I was really surprised by how well this block performed, especially considering it's just a backup that I messed up on because I messed up the block and I ended up having to make some adjustments just to get everything working properly. So, I decided to run an extreme test on it just to see what kind of temps it would show. And surprisingly, it didn't disappoint at all.

It's actually more realistic than I expected, especially given that it was a 151-watt block at 56 degrees Celsius and 65 degrees Fahrenheit. That's much more in line with what we'd expect to see while gaming and stuff. I mean, I did expect it to perform worse, just because it's a backup like I said - it's a filler until the ERS comes back in, which is going to be another week from now. And I'm stuck here without anything else to do, so I thought, why not test this thing out? I figured it couldn't hurt, and it might actually surprise me.

But you know what? It did surprise me. The reservoir and the pump combo are really impressed with the build quality of this block. Not too shabby. However, the mounting mechanism is a bit lacking. Specifically, the mounting brackets - as you can see, I've got them kind of "Jimmy rigged" on there. They're intended to mount to 120mm fans, but the Lanol 216 that I'm using here has 160mm front fans, and they don't have provisions for those. So, I had to get creative with my mounting system.

Now, I know some people might be thinking, "Wait a minute - isn't this just another AIO like everyone else?" And the answer is... not exactly. While it does share some similarities with other AIOs, there's something unique about this block that sets it apart from others in its class. For one thing, it's actually made for LGA 1700 - a CPU socket that's not as common as others, but still pretty popular among enthusiasts.

The build quality is pretty good, all things considered. I mean, I looked inside the radiator and could see where there was a flow path where fluid has been flowing through it, so I know they did do some sort of leak test or pressure test before shipping this thing out. And it looks like they even did some kind of cleaning process to get rid of any debris that might have accumulated in the tank - which is something we don't usually see until later on down the line.

Now, let's talk about pricing. I know some people are going to be thinking, "Is this thing worth $250? Can I just buy a cheaper AIO instead?" And honestly... probably not. There are AIOs out there that can do just as well, if not better, for a fraction of the price.

But then again - is this thing worth it if you're only going to use it to cool your CPU, when you could just get an AIO like the Noctua D15? Well, that's a tough one. The answer is... maybe? I mean, the D15 is an excellent air cooler in its own right, and it might perform just as well - if not better - than this block on most CPUs.

The thing is, with an open-loop system like this, you've got way more flexibility to customize and upgrade things over time. You can change out parts, add new components, and so on - which is something that's really hard to do with a closed-loop AIO. So, in some ways... it might be worth the extra cost.

That being said - I'm still a little flabbergasted by how well this thing performs, considering the price tag. In 2013, I tried to build an open-loop system like this for $300, and I didn't come close to getting anything near this quality. So... yeah. This is definitely a surprise.

Anyway - that's my take on this thing. It's not perfect, but it's definitely an interesting little experiment. And who knows? Maybe we'll see more people building open-loop systems like this in the future. Thanks for watching, and I'll catch you all in the next one!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enI promised you guys I would try and come up with one of the cheapest Loops I could possibly do and I think I did it although there's still some pricing that we could sort of cut with this but I feel like this is going to be an interesting Loop for those looking for a high-end custom gaming experience look no further than Falcon Northwest Falcon Northwest has been building PCS made for gamers for over 30 years with a focus on a true high-end gaming experience custom cases available only through Falcon Northwest feature state-of-the-art testing and design to ensure that every component is performing at their best through thermal imaging and rigorous lab testing designed and overseen by the Falcon Northwest founder himself with a complete lineup of systems ranging from small to large every Falcon Northwest system includes a three-year warranty policy and a year of two-way overnight shipping coverage providing the ultimate peace of mind to see all that Falcon Northwest has to offer follow the sponsored Link in the description below it's funny because I still like made not some mistakes along the way it's just maybe some stuff that I might have done a little bit differently after the fact but we're going to talk about all the pricing uh the components here I pretty much with the exception of like these three things right here I've never messed with this I this this brand Drina I guess it's named after like the plant I've never heard of this brand before until I did a Phil's water cooled build where we used their compression fittings on the black rubber tubing and they are pretty high quality feeling stuff I mean I don't know how actually I'm going to take that back I was about to say how hard is it to bake a fitting but I've had some pretty bad fittings in the past that have been like loose and wobbly and I'm like okay that's not that doesn't feel very um confidence inspiring that my Loop isn't going to leak anyway so let's go through the parts that are here I'm going to be putting it in our open box build even though the power supply is technically not from that build that's from when we did the um the Leon Lee crazy power supply The Edge power supply that has the fitting the the connectors on the side well technically the front extension down there that's the only thing that's not a part of the build but it's kind of keeping with the the the spirit of budget type of stuff so the idea with this build if you haven't seen it we went to Microcenter everything that could be bought open box was and we ended up saving enough money to just about cover our most of the cost of our CPU in here which is the 13700 K so I feel like this Loop would be pretty much like I said in the spirit of that let's talk about the components first of all this block right here it is a XG n BX quinic I don't I don't know it's $14.98 okay I've used this block in the past actually so I'm taking a little bit of a risk that it's going to work