- If we're going to break it, we might as well at
least get it on camera. Kate, not okay. I like Asus. They're a valued partner. The quality of the products
is generally pretty good, and for the most part, they try and do the right
thing for consumers. But the quality of their
implementation of Thunderbolt on their motherboards has
been so bad for so long that I just can't put off
doing this video any longer, because my wife won't let me, because every time and this is across multiple docks, multiple cables and now multiple motherboards, every time she tries to
wake her display from sleep, oh yeah, and I changed
the graphics card too, it simply won't do it. So this is it. It's wife personal rig upgrade time, and I am cutting Asus out of the equation. Guys, you've got to fix your stuff. Just like I'm going to fix
this segue to our sponsor, Innofoods is currently doing a huge product giveaway for LTT viewers, just head to the Innofoods YouTube channel to get all the details. We'll have it linked below. (electronic music) One of the best things about having rack-mounted
PCs in a server cabinet is that performing maintenance is as simple as sliding 'em out, and you're good to go. Now, the astute among you
will probably have noticed that the hardware in
here is not exactly old and shouldn't really need an upgrade. That's because as part of this process of getting my wife's workstation all cable managed up and
upgraded to the latest tech, I threw in an Asus X299 Prime motherboard with built-in Thunderbolt 3. The problem is that her
Thunderbolt 3 is not working and with the distance between our server cabinet
and her desktop monitor, I can't just run a
regular DisplayPort cable, because they're just too flaky. Because this wasn't a planned project, my parts choices were dictated less by what I think actually makes sense, and more by what I had
lying around at the office. So I'll be using this
ten-year-old Swiftech radiator, with some screws that I found in a bin. this Ice Ball reservoir, which was the only res that I could find that was really designed to be
mounted in a horizontal case. It's even got RGB lighting, although it uses a weird connector, and I don't think I have
any way of hooking it up, and finally the Z490
Aorus Xtreme Waterforce. This is a motherboard
that words cannot describe how little sense it would
make to actually buy, but it was one of the few sitting in our warehouse
that happens to be not Asus and have built-in Thunderbolt 3. So I'll be equipping this puppy, which is the only reason I'm water cooling the system at all with a Core i9 10900k. I'm gonna put this down. I just looked up how much
this thing actually costs, it is 2000 US dollars. For that kind of price, it better come with a flipping
amazing accessory package. I mean, to be clear, it's loaded for bear in terms of features. It's got super robust power delivery. It's got 3 m.2s. 10 gigabit networking and
2.5 gigabit networking, and of course the big highlight is the included full cover water block. What is going on here? Part of me feels like no
matter how high end I go, this motherboard is going to be shaming me for not spending more on
the things I plug into it. This RAM is particularly,
you know, unworthy. 16 gig sticks of 3,200 megahertz. Gross. Good lord that is a lot of thermal pads. It's like a handful. This does not look any less complicated than just buying a normal motherboard and water blocking it after. Look at all these screws. Oh, you gotta be kidding me. Here I was all set up to
put it on the thermal pads, you don't have to apply
them the first time. That's only if you need to reapply it. Oh, for crying out loud Gigabyte, I thought I saw that. Now I just gotta plug
the RGB connector in, and line the thing up with the thing. Yeah, yeah, we good. Oh nice. Oh, oh, nailed it. You know, it's funny, the
wife made an offhand comment about how like she's not getting a $5,000 Intel Extreme Tech Upgrade. Why didn't I get one of those for her? I'm getting it for all the other staff. I'm like, "Hun, you're getting a
$5,000 Extreme Tech Upgrade. Awkward thing, I just
blew the entire budget on your motherboard." I feel like a bad person, soft tubing water cooling this thing, but like, I don't want to
spend that much time on it. Come on. This block has a super cool flow path. So it can go down through the CPU and bypass here or go to the chipset. So this helps keep the restriction low, while also allowing it to do a great job of cooling everything involved. And now that the hard
part's out of the way, all I got to do is a quick board swap. Wait a minute. Normally, when you got
thunderbolt onboard, you have a DisplayPort
in, how does that work? See, this is what I'm talking about. You got your DisplayPort injection here from the GPU. A quick Google search
tells me this may work or I may need a Gigabyte Titan Ridge add-in card or something. Because it's water cooled, there's really no way for me to find out without actually building up the system, which is okay, because the other
motherboard that I will use if this one doesn't work, is also pre-water-cooled, which is why I was resigned to just building a water-cooled system, 'cause they were the only two motherboards with Thunderbolt in the entire building. Can you imagine engineering
a whole motherboard for like six people to actually buy it? And then one of them to put an air cooled graphics card in it. It's crazy how many builds that I'm like pulling all
the SATA devices out of now. Unless you need local storage, which if you've got a NAS, you don't, there's just no reason to
have these cables anymore. You can get eight terabyte m.2s. I mean, they're not affordable, but you already got a
$2,000 motherboard like. Good enough cable management for wifey PC. Time for some water cooling. It's got a mounting bracket, so I can put it like there, but wow, how would that make any sense? Turns out it is not well-regarded, but that's okay because I'll be using a D5 to assist it. So in the event that this
