- Running a PC and a mini-fridge just doesn't work.
You know what does?
Hooking up this 3,000 watt
refrigeration cooler directly to a CPU,
at least I sure hope it does.
By the end of this video, with any luck...
♪ Brian the Electrician. ♪
will have transformed this gutted mini split
into a CP cooler and pull the core i7 down.
To what? Like negative 40 degrees Celsius.
It's going to be really stupid,
and huge thanks to Thermal Grizzly for sponsoring it.
(upbeat music)
First thing we need to do is figure out
where the heck the thermostatic expansion valve is.
We've got our condenser here.
It sends liquid to the evaporator
that turns all of your liquid into vapour
with a U
sends it back to here into the compressor.
But if liquid gets sent back into the compressor,
well, you put something that's incompressible
into a compressor and things got really bad, really fast.
That's why you need a TVX.
It turns out it's right here, which is great.
Because we were afraid it would be on the evaporator.
The second thing we had to do is figure out
how the heck this turns on and off.
So, this part right here goes into your house,
and it's responsible for like connecting to wifi
and sending a signal to the outdoor unit,
which actually does the real cooling stuff.
I don't want to go down the electronics engineering
rabbit hole (beep) for the next 16 hours,
so we're just going to take this out and use it as it is.
Now, I just need to go spend a lot of money on copper.
Honestly, this is going to be real expensive.
I'm sorry Lance.
(laughs)
Let's look at what we're going to turn our $200
of raw copper into, using the turmoil.
You're probably familiar with how CPU water blocks work,
and this is kind of like that,
but instead of using water to cool down your CPU,
we're using the phase change of refrigerant.
Via a copper tube, our refrigerant will be aimed directly
at the CPU. When it goes from the small diameter
and high pressure of the tube to the comparatively
massive space in here, the refrigerant should go
from a liquid to a vapour with the phase change
absorbing loads of heat in the process.
After that, we've created a maze of copper for the
refrigerant to navigate for making its way back out the top.
To create this maze, we will need to machine four copper
layers and then solder them all together,
sealing the whole thing and not allowing any
refrigerant to escape, which might be a bit difficult,
given that there might be over two, 300 hundred PSI in here.
- This is my first time running the 16th inch,
so we'll see if we blow it up, I guess.
Yeah, it seems to be working.
That tool is great for chip evacuation,
so I think we're good.
Nevermind.
- I'm almost wondering if we should actually put a little
bit of an orifice in the end of the tube because
with this sitting here, you're still gonna have
a pretty big opening.
- We could just crush the end of that.
It's just the most YOLO evapourator.
- One thing we are going to have to be careful to do is
make sure we put this through the top layer
before we solder down to the lower layer,
because otherwise it won't go in.
- It wouldn't be great.
And I'm going to have to get this to sit up a little
tighter. It was a.. we're winding up with a bit of a gap.
So off to work on the end of this a little bit,
to make it all fit.
- Yup. This is why you double-check everything
when you're running new code.
This was supposed to be a helix and it is there,
but there's not enough space.
So it decided instead it was going to plunge the tool
right down to the final depth and then do a cut,
which with a 16 inch cutter would have definitely
blown it right up. So we're going to fix that.
- Grill the end down a little bit, got the end,
open it back up and okay, that's going to fit.
So once we get the two major pieces soldered together here,
I can solder the tube in and that'll seal it
into this lower layer. And then as we add layers,
I can solder the tube where it passes through each layer.
(upbeat music)
- Oh, final piece of copper.
This one looks pretty good too. The nice stepped edges
Oh my tap just broke in there.
I guess this was a very (beep) tap.
(upbeat music)
- That's cool. Now should do.
- Oh it's finally time.
- I might need the big head
This is way too hot for the flare to figure out what it is.
- It's actually soldered to the pipe
- We have fire bricks down there for when you figure out how
to get it off.
- Yeah I think we're going to need that.
I'll try to move it I guess.
(tools working)
- So what did we learn Brian?
- Firebricks are our friends?
- Yeah, don't solder it to the base.
- That's the first for me.
Does anyone want hearing protection?
(upbeat music)
- Have you ever seen a Firebrick glow red?
- It's been real hot.
- Oh yeah.
- Is that straight?
- Close enough.
- Yeah. You can feel the heat just radiating off.
- The cool and spraying off of the thing
and hitting the screw hole and coming out.
Need to fix that at some point.
- What do you mean? You fixed it. There's a bucket.
- Still really hot, but the firebreaks are the hottest part.
- I dare you to lick it. I'll give you 10 bucks.
- I have an idea.
- Oh yeah.
- The top cools down.
Oh yeah. It is working.
(upbeat music)
- Alex. There's enough thermal mass here.
You could use this thing as a heater.
I would just have to let it cool for a while and I can clean
it up. Get some bare copper again.
And then we'll solder on the last layer.
You can solder the hookups and let it cool again.
And then we can pressure test it.
Definitely going to need to surface the bottom.
- Done
- Wow!
I don't think it's going to leak.
- We did go through about a quarter tank of a settling.
- That's a lot of potato cannon shots.
- Would you really want to use a settling for that?