on our motherboard here only because of the fact that this block came out way before LGA 1700 now everything I know about LGA 1700 is just the fact that the holes are a little bit wider than the other holes so they have an elongated hole so it can fit younger and newer and older coolers alike in there the height and all that's the same it's am4 and am5 they have a different Z AIS height anyway as you can see this is a No Frills package like absolutely no frills whatsoever it's an antistatic bag bubble wrap tape and uh I used this a long time probably a solid six plus years ago I've used this exact block and I think at the time it was like $20 so if we account for inflation and then it was like 6 years ago like 20 bucks and today in 2024's money it's $4.98 it's gone down in price rightfully so because it technically isn't listed as supporting the newer sockets it does not come with thermal paste by the way so you're going to have to add about five bucks to the price of this stuck so I'll be using my own thermal paste it's super basic but I'm going to tell you right now the build quality of it actually feels pretty good I I remember back in the day I used this on like an x99 CPU or something like that and was shocked at the type of performance it was able to give me if you look in there it's just a basic old copper heat plate there's no Inlet there's no Outlet it just flows across some a cold plate that has Square pillars in there if you will it's not even like a a flow plate if you will it's just it's just going to go in there swirl around pick up heat and leave um it's also not very big so I say that because of and there is plastic on this right yes so it's pure copper as you can see not the smoothest best finish but still for $14.99 or9 98 how picky are we going to be um it still has more density to it than any AIO cold plate that you could technically get today just about about it's thicker it has more flow through it um I in my opinion in my past experience with this block it is definitely able to perform uh well enough for what I think it'll be able to do with 7 13 700k now you'll see it is a square um coal plate and it's probably barely going to cover barely if not slightly smaller than the IHS on a 13700 K cuz remember they're they're not Square anymore they're rectangle however it will cover everything that is directly above the die as long as we can get full coverage above the die which we know it will I've Del delated a bunch of them this is going to get the job done now the mounting hardware leaves some to be desired but again it gets the job done you can see in there it's got some plastic washers that go on either side of the motherboard so you don't dig into the motherboard it's just a screw and a spring it is literally an entire the threaded portion of the screw is the entire screw so you're going to want to do your best to try and make sure the amount of like threads down the the spring and the the washer nut is is not um uneven otherwise you can get the block to be uneven so the hardest part about mounting that is going to be getting it flat but again for $14.98 I'm really interested to see how that does this is just regular old black rubber tubing like you can get this at any hardware store um this is a about a meter of it this was about 10 bucks I put 15 bucks for pricing because if you buy it new like on Amazon or something like that and by the way everything here is from Amazon every single bit of it the exception of the water this from our local grocery store that's just distilled water um anyway so yeah you can I put 15 bucks on there cuz you can order it online for about 15 bucks it's just this is a 38 by 5/8 tubing so that means the inner diameter is 3/8 and the outer diameter is 5/8 and because we're using compression for this you need to know the inner and outer diameter unlike rigid tubing only the outer diameter of the tube matters inner diameter matters for the the flex tubing as well so for those fittings we're reusing the same exact ones I used on Phil's build I am a huge believer in this Brand's fittings the rest of this stuff I don't know yet I haven't looked at it haven't tested it but we're going to find out today the quality of their fittings to me is really difficult to match for the price point it comes with a spare o-ring which is for down here where it actually threads into the component so that's always nice to see neural finish so easy to grip when you're tightening it it's a single Barb so instead of having a dual Barb it's short and it's a single Barb that might be the only complaint I have if it could be a little longer and have dual barbs for extra grip but we have a compression fitting on here so the Barb is for sealing by the way not just grip um having two of them would just be a little bit extra seal on there but by having the compression clamp down on that having it slide off would be very unlikely the weight of it is weighty so I believe this is this is going to be plated brass more than likely um very unlikely that that's copper it's more than likely brass almost every fitting is brass and we got six of them right yes six of them for $23.99 making them about four $4 so just called $4 A fitting that is crazy and it has a oneyear limited warranty I don't know what the warranty would be on they give you a spare o-ring it's a solid piece with a collar I don't know what else could go wrong with it maybe I shouldn't tempt fate an extra expense in this that really isn't necessary another $23.99 for for six fittings are 90° rotatable um fittings and the reason why I like these 90s is because of the fact that sometimes it's easier to work around various components and stuff uh to just have a 90 coming off a component you could save 24 bucks probably if you if you plan out your Loop well enough and don't need them but so now we have rotatable angled you know 90° fittings on there okay so there's our fittings for what 40 $8 we got a total of 12 fittings compared to many of the boutique higher end brands that want to charge you sometimes $25 a fitting fans this is just the antech F12 fans they're basic this is a five-pack this is where you can save some money I forgot to buy fans so I dug into my own stash actually did buy these on Amazon in January of 2023 by the way that's how long I've had these fans they're just basic old 120 mm uh DC fans they're not even pwm they're DC so going to have to plug these into something hopefully the motherboard has enough headers I'm going to be adding a couple bucks for a splitter to have a a three-way splitter cuz we have a three UH 60 rat on here there's a basic old fan that we need to push air through here there are fans on Amazon that are better for three packs for like $10 