- Intel's core I9-12900K in performance mode
gets hot.
Too hot to cool with a traditional heatsink.
Too hot even for an all-in -one liquid cooler.
Ugh, smells nasty.
Surely our mighty custom loop can save the day.
All right, so we're getting there.
But what if we had three tubes instead of two?
FLUIX is a newcomer in the custom water cooling space
and claims that their Tri-Swift water block
is the best on the market,
surpassing the latest and greatest from well known brands
like EK and Swiftech.
Their approach?
Divide the coolant to conquer the heat.
According to Tynan in from our engineering department
their theory does hold some water,
but there's only one way to see if
adding extra speed holes to your water block
will make your CPU as fast as
this to our sponsor.
- Ridge Ridge wallet has redefined the traditional wallet
with its compact frame and RFID blocking plates.
The bulge in your pants, shouldn't be from your wallet.
Use offer code Linus to save 10%
and get free worldwide shipping today.
- This is the quantum velocity squared water block from EK.
It's one of the top performing blocks on the market and
like our challenger, the FLUIX tri-swift
it can cost a whopping 200 plus US dollars
depending on options like material choice.
That's just for the block,
which means that to test these monsters,
we first had to dig up all the other components
of a quick custom water cooling loop.
Then we grabbed our CPU frame from Thermal Grizzly
cranked our Noctua fans and D5 pump to their max speeds
and configured the classroom blender benchmark
to a whopping 3000 path samples.
With our CPU in the default power profile,
our EK block here barely cracked 72 degrees
once our loop preached thermal equilibrium.
That's a tough mark to beat.
It's significantly better than some of the air
and all-in-one water coolers that we've looked at recently
but FLUIX is going to have to do it because when
you're spending this kind of money on cooling
every fraction of the degree matters.
And as I learned in my product management days,
the demand for the second best custom water block
is essentially zero.
I don't think that's gonna be a problem though.
Since FLUIX promises to win by a lot more than a fraction
of a degree, I mean, look at this,
two inlets instead of one.
That's right, double the water flow to your--
wait, it's just a why splitter?
(beep)
We're back, sorry.
They explained this better than I can.
Here's the product description, emphasis mine.
The FLUIX tri swift is the highest performance block
on the planet.
(sped up) Five millimeter micro-channels.
Proprietary sinu-soidal pattern jet plate.
Great turbulence mixing chamber.
Something, something.
This allows our tri-swift water block
to lower CPU temperatures
by eight to 10 degrees Celsius during intensive workloads
compared to substitute water blocks.
Here's the thing, guys.
We don't really review water blocks anymore
but these are some bold claims.
Almost as bold as my claim;
that you'll find all the best behind the scenes extras
and exclusives over on floatplane.com.
Like Alex making joystick condoms.
Anywho,
buried in that long winded marketing speil
that you just endured are some actual grains of truth.
Tynan is gonna fill you in.
- They're basically saying that their twin inlets assisted
by these wavy jet plates will increase their
fluid turbulence, improving the thermal transfer
between the copper fins and the water in your loop.
It's a fundamentally sound theory
because turbulent flow does help to prevent the formation
of boundary layers.
A boundary layer is a thin zone where the friction
between the fluid and the solid
slows down the flow
causing the already warm fluid to kind of
stick to the copper, slowing down thermal transfer.
You can see this in action for yourself
with a simple experiment.
The room you're sitting in right now almost certainly
contains weak air currents but you probably can't feel them.
This is thanks to the natural friction between your body
and the surrounding air that creates a zone
of prewarm air next to your skin.
A boundary layer.
Simply wave your hand in the air like this,
to disrupt this boundary layer.
And you'll feel an immediate, though temporary,
cooling effect.
Neat, right?
- Certainly.
But what it isn't is new.
FLUIX's first mistake
was citing the deep water cooling magic to me,
which I was there when it was written.
First generation commercial water blocks
from the early 2000s did suffer from lackluster performance
for a number of reasons.
First up, their simple ma style designs
did almost nothing to increase surface area
directly over the CPU die.
