(engine revving) - It's the drag race
of the century.
On the left, we've got the Apple Mac Studio,
and on the right,
the Apple Mac Studio,
but with a sick custom water cooling setup.
Like other modern chips,
Apple Silicon Processors
will dynamically scale their clock speeds,
depending on how much or how little
cooling you throw at them.
So did Apple compromise on horsepower for looks,
again?
Or does the Mac Studio already unlock
the full potential of their fastest SOCs?
Just how much performance can we squeeze out of
Apple's M1 Maxs Macs?
It's time to start the test.
While I start this Segway to our sponsor.
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(upbeat techno music)
Normally the problem that you run into when you try
and water cool something that isn't supposed to
be water cooled is simply space for all
of your water cooling bits.
In the Mac Studio that's actually not the issue.
Their heat sink assembly is just frigging massive.
We can very easily fit one
of these Alpha Cool radiators in there.
Not a problem.
What is a problem though, is Apple's random
proprietary bull
(bleep)
So as you can see these fans right here
have a little ribbon cable with six pins on it.
I don't know what those six pins do,
but with any luck as long as we can just disconnect these
then we could hook up our water cooling.
Everything will be cool.
It is very fortunate
that we have two of the exact same Mac Studio.
We did that so that we could swap the SSDs
and well we didn't swap the SSDs because again,
Apple proprietary bull
(bleep)
But it does allow us to very easily,
you know drag race them later.
One fan lead, two fan leads.
If this turns on I will be very happy.
Oh, yay.
Okay. It works fine.
We can just disconnect the fans and it does not care at all.
That's actually kind of concerning.
I thought that there would be a fan error that would
come up and be like, your fans don't work.
Like literally every other computer that checks
if your fans are working,
but it doesn't do that which is great for us,
but also what the (bleep)?
This is the main board for the Mac studio.
And the primary thing that we have to be concerned
about is cooling this Apple logo right here.
There are memory chips on either side of it,
but those I'm a bit less concerned about.
They don't use excellent
like thermal paste on it in the stock configuration.
I imagine it's fine.
The main reason we don't want to have a whole lot
of stuff over top of these guys
because it's going to interfere with our radiator.
Our radiator's going to be in here,
something like this.
Our fans that will be attached there.
And we will have several millimeters
between these fans and these memory chips right here.
So our actual water cooling bit needs to go over top of it.
And then, you know
there'll just be a little bit of copper here.
It's gonna get nice and cool anyway.
It'll be totally fine.
Now instead of just totally reinvent the wheel,
we're going to be using this
M.2 Heatsink from Bear.
Well, we won't actually be using it.
This bottom bit is going to get just put in the trash,
but this piece of acrylic will make our lives way easier.
And we don't have to worry about, you know,
making our own acrylic piece.
Instead,
this can attach to a piece
of copper machine that will fit here
and mount to those holes.
It goes over it something like that,
make our lives even more easier.
What we might do is extra dirty.
This is our heatsink and it already has the proper
mounting holes and depth for everything in it.
Maybe we can just get rid of this,
completely eliminate these fins,
get rid of these heat pipes,
face this off on the Tormach.
And then our lives are a lot easier and we don't
have to worry about, you know, custom making this piece
that Apple already kindly made for us.
Or maybe we'll just completely screw this up and have to
do the whole thing ourselves here's plan number one,
take a heat gun, point it towards the heatsink.
And hopefully, we can just chisel off all of these fins
failing that we have a backup plan.
We're gonna wait until it's around like 220, 250
something like that.
And then we might actually be able to get this off.
I don't think this is gonna work, but if it does
that would be fantastic.
Yeah. I'm just mangling the fins.
Well, plan B.
We say this every time we would cut aluminum
but I'm just gonna go over it again.
The dust is very bad to breathe in.
So make sure you have a mask, a good old face shield
in case something explodes.
You know you don't want that going in your face.