not even kidding you cut out the RGB and a bunch of the other fluff that brand brands of fans or fan Brands like to add you can actually get them pretty cheap now it feels cheap they're not the sturdiest fan they're flexible and such but we're just trying to push air through our rad and we're trying to do it as cost efficient as possible there are other fans that you could do but I did put the full price of what these were which was about I think $23 or somewhere around there uh in the price of this like I said you could cut another like $13 out of that by going with an even cheaper brand all right the radiator this is a 360 mm by 30 mm radiator very standard size thank goodness it comes with Hardware cuz not all radiators have the same threads um here is our one-year limited warranty on everything again gives you a QR code with all the Drina stuff no Drina did not sponsor this video I paid for all of this that's actually a pretty quality looking rad holy cow so it is a copper rad it is not aluminum do yourself a favor if you're shopping on the cheap make sure you're paying attention to the material used you do not want to use an aluminum radiator yes aios have aluminum radiators in them however they have very special formulated fluids in them usually that're designed to deal with gantic corrosion which is what's going to happen when you have mixed Metals in your Loop in this instance we would have well copper right copper there um whatever the coat like the Finish is on this an I don't know if it's anodizing powder coating or whatever that's on the fittings there um whatever metals are existing inside our Reservoir here so if we were to add and it could be nickel there could be nickel plated stuff there could be different compounds to the nickel plating itself or different um Alloys and stuff in there same thing with the copper the these Alloys are not going to match they came from two different facilities so all of those mixed Metals lead to corrosion uh especially if you add aluminum aluminum like just expedites that process it's it's just the Metallurgy of it so avoid aluminum don't use aluminum unless all your components are aluminum and then even then you don't want to use just straight distilled water you'd want a formulated fluid for mixed Metals um but I I'm actually genuinely surprised at the quality of this this feels quality even the end tanks are pretty looking like some radiators are just ugly looking now look for the price this was $69.99 it's not the cheapest 360 I could find but it was the cheapest 360 that didn't seem like I was sacrificing build quality for it a lot of the reviews were solid on it the anodizing on it and or the paint powder coat whatever it is it's andiz it's not aluminum but the paint and powder coat is very even it doesn't look blotchy in areas um not really a fan of their of their logo and it's actually a little bit crooked what's actually crooked is not just like it's a plaque it's not a sticker it's a plaque I feel like the rectangle itself that's like stamped into the side cover is crooked but it's okay cuz we're putting it in this way I think I think I'm going to put it in this way so that the tubes are in the back which means we won't see it we got short screws and long screws so our fans can mount directly to our radiator and then we can mount the radiator to underside of the C I waited for the best for last because pumps and reservoirs they can get pretty dang pricey this guy right here also from Justina is a 250ml and when it says 250 ml that's talking about how much fluid the reservoir itself can hold um not it's not millimeters long or anything like that I've seen people get confused on that it's how much fluid the res can hold this is also $69.99 but it is a it is a combo and I'm really curious to what the quality of this is going to be because it is not expensive by pump res combo standards but it looked nice on the picture we have um okay so they include a Molex um to RGB header that's also a controller there a little inline controller on there that way if you don't have RGB in your system you can at least control the lighting on the reservoir okay here is it's actually not very bad looking actually not bad looking at all so it's got a DDC style pump like it's going to be like it's not like a D5 it's like a more like a 12volt DDC um which I'm okay with on this kind of loop the reservoir actually is pretty solid looking to be honest here's other another bracket right here it does have RGB in there it does use Molex unfortunately but um that's okay I mean we can deal with that for the price and then we have wow we have a bunch of extra stuff holy cow okay so we get mounting Rings which are design trying to go on here I would assume we have a vibration pad which we can use to it's double-sided sticky tape also which I believe just goes on the bottom if we want to stick it on the bottom somewhere but it's it's a thick anti vibration pad extra O-rings there's like a theme I love that they provide extra O-rings a lot of water cooling companies even one's charging you two three $400 for their component do not include extra O-rings these do and then as you can see we have our mounting hardware here here this actually feels this actually seems like a pretty decent quality piece like the acrylic it's nice and smooth all the Ed edges are debur they have a nice chamfer to them so that we can get a good seal with our o-ring nothing sharp to cut our O-rings um the little unfortunately the little plaque is kind of scratched already like I don't know if you can see it in the light maybe feel can get a closeup but it's scratched you know whatever it is what it is but that that's going to be on the back side anyway this is the side that's going to be facing us so it has this little kind of a satin badge which looks nice obviously that's our Inlet right there um do we already have o-ring down in there I want make sure these are not supposed to be installed NOP o-ring is down in there interestingly enough this inner piece right here is also threaded so what I was expecting to see was some sort of a pickup tube or something but and the reason why people will Brands will put little pickup tubes even short ones down there is it keeps it from picking up any potential sediment that could sort of fall down in here then allows sediment to just collect at the bottom when we do your Loop cleaning it's easier to clean it there than having cycle through the loop you can see it also does have a little kind of a interesting shaped push down tube I've never seen it like that and that's going to push out to the side rather than straight down because if you're returning to the top of the reservoir which is what that fitting is actually