And second, because most DIY water coolers were
using low pressure, cheap aquarium pumps.
They intentionally used very wide water channels
to avoid restricting flow.
That means that much of the water flow
inside them was laminate rather than turbulent.
That's bad
'cause you'll find substantial boundary layers, basically,
well, everywhere in a Danger Den Maze three from 2002
but then something happened.
Our water cooling Lord and savior,
certified Xtreme Systems legend, Stew "Cathar" Forster,
created the Little River Whitewater.
It was the first commercial block that intentionally
restricted the flow of water at the block inlet
creating a jet of water that blasted the copper cold plate.
Why did you do this?
Turbulent flow.
To say this it was a game changer
would be an understatement.
With a high pressure pump,
the Whitewater and its successors,
the Cascade and the Storm,
would absolutely dominate the custom water cooling scene
for the next few years.
The Storm was super cool,
but devilishly complicated to manufacture.
The high volume version actually used a midplate with 35
micro jets that fired into machined cups
to create a hyper turbulent zone directly above the CPU die.
It left everything else in the dust
and when truly stronger competitors finally emerged,
nearly all of them leaned on the same
fundamental design principles.
Out competing the Storm only by increasing surface area
directly over the CPU die,
optimizing the shape of the cooling patch
for the heat spreader designs of contemporary processors
or by bow out the base for extra mounting pressure.
These evolutionary changes yielded a grand total
six degree improvement over the 10 year span
that we tested back in 2016.
Since then, skived copper bases,
where they actually shaved the copper
and bend it up to make the fins,
have taken over for cast or machined micro pins.
So while I haven't personally tested them
I suspect that the top designs today
like this one from EK are probably
at least a couple degrees better than what we saw.
That means then (chuckles) long story short,
by my rough math,
the total water block performance improvements
from basically flat chunks of copper in 2002
to the skived copper bases we see today
is in the neighborhood of 17 degrees.
With all of that in mind
FLUIX's patent pending fluid turbulence technology
has a lot of work ahead of it to beat anything
by eight to 16 degrees, as they claim,
let alone, a modern block that, by the way
definitely makes use of jet induced turbulence,
like every other decent design on the market.
So how's the performance?
(fart noises)
(laughing) This is bad,
not just a little bit bad,
like comically bad.
Hey, future Linus is coming at you.
FLUIX responded to our results
and said that they have a new cold plate coming
for 12th gen.
It's possible, nay,
probable, that this will improve performance.
But the cold hard truth is that
at least some of the things they're doing
like accounting for the concavity of the IHS.
They should have known, if they were serious about designing
a high performance water block
and they were up against a competitor that doesn't even
use a skived copper base, not to mention
that it looks amazing where
FLUIX is at best hoping to get closer in performance
and also looks like it came from AliExpress.
There's not a huge market
for ugly custom water cooling hardware, either.
The truth is I, I don't, I just don't make the rules
and that's what they had for sale.
So that's what we reviewed.
All right, back to the video.
With our CPU in default mode,
maximum package temperatures hit 85 degrees
with the FLUIX block with an average of 82.
That is over 10 degrees higher
than our EK block.
It pulled about 10 more Watts.
Okay, so fair enough.
But our average core clocks were actually slightly worse
which would indicate to us that
that higher power draw was likely due to higher thermals,
not higher performance.
Cranking things up with our 12900K in performance mode,
letting it turbo to high heaven and pull nearly 300 Watts.
Our EK block
did manage to pull it off.
I mean, it's hot at 97 degrees,
but it didn't throttle.
Meanwhile, the tri-swift throttled so quickly,
we didn't even bother letting it
complete the full 3000 sample render.
Having not looked closely at this thing
before green lighting this review
these results are much worse than I expected.
So bad, in fact that I actually--
damn it, where'd I put it?
Dug up my old Storm V2 from the moth balls
to test against it.
The unit I have was manufactured
under licensed by swift tech back in the mid 2000s
and cost about 80 us dollars.
It uses a pretty janky mounting adapter
that Jake made by hand but meh.
- I cut that with tin snips.
We had very few tools back then.
- Yes.