Also, make sure that you have an aluminum cutting disc.
It has lubricating stuff in here to help prevent the gumming
up and exploding, but not entirely.
Yeah, it just kind of sucks to do
(saw whirls)
And definitely hearing protection.
(saw whirls loudly)
- This is pretty brutal.
The angle grinding was just making a mess.
So instead we're just gonna simply
(loud banging)
get it off exactly like that.
(loud banging continues)
I'm pretty sure Tynan just sharpened this chisel.
(loud banging continues)
My sincerest apologies, Tim Cook.
Next thing we have to do these copper heat pipes
that are right here.
They are very soldered down.
They are not coming off.
Instead. We're gonna go over to the Tormach
and just face off this area right here.
So we're able to attach a water block to it.
There's almost definitely a better way to do this
but I'm YouTuber, not a machinist.
So this is what I've come up with.
We have this nice little plate
from Saunders machine works that has a bunch
of stuff clamped down to it.
This is going to go into our vise
because there's not enough space anywhere,
for this just mount to our table.
And this is gonna be kind of scary
although it should be totally fine.
If the tool just decides to do anything that it shouldn't
it's going to hit something.
(loud banging)
All right, I have checked and double-checked everything.
I believe we are good to go.
As long as this doesn't decide to do something random
our part of the Tormach turned out great.
Although we've actually totally changed the plan
having everything internal was going to technically work
in order to have these fans clear the water
block that was going to be on here.
It would have to be smaller
than the one that I put in the red camera.
I was just very concerned that it would not cool as well
as the excellent solution that Apple has from the factory.
So we have completely redone our plan.
This is what's going to happen.
See this wonderful Corsair block right here.
Bam turns out thread ripper, mounting holes almost line
up perfectly with the ones that Apple has from the factory.
So a CPU taken care of now, you might be thinking
with this big old CPU block, where's all
of your stuff gonna go? Right on the top radiator pump.
Amazing. It is going to be without a doubt
the coolest Mac studio in existence.
Now one of our biggest problems was RGB and fans
12 volts we can very easily get
from right here off the power supply.
All other voltages, not so simple.
Now it is very crucial on something
like this to have just a bunch of RGB
because I want to just annoy Apple people as much
as possible, which means loads of RGB.
And that is quite difficult.
So we went with Corsair stuff
because they are the only ones that have RGB software
for Mac OS.
This controller is going to work really
really well because I'm able to have it in hardware mode.
So it just runs all of our RGB off of it.
And we have a temperature probe
in our loop that goes into our controller here
that controls our fan and pump speeds.
So we don't have to worry about, you know
grabbing it off of this.
And then hopefully everything just works really
really well.
One more thing, though
this is gonna be pretty stupid for five volts.
We'll be using this buck converter 12 volts in right here
adjust this potentiometer
until five volts comes outta there.
We are happy.
Yeah, I guess
at this point we have not many hours to get this done.
Let's do it.
(saw grinding)
There we go.
There's your cold plate.
And now we're left with this
which will hold our main board to, well, we'll just hold it.
Getting this thing in here was not very simple.
We are about two and a half millimeters away
from the full travel of the Y axis of this machine.
It's really close, but we should be able to do it.
(cnc machine grinding)
Look at that.
It's so precise.
Everything's roughly in place at the moment
including our nice tubes so
that the main board can go in and out.
We don't have though is power going
to our RGB and fan controller.
We know that we're going to be getting it
off of the power supply right here.
We do not know which way this voltage goes.
Fortunately, Apple doesn't tell us the polarity
of this power supply.
So I have attached some leads.
Now it's either going to just say
plus 12 volts or minus 12 volts on here.
And then we know which way to wire all of our stuff.
Yeah, don't do this at home.
Please. Just don't.
So not only does this tell us
that we have minus 12 volts right now also lets us know
that we have 12 volts, always on a lot of power supplies.
