Watercooling my invisible PC... (and other upgrades)

this is my now quite famous invisible pc which is essentially a custom made holo desktop enclosure that has a high power pc built into it now it does work brilliantly as is but there's room for a few quite significant upgrades and i'm going to start by enhancing its cooling system which has a bigger effect than you might think you see the original build relied on a bespoke air cooling system which worked pretty well and was chosen to make the system much easier and cheaper to build while remaining quiet in use it did require some raised sections for some components headroom however spoiling the overall elegant thin look if seen underneath and it also bordered on thermal throttling meaning that the design had an upper limit for upgrades and wouldn't really have been able to handle the latest high-end cpus for example which is a shame as it's such a unique design so the plan now is to use water cooling to take heat away from the components more effectively but as the case is so thin this might initially seem to be quite a daunting challenge especially as just a standard radiator and bank of fans is already thicker than the desk itself thankfully however alphacool have a full lineup of one new sized watercooling components that should make it perfectly possible and they've sent over a bunch of stuff specifically for this upgrade these super thin and long radiators in particular being absolutely perfect for builds like this measuring just 40 millimeters thick they should easily fit inside although the airflow path of the case is going to need reworking for them to function correctly so after stripping everything down i can use these handy joiners to join two radiators together in series and then mount my trusty noctua fans in place to go along with these radiators alphacool have an absolutely tiny pump and reservoir combo that can be screwed in place too which keeps things smart and compact now for maximum performance i'm going for a total of four radiators here which equates to roughly a quad 120 rad setup offering some serious cooling capability with a huge amount of headroom for better components compared to what i used originally can you see where this is going yes it's time to go with ryzen this is the ryzen 5950x from amd and it's pretty much considered to be the most powerful consumer processor at the moment featuring a whopping 16 cores and 32 threads insane the motherboard i'm going to be using it with is an asrock b550 phantom itx which is a much smaller board than what i used last time but it packs a punch and should allow for the processor to reach its full potential instead of using a standard water block on it though which has connection points on the top making it too thick to fit inside the table i'm going to be using a much thinner block that has connection points on the sides keeping it extremely low profile in fact the only bit now that's too high is this heatsink asrock actually do sell a similar board to this that features a much lower heat sink here but as i have this one to hand i'm just going to trim it down instead this will affect its cooling performance slightly but it will be compensated for by good airflow over this area which you'll see in just a minute so this is looking great but before moving on we need to focus on the power supply you see the original power supply i used was a thin 1u power supply rather than the traditional atx variety for obvious reasons while it worked well overall it was a model that was geared very much towards industrial applications and as a result absolute silent operation was not a primary design consideration with it this means that while it is pretty quiet overall as the fan only spins at very high load levels it does emit transformer wine at all times take a listen now for an absolutely silent build this is definitely something that i would rather avoid but there are very few alternative power supplies to choose from that are thin enough to fit inside the pc unless one thinks outside the box you see after atx there's another power supply variety called sfx for small form factor while these are still quite a bit thicker than my original psu i'm going to mod mine to make it fit this should work because after removing the top plate which also houses a fan the actual circuitry inside is fairly short almost matching my original power supply on closer inspection it measures just 44 millimeters which precisely matches the internal size of my desk so it's looking pretty hopeful temporarily removing the board allows me to trim the metal frame down to leave me with just the bottom plate which i can leave the board inside for mounting and safety purposes its ac input does need to be reconnected however which i hard wired directly to a kettle plug y splitter along with the original preliminary filter components being careful to replicate the original distances between the exposed joints for safety this can now all be mounted inside my case but as i can't rely on the outer chassis of the power supply for grounding because it's painted i made sure to use a grounding tab this time instead now although the power supply is now fairly exposed it's worth noting that its outer case will now effectively be the table itself and once sealed in there's no way to touch anything near it especially as all of the surrounding metal is grounded however to be extra sure i used some insulating plastic around its ac input and installed a grounded fine metal mesh all the way around its perimeter which also keeps in any interference to finish things off another piece of insulating plastic was glued on top as well now although this appears fairly boxed in the intention here is for air to be pulled through it as directed by some