Oh, this is great, we were fighting with smart fan mode with all these different temperatures, which by the way is
very cool, and you know, different fan RPMs, but
you can just turn it off. That's not a dropdown, it's a check mark. And you can just set it, 50%, which gives us around
1100 RPM on this fan, which is pretty quiet, like, but then, the main reason that you go water cooling these days is of course, A for looks
and B for quieter operation. If you don't want it quiet,
don't want cool then. I mean, you gotta, where is it? Look at the cooler on this thing, like? So yeah, that's what
we're gonna settle on. It's pretty crazy to see an RTX 3090, even at idle, running
at 32 degrees Celsius - Damn.
- Dang! And that's even with
room temperature water that we put in here, cause we didn't want to wait forever for it to heat up and reach equilibrium. Good luck little radiator, I'm kick-out rooting for you buddy. I'm gonna take lunch. We returned from lunch to find our system black screened
and unresponsive. Thankfully our data logging still worked and we discovered that our
GPU shot up to 87 degrees immediately after the test started, which is obviously not right. Even with an inadequate radiator, the water would still
need time to heat up. So upon further investigation, we discovered that in
EK's mad rush presumably to get us one of these blocks
ahead of retail availability, they, the block is great, but they appear to have
made a small booboo and sent us two millimeter, rather than one millimeter thermal pads. So here's the one they
sent us against a one mill. What that did, was
actually prevented the GPU from making proper contact. You can see we've done a test fit now and everything's doing
great with the one mills, so we just need to re-mill this and take another crack at it. Ow! (Alex laughs) It's really hot. That's not quite as bad but the tanks on the sides
of the radiator, whoa! I'm surprised, we changed
our test methodology, long story, but we're using FurMark and letting it reach equilibrium, then logging for five
minutes and it's like turboing completely to two gigahertz and maxing out at 66 degrees. In fact, what's weird is
like the back of the GPU, we put some tape on it to deal with the reflectiveness of
the, of the backplate there. So the GPU itself is
actually running at around the same temperature as the
back of the back plate, crazy. That Ram on the back of the
card must get freaking toasty. Maybe we shouldn't be
that surprised though, I mean, we've seen a 10 ADTI and what, an 8,600 K on a single. - 87. - 8,700 K on a single
120 millimeter radiator. That's not to say that,
that we think this is ideal. Let's see how much better
we can do with a better Rad. To say our results from the thick single were a disappointment,
would be an understatement. We've got basically the exact same temps, even though we amped up the
thickness of our radiator. Although if you think about
it, it does kind of make sense, because we are adding
some more surface area but we're also adding more
restriction to the airflow. So you tend to need higher RPM or higher static pressure
fans to get the most out of thicker Rads. Actually, here's another
thing I didn't notice until I went to do that B-roll shot showing the relative thickness. The high-performance thicker
one actually has kind of like a built-in shroud. So you can see there's more space between where it screws in
and where the Fin Stack is. So, the difference in thickness of the actual cooling
element is not as much. You can see, it also has a much
more dense Fin arrangement. It's possible then that
a more powerful fan could have improved our results with the thicker radiator, but not to the degree that
we'd be getting temperatures that I'd be happy with, on water cooling. So let's move on to a dual
120 millimeter radiator. This is also of the dense
Finn thicker variety. Come on pump, you can do it. Half an hour into our dual Rad, I gotta say, I am blown away. Like I knew it was gonna perform better, two fans is definitely
better than one, but wow. We went from 66 degrees
down to 48 degrees. That's almost a 20 degree drop, just by adding a little bit
more radiator surface area. So without testing the
triple, I can already say, that this is probably
gonna be the sweet spot for performance and noise. Just because I'm not
expecting a big difference in performance this time around though, doesn't mean I can skip
out on testing the triple. What you get with an
overkill sized radiator, in addition to potentially
lower coolant temperatures, is more headroom for
optimizing your system. For example, if you've got
restrictive grills on your case, a larger radiator can help
compensate for less airflow. In the same way, you could
just turn your fan speeds down, if you wanted your system
to operate more quietly. Finally, of course, there's
the F-word, future-proofing. If you've got a larger
radiator and you do decide to add another component
to your loop down the road, it's more likely that
you'll be able to do so without changing out your Rad. As expected, we only dropped
about four degrees this time telling us that our sweet spot
really is a double radiator, but if we wanted some room to grow, or we knew that we were gonna be giving up a bunch of our airflow to something like a restrictive fan filter, than a triple would be a
great bet for an RTX 3090. This is crazy, because that means that doing small form factor machines, with a high performance
CPU and an RTX 3090 is basically gonna require
either a dual and a single or two triples. And remember too, that the
scenario we're testing here assumes that our radiators
are gonna have access to fresh air. Sometimes they're gonna
have a mixture of fresh air and case air. In fact, like you see
in a case like this one, where there's kind of like a gap between the back panel and the fans, where it can kind of mix what
comes in through the grill and what's already present in the case. So, now we know, just like we all knew that I was gonna use this opportunity to tell you about our sponsor. Micro Center promises you the best prices and selection across any
of their 25 locations across the United States. You can join the new Micro
Center community to give and receive advice on PC
parts selection and hardware and you can check out their
custom PC Builder configurator. Just check out the link
in the video description for a free 32 gig flash drive
and 32 gig micro SD card valid in store only,
no purchase necessary. If you guys enjoyed this video, you might enjoy other
water cooling experiments like, oh shoot, I don't know
if this one's gonna be up yet, by the time you guys watch this, but, what in the, what in
the heck is this thing, ML-360 Subzero?