You need to like press the power button
on the motherboard before it starts giving you 12 volts.
This one just gives it to you right away for some reason.
Oh wait, it's dropping.
Maybe that was just, it gave 12 volts while it was charging.
I don't know.
Doesn't matter.
That is good to know though.
Cause I was kind of concerned about the Mac being
off an hour fans and pumps, still just running indefinitely
getting everything to fit
in this Mac, studio has been quite a challenge
by getting everything to fit inside of it.
I mean on top, even our course air controller
it would not fit inside.
It technically could.
It was going to be very difficult.
So instead we have denuded it it's going on the top.
We've redone our radiator mount it's this nice
black 3d printed piece.
Now that has space where RGB hub down below
because the spirit of this is really, you know
PC-ifying the Mac Pro I have used Wago lever
nuts to add expandability to this loop in the future.
And as you can see our buck converters right
down and there attach it
to a power supply and now spits out five volts.
One more thing.
If you look really closely in here
we have two 40-millimeter Noctua fans
and the rest of the holes all blocked off.
This is for the power supply actually.
So it draws air in the bottom, shoots it out at the back.
And hopefully, our power supply does not overheat.
Probably be fine without it
but this is just some good insurance.
I've added a little bit
of VHB tape to the bottom of the pump.
This isn't to hold it down.
The screws are gonna do that just fine is to try
and stop vibrations going from the pump
onto this top plate here
and just turning into a little drum.
One thing I feel is underutilized in PC making is hot glue.
We have a connector rate here
for an Noctua fans that just keeps on wanting to come off.
It's gonna stay on now.
And as you can see, Corsair clearly knows this.
They have a bunch of hot glue
on here from the factory for string relief.
Here's the power for our fan hub
and RGB controller just simply probed it
while it was connected into one
of these figured out what's five-volt ground.
Hm. You get it.
It needs to go in which means the box connector
needs to leave getting a radiator mount
on with the Corsair controller underneath.
It is not very simple.
We've pulled all of the excess wires
up through the top so we can hopefully get it down.
We'll get it bolted on.
And then we can stuff all
of this back down in and hopefully it'll be fine.
There we go.
We've got our little fan trod piece that just
printing this easier and way faster on the inside.
We're using Alphacool's server-grade fittings and tubing.
It's just way better at not coming out.
And we really given how much this is gonna
be stuffed inside.
Do not want a tube popping off.
Now the tubing runs
for this are a bit on the unfortunate side.
If we were smart, we would've taken our time and planned it
out so that this hole was directly underneath this.
And you could just have a little tube there or a little run.
We didn't do that.
Cause we were rushing.
Instead, we have a run that goes like that.
Another one that goes back
and around and the most biggest dumbest of all
look at how close these are.
There's no way to get a tube in here.
So the solution, the big old loop-de-loop,
it's kind of gross.
I don't love it.
But at the same time,
it's gonna be able to show off our nice fire orange.
Well, this is why you leak test.
I figured it was fine, but if we have a look
at the needle, it's dropping quite rapidly.
I really hope that the leak is somewhere up here.
Cause if it's on the inside, putting
in a bunch of the IO down here, huge pain in the arse
and looks like I'm
- do it all over again.
- Found where leaking seems
like it's the other side of this right here.
The through holes are honestly pretty trash.
So I'm not super surprised.
You do things out of order for filming's sake.
Blaming this on you, Brandon.
- For the record, it's not my fault.
(loudly laughs)
- So I'm going to use the good old soapy water trick.
Think this might be our spot.
No, I just have soap water all over the place.
Problem is just this connection right here.
Look at that.
Not moving at all.
Leak, tested, working great.
Gotta stitch it all back together and we should
be good to go.
We're doing it smarter this time.
I want to make sure that everything up here
works before we stitch it all back together and
I have to take it all back apart again.
Cause that would just be terrible.
We have Mr. Nick Heavy.
He's going to fill it up.