plastic strips ensuring that the whole thing is kept as cool as a cucumber so the last component left to upgrade is the graphics card unfortunately though the latest lineup of these from both amd and nvidia are completely sold out and there's currently no way for me to get one for this build so instead i'm going with an older generation card with a power consumption that matches fairly closely the mid-range of the new lineup so although its performance won't be as good it will at least provide a fairly accurate indication of the cooling ability of the rig allowing us to extrapolate various performance conclusions more on that later though so with everything installed it's time to fill up the loop [Music] so before i put this all back together which will then allow us to test out both the acoustic performance as well as the thermal performance it's time for a quick ad from this video's sponsor skillshare learning a new skill whether it's how to start coding in html or improving your artistic ability or even just how to brew a perfect cup of coffee skillshare is a great place to start they've got thousands of classes to choose from and they're easy to follow thanks to their concise step-by-step structure that takes 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happy learning so before mounting the bottom panel in place it too needs a few modifications you see originally there was a large cutout over where the graphics card sits with the idea being for air to be pushed through the old graphics card's heatsink from inside due to a higher internal air pressure thus keeping it cool this actually worked really well but as the card is water cooled now i glued a panel in place instead to block it off for neatness and i did likewise for the power supply access hatch as it's now hardwired once these were sanded flush i gave it a few coats of matte grey which makes it look quite smart as the case still needs plenty of airflow i left the motherboard cutout area open and instead installed a wire mesh this allows air to be pulled in through this mesh cooling down the whole motherboard area with the air eventually being forced out of the bank of holes at each side after being pushed through the radiators one of the things i noticed after screwing it all together was how much of a difference it makes having the bottom of the desk completely flush now it's not something that i'll ever really see in reality but just knowing that it's flat psychologically makes quite a difference to the overall perception of the build and it feels so much slicker now not that it wasn't before of course but it's like this was what it was always meant to be so the system is up and running now and i'm happy to report that one of my initial goals with this upgrade has definitely been worth it which is changing the power supply as uh the coil whine and the transformer noise is completely gone and the system at idle and just general web browsing watching videos that kind of thing is completely silent and i do mean silent take a listen so those are very impressive results and yeah i'm very happy but what about the performance under load and is the system now capable of cooling down more higher power hardware well here are my findings so this has been running for about 20 minutes now which will have heated up pretty much all the water in the loop to as high as it's going to get but even so it's extremely quiet far quieter than the previous air cooling setup now it is very hard for me to convey sound levels over a video as i've said many times before but i'm just going to be quiet for a second and then raise the volume levels of my usual high quality microphones i use so you can get a general idea not bad now there is a little bit of coil wine from the graphics card but that is a component that can easily be changed out in the future but just serves as an example for now because coil wine does vary from card to card so overall i would say that that is very impressive in terms of numbers here the graphics card maxed out at roughly 55 degrees celsius which is why acoustic performance in games is so quiet as we just observed this is an excellent result and means that the system would still be completely viable if coupled with an even higher tier graphics card like an rtx 3080 the only time the fans wanted to ramp up to audible levels was when i slammed the processor with an intense single core workload for longer than five minutes which is really a limitation of the transfer of heat from the cpu to the water block than the limitation of the water loop itself and in general use for video editing and the like the system remained basically inaudible which is absolutely perfect so i'm really happy with those results and i would definitely say that these upgrades have been worth it as it really polishes off the design and gets the most out of it i mean don't forget this is like a full proper big tower computer performance but in the desk itself it really is quite remarkable now one of the things some of you will notice is that the monitor system is just sitting on top rather than the shelf system that i used last time and the reason for that is just because this is my studio and i've already filled in the holes i drilled in there because this was never its intended residing place into the future but that will come and you will see that because that's a video for another time and it's going to be super interesting because we're going to make some extra stuff for it to make a very clean setup but until then i'm matt you've been watching diy perks and i hope i see you next time goodbye for now you

Channel: DIY Perks

Views: 3,712,509

Keywords: diy perks

Id: HhWDPG8EROw

Length: 13min 38sec (818 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 15 2021