- Hi guys, it's Fireball Brady with Microsoft,
and I'm here talking with Brad from iBUYPOWER.
We're here to talk about the new Element CL.
Brad, give me the lowdown.
- Yeah, so this is it.
This is our brand new desktop, the Element CL.
CL stands for Custom Loop because, you know,
we're doing a custom liquid cooling system in a prebuilt.
That's sort of the goal of this project
is to take the ultra high end aspirational,
full custom loop systems and bring that to
the prebuilt market, you know,
where it's accessible to, you know, to anybody
in terms of price, in terms of availability,
you know, that's our major goal for this product.
- What were some of the engineering struggles
you guys had trying to put this together in a way
that you could produce en masse?
- Yeah, so there were actually a lot of things
that we had to do for this.
You know, anybody who's familiar with a
full custom loop desktop knows that they're very expensive,
they're very complicated, and they're also very fragile.
Most custom loop desktops are
double the price of the same spec.
They're very complicated, they take forever to build,
three, four, or five hours.
And then the last thing being that they're
just really fragile, you know,
they're not as robust as a standard desktop.
You ship them, you know, with regular shipping
in a regular box and, you know,
they tend not to survive through to the other side
and you can't have that with a prebuilt, right?
These things need to be shipped pre-filled, pre-tested,
you know, ready to go on day one out of the box.
We had to design, you know, a lot of things
from the ground up to meet those goals.
Central to all of it is the distribution plate,
which mounts in the front of the system.
Distribute plates are super important for
building custom loops quickly because, you know,
they'll bring the tube locations to
where you need them to be, saves a lot of time.
You don't have to plan how the tubes go around the system.
Another thing that we have is
we have special fittings that we designed.
These actually have little retention teeth on the inside,
so that when you put a tube into these fittings, it's stuck.
It's not going to pop out in shipping,
it's not going to pop out just by pulling on it,
you actually have to squeeze a little
release tab to get it out.
- Awesome.
What are the considerations for noise? How loud is it?
- So this system, I have it right here next to me.
At idle, this thing is dead silent. I can't hear it at all.
One of the other nice things about custom loops,
in most systems, the loudest component is the graphics card.
It's the most power-hungry component,
and so it needs the most cooling,
and by liquid cooling your graphics card,
you know, we're taking a small fan,
and heat, sink, and fan assembly that's about
that big and blowing it up to a big 360 millimeter radiator
with 120 millimeter fans,
so the sound level of this on full load versus a
traditionally cool desktop on full load,
this is going to be much, much lower.
- [Brady] You know, the aesthetics on the device
is absolutely beautiful.
I've seen the pictures, they look great.
What about the customizability for the end users?
- Yeah, so that was another thing we had to consider, right?
We don't want to lock people into one spec
and only one spec for these systems, right?
We don't want to sell just one spec.
We want to offer a variety of hardware.
The fittings themselves are adjustable,
and because they're designed by us, you know,
we always know that they're going to be in the same place
every time.
So we're going to have multiple GPU configurations,
multiple CPU configurations,
they can choose different motherboards,
they can choose different memory and hard drives,
it's very flexible in that way.
- Fantastic, and future focus with, you know,
the advent of new technologies coming all the time,
how is this looking for those who are on the bleeding edge,
the gamers who really want to be able to upgrade stuff
as soon as it drops with the newest GPU or CPU?
- That's also another excellent question.
So, you know, we're releasing this product
in the middle of a hardware cycle, right?
We're in the middle of a CPU cycle, and a GPU cycle,
so of course, you know, within the lifetime of this product,
we're going to see multiple hardware refreshes,
and we've taken that into consideration as well.
Like I mentioned, our fittings are adjustable
so when new motherboards come out with new sockets,
you won't have to re-bend tubes,
the block just sort of slides to where it needs to be at.
This is the CPU fitting,
it actually slides about an inch up and down
to account for CPU position.
And then for GPU,
as soon as we get our hands on the newest graphics cards,
we're designing blocks for them.
And we're going to make those blocks available,
both for customization,
for systems you could purchase from us.
And also if you already own one of these,
you can purchase that GPU with that water block
and upgrade your system yourself.
And it's a lot easier to do in the Element CL
than in a traditional custom loop.
- That's actually very exciting for me
so I need to know when can I order one?
How soon are these going to be available?
- So the official availability date for this is August 28th.
And, you know, at launch, we will have
multiple configurations available.
You can order one of these as what we call an RDY system,
so they're prebuilt, ready to ship.
You don't have to even wait for us to build it,
you know, it's already in a box ready to go.
Or you can configure one manually, you know,
pick the parts that you want,
and we put it together on our website.
- That's fantastic.
But yeah, I'm excited to get my hands on it
and see what it's like.
Anyways, this has been Fireball Brady with Microsoft,
I'm here with Brad.
Thank you very much for joining us.
- Yeah, it's been a pleasure. Thank you.