At least one.
Aye, (beep) roasted.
You tried both.
- [Jake] Yeah. - Oh, just for LOLs.
- [Plouffe] I tried swapping it,
in case I was doing
something wrong. - [David] You're leaking,
you're leaking. - Linus, it's leaking.
- Oh, well that's not optimal.
We have not pretested this.
We have no idea what's going to happen.
So whatever happens happens.
Here we go.
Bring on the Storm.
Okay, it's not as good as it seems to be so far.
It's set like 73, 74 on the package
but the fluid hasn't heated up yet
so we're gonna have to give it a little bit.
We can't take these results as final just yet.
You can see here, I held the fans to speed up
the fluid heating up right here
and we reached a maximum of 87.
But since then it has actually settled back down to
83 to 85 degrees Celsius on the CPU package.
We landed at 84 degrees.
Now I wanna show you something.
Here's a better look at the Storm.
We've got our micro jet midplate.
There's those finicky little bastards.
And then we've got the cups on the bottom
and you can see as I alluded to before,
this is a really, really small cooling patch.
Where there's actual turbulent flow.
It was designed for direct die cooling on older CPUs
that didn't have a heat spreader over top of the die.
So the fact that this performs anywhere near
the FLUIX tri-swift, which has a gigantic cooling patch
and gets to take advantage of much
much more modern machining techniques.
It's kind of hilarious.
Clearly there's more turbulence here
than here.
For comparison, I also took apart
the quantum velocity squared and
oh, that's interesting.
This does not use skiving
even though EK is not using skived fins,
you can see they are much finer
than the ones in the FLUIX tri-flow.
Oh, and this is notable.
(clears throat) There's this mid plate here.
This slotted midplate that sits over top of the fence.
Gee, I wonder what that does.
So then
by going FLUIX
we not only get performance that's comparable to a design
that was optimized for CPUs from 2005,
we add complexity to our loop with more potential points
for leakage thanks to the Y-splitter.
Yay.
It's ugly as hell.
And yes, again with the price, it's a whopping
230 US dollars
on sale.
Even adjusted for inflation,
it costs twice as much as the Storm
with some budget left over for our awesome new swim trunks
on LTT store.com.
The only way that I can imagine FLUIX justifying
their turbulent juice marketing nonsense
is if they've only ever tested this thing
using the anemic pump that they bundle
with the AIO version.
From talking to Tynan,
it is possible that with an extremely weak pump
their design may actually help to increase turbulence
in the CPU block.
But while I could test this thing, frankly
I have spent enough of both my time and money
evaluating this piece of junk.
And the reality is that anyone spending this kind of moolah
on a water block is gonna drop more than 40 bucks
on their pump and they're gonna get a proper D5.
So probably the only good thing that came out
of this whole video is that it was an excuse
for me to talk about water cooling again after so long.
Maybe someday
we'll see a wild new block design
that nobody ever thought of
and it'll be a quantum leap forward and performance
but it is not this day.
If you wanna get into custom loops
we're gonna have everything we use linked down below.
But for now we would probably recommend sticking
with the tried and true EK block.
It's much less expensive.
Yeah, that's the, that's the real kicker.
The $200 one I showed you guys before,
that's with all the extra bells and whistles.
It's like actually a lot cheaper.
And while they're not manufactured in the USA
at least they're made in a machine shop rather than in a
shoe factory.
And this segue was made in our segue factory.
To our sponsor.
- Squarespace.
Need a website but don't have the know how?
Squarespace makes it easy.
There's a wide selection of award-winning templates
all optimized for mobile.
So it looks great on all devices.
Create members only content
for extra revenue using Squarespace's member areas.
Grow and engage your audience with
the powerful and easy to use email campaign system.
And if you ever need additional help
Squarespace also offers webinars, help guides
and you can contact their 24/7 customer support
via live chat and email.
So get started today and head to
squarespace.com/LTT to get 10% off your first purchase.
- If you guys enjoyed this video
make sure to check out our easiest water cooled PC video.
We are well aware now of how much time it takes
to do a proper custom loop. (clicks tongue)