- 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.
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(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.
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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?