I mean, I've seen potato shot with compressed air before.
- Oh yeah.
I used a settling. The first time we shot it,
my dad was like,
you guys can't shoot that on the deck anymore.
Cause the windows moved too much.
- It's got some good weight to it, that's for sure.
- We're in Brian's truck to do the last bit here.
We just want to pressure test this.
- See those jumps... 400 PSI.
If there are any leaks that should actually show up even
just my pressure's fairly fast just because it's such a
small volume.
We're good. No bubbles.
- Good freaking job on the solder.
Blocks pressure tested.
Now we just need to get it ready to go on the CPU.
Most of the crap is gone now,
but during all the soldering heating up,
cooling down and so on, this might be very far from flat.
So fortunately we have a lapping plate here.
We're just going to mix up some oil,
Oh (beep) not that much
and a little bit of this stuff right here.
It's just, what would you even call this?
And now I just do this for quite a while.
The lapping about halfway through made the bottom look like
it was sandblasted,
which reminded me that we have a sandblaster.
Why does this thing look like garbage?
It should look like a $300 park.
So there we go. Look at that
Out of the sandblaster,
the surface finish on this thing is incredible.
I also went in, locked the bottom once more.
It's not a mirror finish, but who cares?
We have Thermal Grizzly.
That'll fill in all the little gaps there.
And now it's time for the hardest part of this
If you've never seen a motherboard prepped for Sub-Zero
before, this is probably going to be real hard to watch,
but I swear this is much better than not doing it.
Just see the Vaseline squishing out this poor 8,700 K.
I say that it didn't deserve this,
but like it's going to be a real fast 8,700 K
by the end of the day.
- So what are the chances this dies?
- I really don't think we're going to kill this CPU,
especially given how much Vaseline I just put on here.
But there is a reason that we're doing this on not our best
CPU the first time. I think it'll be fine though,
This is so gnarly Brandon.
Oh, this is so hard to turn.
Everything's so slippery from all the Vaseline.
So we have electrical. It's right in here
and now it's time to connect
this up and fill it with refrigerant.
- First. We have to pull it all down into a vacuum.
- Oh, now it's time to pull it down to a vacuum.
- We pull it into a vacuum
to make sure that there's no contaminants
Nitrogen doesn't compress very well at least
not in an AC system.
You will probably get some condensation on
the low pressure side.
- Yeah. If it's a problem,
we can just insulate the whole thing.
Got to use the sponsor of this video.
Good old Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut.
I'm gonna make sure it's reading really accurate.
So the sensory needs to get taped there,
but we also just need to insulate the whole thing
- regardless.
- So I'm going to use the insulation tape stuff.
- Oh, we need an Allen key for those. Okay.
What do you think the chances are that one Allen key we
don't have is the one that we need.
- That's definitely too big.
So I'm going to say chances are probably pretty good.
- You have the electrical connected.
This is mostly a box now.
We also have our electrical here running to it,
which maybe works maybe doesn't.
Hopefully we can get refrigeration into it all.
Are we good?
- Yep.
- All Right. Let's hit it.
- Oh.
- Is it on?
- Yeah. Oh that's cold.
Oh E6
Okay. So it just shut down.
But that definitely got quite cold.
- Do we have a manual for this thing?
- E6 malfunction of indoor fan motor.
Exactly what you thought. Alright, let's plug that in.
- Oh no. I was thinking, just pull the motor itself out.
- Oh yeah. That's more smarter.
I was thinking we just chuck the whole thing on the table.
- Well, I'm in, we could just for a quick test, but we.
- So good to cool. A whole computer with this.
- I actually melted in the front of a tower.
Oh my fans coming on.
- So our controller isn't happy because it's 17 degrees
in here and the lowest, this will go is 16 degrees.
So when do you heat up the temperature probe before it'll
kick on.
- We don't want to melt the probe.
- It's on low. There we go.
You can start to see the condensation on it. -3,
- 4. It's still going.
- Oh my hands are cold
- This whole thing is frosted up. Well, I guess,
should we connect it to a CPU?
- I think so.
- Okay.
- I'm very ready to. This is getting very cold,
very fast and -8 now.
- This is really about is jank as this could ever get.
- Oh wait, geez.
- Thermal paste?
- Yeah. Thermal Grizzly would not have been happy
if we forgot to put it down.
So yeah.
Thermal Grizzly sponsored this video and we are going to be
using their Kryonaut. They do have liquid metal as well,
but that will just be metal at these kinds of temperatures.
The Kryonaut is good for down to what?
Like -200 degrees Celsius.
Something absolutely ridiculous like that.
- Oh wow.
- Nice! CPU temperature of -3 degree Celsius right now.
Not a bad start.
Let's try what? 5 GHz.
5.1. Let's try 5.3 and just see what happens.
We have so much cooling. Let's try 1.36. (beep)
We'll probably just get a blue screen, but whatever.
- Oh, it kicked off.
- (beep)
- Sweating?
- Yeah. Sweating pretty bad.
Should have encased the whole board and Vaseline in case
something drips down on it. Oh, Windows is not happy.
It's not even a stability error. It's just stupid.