for right there then it needs to push down into the fluid otherwise you get a weird waterfall effect or surface tension could just make it run down along the side um and then the other one is a a fill like you can fill it from that right there also bleed air out if you need to it's a pretty solid feeling kit though for 69 bucks and they come in different sizes so the total on all of this including the water the only it doesn't include is like the five bucks or whatever you would need for thermal paste cuz unfortunately the block doesn't give you any but the total cost for all of this minus the five bucks for the thermal paste I have to add is $239.90 and that's including the overpriced fans because it's all I have on hand right now now like I said if you didn't need to use '90s anywhere you could cut $24 more off of that making it just over $2 what $19 something like that I have two pump reservoir combos similar to this in Skunk Works are glass and RGB and beautiful and all that I can guarantee you one of them costs what this entire Loop does so all right let me let me build it let me put it together in here and then I'll give you we'll do some temperature tests and see how it does with a 13700 K and uh we'll talk about whether or not this was worth it because at this point we are more expensive than many aios okay many aios cost less than $239 almost all of them 360 AIO I should say anyway um there are many air coolers out there that costs less that would do just as good of a job however this is expandable we can expand upon this by adding our graphics card in the loop and such and I think overall um the performance hindrance is going to come down to whether or not this block which was designed many moons ago versus today's block at $15 can handle the type of the type of punishment 13th and 14th gen can provide he oh I don't think it looks too bad considering the fact that it's all such really like thrown together stuff it wasn't even designed to have an aesthetic to it but clearly that matte black works everywhere right uh the reservoir actually looks really really good I'm not a fan of the fact that it makes you have to use the return on the top I would like to have had a fitting or something on the side so I don't have to use the push down now you'll notice in the top here what I did is I also have a 90° fitting on here I had six of them might as well use them but I ended up putting a cap on I'm want ah the Fan's turning very fast I want to point out the reservoir also does not come with a spare cap because you have two holes on the top and then one on the output so you're going to have one return and one output and then a third hole which is ideally used for filling or something like I did but they didn't give you a cap for that so let's add $5 more to the budget cuz I let's say I had to buy a cap on Amazon so now we're at $44.92 or whatever that was um there was something else oh yeah we used the mx4 thermal paste and that's also five bucks on Amazon so I didn't do like Kingpin extreme or anything crazy which is like a $40 thermal Pace we used $5 mx4 so now we're up to $249 so $250 for this Loop now I'm going to tell you right now now the weak Link in here is the CPU block absolutely guaranteed getting it mounted and getting it flat is difficult because of the fact that there is no one there's no back plate on the back like I showed you it just pulls the holes now if you overtighten it it will bow the board what that will end up doing is pulling the CPU Away From the Block so we've already been messing around and doing some testing and I was getting 100 C instantly uh under load that's because we were getting a very poor amount I've got it sort of flat now at least as flat as I think I can get it um and you'll see what the temperatures but there's another block I'm going to be testing that's only $5 more than this one it's at 19 bucks but truth be told that was the block I actually ordered for this whole thing and I didn't pay attention to the fact that it was going to take two weeks to arrive so I got this one in a pinch to be able to test the rest of the components and it's performing exactly as I sort of expected in that it's really not going to be any better than an air cooler we'll show you um right now it's installing time spy because I want to use that as a CPU test as well not just cen's ABX instruction which is going to push the it's going to push it way harder than any normal use case would but I feel like the time spy CPU test is more indicative of a multi-threaded workload than doing something that's like just straight AVX instruction I do want to point out this MSI board though that we're using is actually pretty terrible when regarding using the Intel defaults even though we updated the BIOS they don't tend to be there it still sort of wants to push it to 4,996 Watts available to it so we did go in and manually set limits at 253 so it can't possibly exceed where the CPUs uh intended to go which is what a lot of our complaints were about various motherboards and stuff of Brands pushing it too high okay here we go stress test R R23 cin Bench way harder than anything real world would be we're set 53 all core no throttling 87 86 87 we're at 226 Watts which is below our 253 limit remember we are at 105c well technically 100 C where we start to hard throttle but we're under that obviously there's a 30,5 84 so we hey we beat a thread Ripper W 29 2990wx if you have one of those he just got just got beat by an i7 with a $250 Loop but anyway I digress um that's way worse than anything we would ever see I mean you see look right now the package is at 32 as we're chilling right here our hottest core hit looks like 88 yeah hottest P core was 88 hottest e core was 74 and again those temps yes they're no better than putting like a octa or something on there which would be cheaper than this Loop entirely well or about roughly the same there's definitely Air Towers out there that are cheaper than this Loop that would perform better that's the fault of our $14.98 set water block not the $249 Loop so like I already mentioned there's another block coming that will be better and maybe I'll even check not just like the $20 block that I'm getting cuz I was trying to do like super budget but I'll find like maybe like a realistic like $5 $50 block that maybe gives us something some good quality to add to this Loop making it still less than $300 but giving us a good uh a really good result in our cooling versus a $14 piece of of copper but so far I'm actually impressed with the fact that it can once you get it to sort of lay flat laying flat is very important but it's actually done better than 88c I expected worse I mean yeah aios could do just as good