does fail, I'll be good to go. I just gotta find somewhere
to mount this stupid thing. So that's it, we're going right there. All set. Yep. Oh shoot. I kind of wish I had plugged
in the front panel connector before I did this. I'll go get some sleep, come back to it tomorrow. while I was sleeping,
a wild helper appeared. As I was test-fitting the radiator, I was reminded of a couple
of significant oversights in the design of this case,
which of course are on me since this is a custom designed case. In the front bay of fans, there is interference from the USB ports and the power and reset switch. So there's nowhere to
really fit in this tank without cramming it in there in a way that can break the power switch, which I have done on my case. And for this one, there's a ridge here that makes it so that you can't actually get a screwdriver in to screw
in the fans on the radiator. That is unless you like, disassemble the whole thing and then put it together after the fact. The boy says we're going
to go about it this way, and just, if we gotta
sacrifice some cables and mash them, then that's
what we're going to do. Now this is an older style radiator. It's super dumb. It has the actual tubes for the coolant right under where the screws go in. Can you imagine how that
would cause a problem? So that means we have to double check the length of these screws, and I think they're too long. You can see they pop out a little bit. Fortunately, we have new
screws that I brought. Oh yeah. It's absolutely perfect. Okay, don't let it stop. You got to go in straight. Yeah, keep going. There you go, perfect. Now my boy, we need to do, who am I talking to? The camera or my kid? We need to do tubing. Because I don't want to do
any maintenance on this ever, I'm using an extremely
non-porous walled tubing. This is the same stuff that we used for six workstations, one CPU. Now that I'm on the last tubing run, it can go one of two places. It can either go back to
the motherboard monoblock or we could watercool the graphics card which would make the whole
thing actually look nicer, and obviously the graphics card
would then be water-cooled. I did bring a block, it's like right here, propping up the case. I just really don't feel like it. What do you think, boy? should we spend a whole
bunch of extra time to watercool the graphics card? - No. - [Linus] I mean, what could go wrong? Let's actually try a smaller funnel. - That's tiny. - Yeah, well we're going to go slow. If we're going to break it, we might as well at
least get it on camera. Okay, just pour it nice and slow. Okay, slow. Wait, wait, wait. Go back, go back, go back, go back. Kate, not okay. You can't dump it like that. You gotta go slow. - [Kate] Bigger funnel please. - Oh, okay. That's not bad. Now to find out if the thing still works. Boy, do you want to hit the power button? Oh, that's not a good sign. After fully stripping down the board, it's no more obvious what
caused the failure than before. I thought, "Nah, maybe
some liquid got on there that I didn't notice." But nothing, it's bone dry. So the only explanation
I can come up with now is that maybe the mounting
pressure of the water block was too much and crushed some
of the traces inside the PCB 'cause I can't see any
physical damage on the surface. I have had this happen before but I didn't think it was that tight. At any rate, back there is the new board. A Z490 Aqua from ASRock. See what I'm talking about? The only Thunderbolt boards
I had were water cooled ones. So let's give this one a shot. Now that I'm using a completely
different motherboard, it feels only right to tell
you a little bit about it. The Z490 Aqua is from ASRock. It similarly comes with a
pre-done water cooling solution, except it doesn't cool the chipset, it only does the power delivery, CPU and 10 gigabit networking chip. It also has 3 M.2s. It also has Thunderbolt 3, it's got a couple of them. It does have the DisplayPort in. So I'm sure that this one's
actually going to work. In my experience with
ASRock's Thunderbolt 3, at least on their X570 Aqua, has been pretty positive so far and it's a veritable bargain
comparatively speaking at only 1100 US dollars. So let's, let's put it in, and finally fire this thing up. Kudos to ASRock by the way, this thing is so much more user-friendly. All the little grommets on
the board are pre-applied. There's so many fewer screws. I'm liking it. I'm liking it. It has not been my day. I just realized I hooked the inlets of both pumps up to each other. This thing would have like burned itself out or not
freaking cooled at all if I had actually managed to turn it on with the previous motherboard, not that that was the problem
with the previous motherboard 'cause we never got that far, but also all these tubing runs
just need to be redone now because they're not quite long enough to reach where they now need to go. This is what happens when you're like, you know, I'm feeling ambitious. I'm not just going to
fix the wife's machine. I'm going to make a video about it and I don't even need
no stinking film crew. I'm just, I'm yoloing it. Let's find out if it works. All right, there we go. We got a display. Now I just got to get this stupid reservoir to fill, it takes forever. (upbeat music) And it's in the rack. So all that remains is to
leave this for one minute and let the screen go to sleep and see if it wakes up. Finally, test time. Yay. That was all I asked. Thank you ASRock, and thank you to our sponsor. Do you need to create a beautiful website without the hassle? Well check out Squarespace. Their all in one platform makes it easy to get up and running quickly. They've got award-winning templates that you can use as a starting point for a wide range of projects, and if you ever need additional help Squarespace offers webinars,
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we lost all our data? That's a good one. Yeah, it's a roller coaster.
tasty
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