I have a bench power supply.
That's going to the leads that will be attached
to the Mac studio's power supply.
And this is gonna be beautiful.
This is not sketchy at all.
- Oh, kind of scared.
- How did that happen?
- The tube screwed us.
- Oh no.
- We're professionals here.
- We spilled water before.
(nick laughing)
Oh, oh that looks good.
That our RGB is working, this RGB is working, pump's working
fans running, are these fans.
We have RGB internally.
- This is dumb in all the right ways.
(both laughing)
- Thank you.
That's what I was going for.
Let's stitch it back together.
I think we've done it.
She's absolutely stodge
like you can see right here that doesn't want to
go all the way in because the power leads.
The whole thing.
He just kind of was like,
(grunting noises)
get it back.
But it's so stupid.
I absolutely love it.
I really hope it works.
I really don't want to take this thing up apart again
but it's kind of looking like I might, it's below 60 degrees
and it's very similar to the air-cooled version
which is not what I was hoping for.
But I was just kind of like, ah
maybe they have a bad IHS spreader or something like that.
And that's the bottleneck, but no, we put the dye in there
and it just very slowly meanders way through.
There's definitely a kink in there.
So now I get to just to spend the next hour taking it apart
and reassembling it.
The benefit of this is
that the fire orange looks more like Tang.
So I think we're just gonna get rid of that.
Otherwise, hopefully, it all works.
45 minutes later
whole thing's been disassembled and reassembled.
That might be a record.
I don't know
if anyone's ever done it that fast before for the coolant.
We're going to go with the Go Chiller Premix
has a bunch of carbon particles in it.
Apparently, it reduces your temps of it.
Mostly. It just looks really freaking cool.
So we're gonna use that instead of the Tang juice.
Oh, there we go.
Looks fricking sick.
Now let's start here.
Cinebench.
We're looking for it to be under 60 degrees.
That's about as hot as the other one gets looking at what?
55? 54?
Yeah. The hottest that I'm seeing is 55 degrees.
Seems like we're not getting as good
of cooling performance as I would've liked kind of
like I guessed before it probably has to do with Apple's IHS.
Just not being able to get the heat away fast enough.
But at the same time, this thing's really well cooled.
- So glad I bought two of these.
- Yeah.
- Otherwise, how would we do an Apples to Apples comparison?
- Ah
- You guys did a surprisingly professional job
of this, is this our new standard of quality now?
- I guess so
there's a whole Corsair RGB and fan hub in here.
That's controlling everything based off
of like the temperature of the water.
Uh, hello?
(both gasp)
- Okay We're good.
- Yeah. Sorry.
Holy crap.
We dropped the temps by 30 degrees.
Not only is it 30 degrees lower
but this fan is barely spinning.
I mean, I guess that's what happens when
you put a giant water cooling radiator
on like how many Watts is this chip?
Even like 45 Watts and it's near silent.
Okay, here we go.
(loud clapping)
Let's go.
Let's go water-cooled Mac.
Come on.
- I don't want it to do better.
- That's fair.
12056,
- 12016
- (snaps) 40 points.
Did we think there was gonna be a performance uplift?
I mean, it's not exactly a MacBook Air.
We, it's not known to thermal throttle right?
- Apparently the M1s
like turbo boost is really terrible.
- Oh.
- But also it doesn't matter
because they sip power and are well cooled.
- We did a thing.
- You have to admit
- It looks great.
- No one else has a Mac studio.
That looks like this.
- This is hot rod-ed-ed out.
I love it.
- It's 20 degrees cooler and it looks like that.
I think we can call it a win.
- Here we go.
12104.
I got another 48 points.
- 12028.
So
- Both times the water cooled one was technically faster.
The best kind of faster.
Just like this is the best Segway to our sponsor.
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- If you guys enjoyed this video, you might also
enjoy the one where we water-cooled a red camera.
That was less pointless.