of a job but uh this is about making sure we have an upgrade path and such and which we do we can change the block we can upgrade uh the GPU in the loop we have a 360 red we have more than enough we can add another radiator to Loop if we wanted I could put another one down here technically or something all right let's go ahead and see what a more realistic type of workflow looks like by using cinch uh or not cinebench but U time spy so for those of you that may have noticed this is a my processor was at 144% utilization 155% on the PES and 123% on the E cores that's a bug with hardware monitor I've had people email me about that asking what's the deal with this is this percentage of overclock um no it's actually just a bug in hardware monitor okay here we go so there's 43 42 51 46 45 61 65 54 63 actually did a lot better than I thought it would so maybe I'll go ahead and do extreme cuz I didn't really push the CPU that hard at all okay it just doesn't care I mean there's more wattage there it's 151 Watts at 56c 65 that's more realistic 57 71 6070 yeah I mean that's that's a more realistic like real world test that's the kind of temps we'd more than likely see while gaming and stuff but you know what though ultimately I expected I think I expected worse out of this block to be honest cuz it it was a backup like I said it was a filler because I messed up the block I ERS won't be here for another week and I'm like dang it I can't wait that long because we've got other things happening in between now and then so I'll test that block when it comes later and then like I said I think I'll do another test of like a more realistic like $50 block or something maybe check out like borotech or something like that that has more affordable blocks are actually intended and designed for LGA 1700 um but not bad honestly I think it could be worse the reservoir and the pump combo I'm extremely impressed with the build quality of it not impressed with their mounting mechanism so the mounting brackets as you can see I've got them kind of Jimmy rigged on there I kind they're intended to mount to 120 mm fans the problem is the lanol 216 I'm using here has 180 mm front fans very actually no they're 160s I think yeah they're 160s so they have Provisions for 120s 140s and 160s which is really unique so because I didn't have fans that I bought for this changing out those fans would then change the price of the loop so I have one bracket coming off one side and one bracket coming off the other and then there's like a zip tie holding it but it's still screwed in it's just I needed it tied in more more securely but it's it's working perfectly uh my biggest drawback to it is that fact that there's no like return port on the bottom of the pump I don't like that it has to come in only on the top everything else though the fittings worked exactly as I expected because I've used them in the past the radiator's build quality is pretty good um as far as I can tell I looked down inside I could see where there was actually a flow path where fluid has been flowing through it so it's clear that they do leased a leak test and a pressure test um it also looks like they might have done some sort of cleaning in there because I can tell where there's a little bit of rainbowing and stuff which uh typically is from like the Heat and stuff they use when they do the flux melting so they they they heat the whole rad the flux will flow and and then the solder it solders all the rows on the end tanks uh it looks like they did a cleaning on that cuz when a radiator hasn't been cleaned or at least at least a flush you can see a lot of granular type of material in there and that's not at present at all and if it were we would actually kind of see it floating through the reservoir um over time but the reservoir is pretty clear it hasn't run long enough for it to really turn dirty but I time W tell whether or not that's that's dirty or not pretty impressed with the fact that you could actually build for $250 a completely custom open loop question is whether or not it's worth it if you're only going to cool your CPU when much cheaper aios that have just as good a build quality exist so that's where you get same with air cooling there's air coolers out there obviously the the noctua D15 is like extremely popular um which would perform just as good if not better even on this CPU than that block the question is going to be once I change that block out then how well does it do and then we'll probably have to do another further test after that where we throw a GPU in the loop and see how the whole Loop does cuz now we're beyond the realm of what an air cooler and an AIO can do which is the whole point of an open loop you can change the parts out you can expand it to typically has better build quality it's serviceable and that's some of the benefits to that all right guys I'm going to get on out of here hope this has taught you something I'm still a little flabbergasted at the fact that this exists because I tried to do this back in 2013 and 300 bucks did not get me anything near this quality so all right guys thanks for watching as always we'll see you in the next oneI promised you guys I would try and come up with one of the cheapest Loops I could possibly do and I think I did it although there's still some pricing that we could sort of cut with this but I feel like this is going to be an interesting Loop for those looking for a high-end custom gaming experience look no further than Falcon Northwest Falcon Northwest has been building PCS made for gamers for over 30 years with a focus on a true high-end gaming experience custom cases available only through Falcon Northwest feature state-of-the-art testing and design to ensure that every component is performing at their best through thermal imaging and rigorous lab testing designed and overseen by the Falcon Northwest founder himself with a complete lineup of systems ranging from small to large every Falcon Northwest system includes a three-year warranty policy and a year of two-way overnight shipping coverage providing the ultimate peace of mind to see all that Falcon Northwest has to offer follow the sponsored Link in the description below it's funny because I still like made not some mistakes along the way it's just maybe some stuff that I might have done a little bit differently after the fact but we're going to talk about all the pricing uh the components here I pretty much with the exception of like these three things right here I've never messed with this I this this brand Drina I guess it's named after like the plant I've never heard of this brand before until I did a Phil's water cooled build where we used their compression fittings on the black rubber tubing