This drive has risen (beep) on it.
- It's not our jank cooling setup. It's a driver's seat.
Yay.
- Nope.
- You piece of (beep). Well, definitely works.
Although we're having trouble with the electronics,
it seems to have some sort of like a defrost cycle or
something like that. For our purposes it's terrible.
So preface. Absolutely do none of this.
We have a professional electrician and electrical engineer,
but basically we're ball steep in this.
We were hoping just the compressor.
- Okay, I don't know if I can say that
- Our hope was that the compressor just ran off of AC.
So we could just have a switch.
Turn the switch on, compressor runs. We have cold.
- To clarify,
We were hoping the compressor just ran off single phase AC.
It's looking like it's actually a three phase motor.
- So what we've figured out is that most of the electronics
garbage is to just feed it.
Three-phase AC. We have that here.
We could just plug it in and send it.
- Full send on the three-phase.
- So we thought we figured it out, but then.
- 190 Volts DC at 180 Hertz.
- Yes, But basically instead of making it dumb,
it might be easier to scoop the signal at this point.
I just really don't want to blow up the compressors.
- Making a dumb was a lot harder than we thought it would be
Either we can spoof all of the different thermal probes
and just potentiometer them until everything's happy.
Or we can come to this board here and try to figure out what
the enable pin is. So now I get to spend all of today,
spoofing thermal couples, hoping that works, feed it
whatever it wants and it'll run.
This is probably going to be the only mini split in
existence with Thermal Grizzly or it's chips.
This is the temperature probe that was on the evaporator.
And it seemed to shut down when we hit
about -20 degrees. It might've been because of this.
It might've been because of something in here,
but we're going to test it out with this just at ambient
temperature and see what happens.
Oh, there we go.
Yep. So that temperature is dropping and quickly.
Now we just give it a minute?
Wobble is concerning
Hey Jamie
I dare you to stick your belly in there.
So we're now into the negatives on the block.
This is where we might be shutting down kind of soon,
but we'll see.
If it gets all frosty like this and then shuts off,
all of this frost is immediately turning into water.
Cause it warms up pretty fast. That's really bad.
As you can probably imagine the compressor also is starting
to frost up.
So that's why I'm concerned that the problem isn't our
evaporator,
but one of the sensors in here is making a kick into a
defrost cycle.
This is where having a proper shroud on this probably would
help a lot.
We're having a lot of blow back.
It's at - 14 degrees now.
It seems to be struggling to get below 14 degrees. Yeah.
It's actually warming up right now a little bit.
Let's put the trial back on for better cooling
and try this again.
Come on, eat up, kick off,
Come on..do it!
That's a lot less sketchy with it properly secured.
So we should now see the radiator temp go up as the
evaporator goes down, which is exactly what's happening.
Wonderful. I wonder if turbo will help us.
It's actually so stupid that just this sensor hitting
- 20, shuts it off.
That will be amazing.
So we need to do two stages.
We'll take our other air conditioner, hook it up to this.
We're close to the moment of truth.
If we're able to hold -20,
that means I can finally finish this project? Holy Frig
This has been a lot of work. Thermal Grizzly,
You really got your money's worth with this one.
Geez. Oh! -20. There we go.
Still dropping. Radiator temp's actually gone up
a little bit,
which is cool.
It looks like we're not dropping any more though.
We're probably just right at the limit of what this is able
to do. Like I can feel a bit of the heat
coming through and that might be enough to stop it
from going any lower.
It's looking good. If it's this dumb, I'm really happy.
Like they did a good job, I guess.
Cause like who wants something
That's -20 inside of their house.
Look at all that frost.
I really hope this works.
If this is the last time that I apply some Thermal Grizzly
Kryonaut, I am so sorry, Roman.
Going for the hard mount of course.
I just want to get ahead of the comments here. I do know
the 8,700 K is still a very good chip,
especially when overclogged like this
one is going to be it's really fast still.
I want to turn the AC on now.
Cause it can take a little bit, oh,
that kicked on. Our nice safety shop towels.
That's already very cool. Yeah.
That's sub zero. All right.
So our CPU is currently at 0 degrees.
That's that's pretty good to start off with.
It's kind of weird that it isn't lower.
I don't know if during a cinnamon Tron,
if this has the heat dissipation to deal with that,
but we're about to find out, oh,
temperatures increased to 38 degrees. Oh my God.
That's so warm, 4.8 GHz all core.
It seems like it's doing fine. I don't see any condensation.
It's holding at 38 degrees. That is fantastic.
Well, the overclock isn't holding quite like I'd like,
but it still proves this works amazingly well
I could fiddle with it more,
but I want to save all of my fiddling for the 12th gen in
another video. That is cold!
So Huge thanks to Thermal Grizzly for sponsoring this video.
Get some Kryonaut or conductonaut. I don't know.
Chuck in your laptop, your GPU, wherever you want.
I don't know. Don't eat it probably I guess,
unless you want to.
So I feel like this video hit like get subscribed and maybe
watch your video where we Sub-Zero cooled the Alien ware
Area 51M with Steve.
That thing was insanely cool and very scary.