and they are pretty high quality feeling stuff I mean I don't know how actually I'm going to take that back I was about to say how hard is it to bake a fitting but I've had some pretty bad fittings in the past that have been like loose and wobbly and I'm like okay that's not that doesn't feel very um confidence inspiring that my Loop isn't going to leak anyway so let's go through the parts that are here I'm going to be putting it in our open box build even though the power supply is technically not from that build that's from when we did the um the Leon Lee crazy power supply The Edge power supply that has the fitting the the connectors on the side well technically the front extension down there that's the only thing that's not a part of the build but it's kind of keeping with the the the spirit of budget type of stuff so the idea with this build if you haven't seen it we went to Microcenter everything that could be bought open box was and we ended up saving enough money to just about cover our most of the cost of our CPU in here which is the 13700 K so I feel like this Loop would be pretty much like I said in the spirit of that let's talk about the components first of all this block right here it is a XG n BX quinic I don't I don't know it's $14.98 okay I've used this block in the past actually so I'm taking a little bit of a risk that it's going to work on our motherboard here only because of the fact that this block came out way before LGA 1700 now everything I know about LGA 1700 is just the fact that the holes are a little bit wider than the other holes so they have an elongated hole so it can fit younger and newer and older coolers alike in there the height and all that's the same it's am4 and am5 they have a different Z AIS height anyway as you can see this is a No Frills package like absolutely no frills whatsoever it's an antistatic bag bubble wrap tape and uh I used this a long time probably a solid six plus years ago I've used this exact block and I think at the time it was like $20 so if we account for inflation and then it was like 6 years ago like 20 bucks and today in 2024's money it's $4.98 it's gone down in price rightfully so because it technically isn't listed as supporting the newer sockets it does not come with thermal paste by the way so you're going to have to add about five bucks to the price of this stuck so I'll be using my own thermal paste it's super basic but I'm going to tell you right now the build quality of it actually feels pretty good I I remember back in the day I used this on like an x99 CPU or something like that and was shocked at the type of performance it was able to give me if you look in there it's just a basic old copper heat plate there's no Inlet there's no Outlet it just flows across some a cold plate that has Square pillars in there if you will it's not even like a a flow plate if you will it's just it's just going to go in there swirl around pick up heat and leave um it's also not very big so I say that because of and there is plastic on this right yes so it's pure copper as you can see not the smoothest best finish but still for $14.99 or9 98 how picky are we going to be um it still has more density to it than any AIO cold plate that you could technically get today just about about it's thicker it has more flow through it um I in my opinion in my past experience with this block it is definitely able to perform uh well enough for what I think it'll be able to do with 7 13 700k now you'll see it is a square um coal plate and it's probably barely going to cover barely if not slightly smaller than the IHS on a 13700 K cuz remember they're they're not Square anymore they're rectangle however it will cover everything that is directly above the die as long as we can get full coverage above the die which we know it will I've Del delated a bunch of them this is going to get the job done now the mounting hardware leaves some to be desired but again it gets the job done you can see in there it's got some plastic washers that go on either side of the motherboard so you don't dig into the motherboard it's just a screw and a spring it is literally an entire the threaded portion of the screw is the entire screw so you're going to want to do your best to try and make sure the amount of like threads down the the spring and the the washer nut is is not um uneven otherwise you can get the block to be uneven so the hardest part about mounting that is going to be getting it flat but again for $14.98 I'm really interested to see how that does this is just regular old black rubber tubing like you can get this at any hardware store um this is a about a meter of it this was about 10 bucks I put 15 bucks for pricing because if you buy it new like on Amazon or something like that and by the way everything here is from Amazon every single bit of it the exception of the water this from our local grocery store that's just distilled water um anyway so yeah you can I put 15 bucks on there cuz you can order it online for about 15 bucks it's just this is a 38 by 5/8 tubing so that means the inner diameter is 3/8 and the outer diameter is 5/8 and because we're using compression for this you need to know the inner and outer diameter unlike rigid tubing only the outer diameter of the tube matters inner diameter matters for the the flex tubing as well so for those fittings we're reusing the same exact ones I used on Phil's build I am a huge believer in this Brand's fittings the rest of this stuff I don't know yet I haven't looked at it haven't tested it but we're going to find out today the quality of their fittings to me is really difficult to match for the price point it comes with a spare o-ring which is for down here where it actually threads into the component so that's always nice to see neural finish so easy to grip when you're tightening it it's a single Barb so instead of having a dual Barb it's short and it's a single Barb that might be the only complaint I have if it could be a little longer and have dual barbs for extra grip but we have a compression fitting on here so the Barb is for sealing by the way not just grip um having two of them would just be a little bit extra seal on there but by having the compression clamp down on that having it slide off would be very unlikely the weight of it is weighty so I believe this is this is going to be plated brass more than likely um very unlikely that that's copper it's more than likely brass almost every fitting is brass and we got six of them right yes six of them for $23.99 making them about four $4 so just called $4 A fitting that is crazy and it has a oneyear limited warranty I don't know what the warranty would be on they give you a spare o-ring it's a solid piece with a collar I don't know what else could go wrong with it maybe I shouldn't tempt fate an extra expense in this that really isn't necessary another $23.99 for for six fittings are 90° rotatable um fittings and the reason why I like these 90s is because of the fact that sometimes it's easier to work around various components and stuff uh to just have a 90 coming off a component you could save 24 bucks probably if you if you plan out your Loop well enough and don't need them but so now we have rotatable angled you know 90° fittings on there okay so there's our fittings for what 40 $8 we got a total of 12 fittings compared to many of the boutique higher end brands that want to charge you sometimes $25 a fitting fans this is just the antech F12 fans they're basic this is a five-pack this is where you can save some money I forgot to buy fans so I dug into my own stash actually did buy these on Amazon in January of 2023 by the way that's how long I've had these fans they're just basic old 120 mm uh DC fans they're not even pwm they're DC so going to have to plug these into something hopefully the motherboard has enough headers I'm going to be adding a couple bucks for a splitter to have a a three-way splitter cuz we have a three UH 60 rat on here there's a basic old fan that we need to push air through here there are fans on Amazon that are better for three packs for like $10 not even kidding you cut out the RGB and a bunch of the other fluff that brand brands of fans or fan Brands like to add you can actually get them pretty cheap now it feels cheap they're not the sturdiest fan they're flexible and such but we're just trying to push air through our rad and we're trying to do it as cost efficient as possible there are other fans that you could do but I did put the full price of what these were which was about I think $23 or somewhere around there uh in the price of this like I said you could cut another like $13 out of that by going with an even cheaper brand all right the radiator this is a 360 mm by 30 mm radiator very standard size thank goodness it comes with Hardware cuz not all radiators have the same threads um here is our one-year limited warranty on everything again gives you a QR code with all the Drina stuff no Drina did not sponsor this video I paid for all of this that's actually a pretty quality looking rad holy cow so it is a copper rad it is not aluminum do yourself a favor if you're shopping on the cheap make sure you're paying attention to the material used you do not want to use an aluminum radiator yes aios have aluminum radiators in them however they have very special formulated fluids in them usually that're designed to deal with gantic corrosion which is what's going to happen when you have mixed Metals in your Loop in this instance we would have well copper right copper there um whatever the coat like the Finish is on this an I don't know if it's anodizing powder coating or whatever that's on the fittings there um whatever metals are existing inside our Reservoir here so if we were to add and it could be nickel there could be nickel plated stuff there could be different compounds to the nickel plating itself or different um Alloys and stuff in there same thing with the copper the these Alloys are not going to match they came from two different facilities so all of those mixed Metals lead to corrosion uh especially if you add aluminum aluminum like just expedites that process it's it's just the Metallurgy of it so avoid aluminum don't use aluminum unless all your components are aluminum and then even then you don't want to use just straight distilled water you'd want a formulated fluid for mixed Metals um but I I'm actually genuinely surprised at the quality of this this feels quality even the end tanks are pretty looking like some radiators are just ugly looking now look for the price this was $69.99 it's not the cheapest 360 I could find but it was the cheapest 360 that didn't seem like I was sacrificing build quality for it a lot of the reviews were solid on it the anodizing on it and or the paint powder coat whatever it is it's andiz it's not aluminum but the paint and powder coat is very even it doesn't look blotchy in areas um not really a fan of their of their logo and it's actually a little bit crooked what's actually crooked is not just like it's a plaque it's not a sticker it's a plaque I feel like the rectangle itself that's like stamped into the side cover is crooked but it's okay cuz we're putting it in this way I think I think I'm going to put it in this way so that the tubes are in the back which means we won't see it we got short screws and long screws so our fans can mount directly to our radiator and then we can mount the radiator to underside of the C I waited for the best for last because pumps and reservoirs they can get pretty dang pricey this guy right here also from Justina is a 250ml and when it says 250 ml that's talking about how much fluid the reservoir itself can hold um not it's not millimeters long or anything like that I've seen people get confused on that it's how much fluid the res can hold this is also $69.99 but it is a it is a combo and I'm really curious to what the quality of this is going to be because it is not expensive by pump res combo standards but it looked nice on the picture we have um okay so they include a Molex um to RGB header that's also a controller there a little inline controller on there that way if you don't have RGB in your system you can at least control the lighting on the reservoir okay here is it's actually not very bad looking actually not bad looking at all so it's got a DDC style pump like it's going to be like it's not like a D5 it's like a more like a 12volt DDC um which I'm okay with on this kind of loop the reservoir actually is pretty solid looking to be honest here's other another bracket right here it does have RGB in there it does use Molex unfortunately but um that's okay I mean we can deal with that for the price and then we have wow we have a bunch of extra stuff holy cow okay so we get mounting Rings which are design trying to go on here I would assume we have a vibration pad which we can use to it's double-sided sticky tape also which I believe just goes on the bottom if we want to stick it on the bottom somewhere but it's it's a thick anti vibration pad extra O-rings there's like a theme I love that they provide extra O-rings a lot of water cooling companies even one's charging you two three $400 for their component do not include extra O-rings these do and then as you can see we have our mounting hardware here here this actually feels this actually seems like a pretty decent quality piece like the acrylic it's nice and smooth all the Ed edges are debur they have a nice chamfer to them so that we can get a good seal with our o-ring nothing sharp to cut our O-rings um the little unfortunately the little plaque is kind of scratched already like I don't know if you can see it in the light maybe feel can get a closeup but it's scratched you know whatever it is what it is but that that's going to be on the back side anyway this is the side that's going to be facing us so it has this little kind of a satin badge which looks nice obviously that's our Inlet right there um do we already have o-ring down in there I want make sure these are not supposed to be installed NOP o-ring is down in there interestingly enough this inner piece right here is also threaded so what I was expecting to see was some sort of a pickup tube or something but and the reason why people will Brands will put little pickup tubes even short ones down there is it keeps it from picking up any potential sediment that could sort of fall down in here then allows sediment to just collect at the bottom when we do your Loop cleaning it's easier to clean it there than having cycle through the loop you can see it also does have a little kind of a interesting shaped push down tube I've never seen it like that and that's going to push out to the side rather than straight down because if you're returning to the top of the reservoir which is what that fitting is actually for right there then it needs to push down into the fluid otherwise you get a weird waterfall effect or surface tension could just make it run down along the side um and then the other one is a a fill like you can fill it from that right there also bleed air out if you need to it's a pretty solid feeling kit though for 69 bucks and they come in different sizes so the total on all of this including the water the only it doesn't include is like the five bucks or whatever you would need for thermal paste cuz unfortunately the block doesn't give you any but the total cost for all of this minus the five bucks for the thermal paste I have to add is $239.90 and that's including the overpriced fans because it's all I have on hand right now now like I said if you didn't need to use '90s anywhere you could cut $24 more off of that making it just over $2 what $19 something like that I have two pump reservoir combos similar to this in Skunk Works are glass and RGB and beautiful and all that I can guarantee you one of them costs what this entire Loop does so all right let me let me build it let me put it together in here and then I'll give you we'll do some temperature tests and see how it does with a 13700 K and uh we'll talk about whether or not this was worth it because at this point we are more expensive than many aios okay many aios cost less than $239 almost all of them 360 AIO I should say anyway um there are many air coolers out there that costs less that would do just as good of a job however this is expandable we can expand upon this by adding our graphics card in the loop and such and I think overall um the performance hindrance is going to come down to whether or not this block which was designed many moons ago versus today's block at $15 can handle the type of the type of punishment 13th and 14th gen can provide he oh I don't think it looks too bad considering the fact that it's all such really like thrown together stuff it wasn't even designed to have an aesthetic to it but clearly that matte black works everywhere right uh the reservoir actually looks really really good I'm not a fan of the fact that it makes you have to use the return on the top I would like to have had a fitting or something on the side so I don't have to use the push down now you'll notice in the top here what I did is I also have a 90° fitting on here I had six of them might as well use them but I ended up putting a cap on I'm want ah the Fan's turning very fast I want to point out the reservoir also does not come with a spare cap because you have two holes on the top and then one on the output so you're going to have one return and one output and then a third hole which is ideally used for filling or something like I did but they didn't give you a cap for that so let's add $5 more to the budget cuz I let's say I had to buy a cap on Amazon so now we're at $44.92 or whatever that was um there was something else oh yeah we used the mx4 thermal paste and that's also five bucks on Amazon so I didn't do like Kingpin extreme or anything crazy which is like a $40 thermal Pace we used $5 mx4 so now we're up to $249 so $250 for this Loop now I'm going to tell you right now now the weak Link in here is the CPU block absolutely guaranteed getting it mounted and getting it flat is difficult because of the fact that there is no one there's no back plate on the back like I showed you it just pulls the holes now if you overtighten it it will bow the board what that will end up doing is pulling the CPU Away From the Block so we've already been messing around and doing some testing and I was getting 100 C instantly uh under load that's because we were getting a very poor amount I've got it sort of flat now at least as flat as I think I can get it um and you'll see what the temperatures but there's another block I'm going to be testing that's only $5 more than this one it's at 19 bucks but truth be told that was the block I actually ordered for this whole thing and I didn't pay attention to the fact that it was going to take two weeks to arrive so I got this one in a pinch to be able to test the rest of the components and it's performing exactly as I sort of expected in that it's really not going to be any better than an air cooler we'll show you um right now it's installing time spy because I want to use that as a CPU test as well not just cen's ABX instruction which is going to push the it's going to push it way harder than any normal use case would but I feel like the time spy CPU test is more indicative of a multi-threaded workload than doing something that's like just straight AVX instruction I do want to point out this MSI board though that we're using is actually pretty terrible when regarding using the Intel defaults even though we updated the BIOS they don't tend to be there it still sort of wants to push it to 4,996 Watts available to it so we did go in and manually set limits at 253 so it can't possibly exceed where the CPUs uh intended to go which is what a lot of our complaints were about various motherboards and stuff of Brands pushing it too high okay here we go stress test R R23 cin Bench way harder than anything real world would be we're set 53 all core no throttling 87 86 87 we're at 226 Watts which is below our 253 limit remember we are at 105c well technically 100 C where we start to hard throttle but we're under that obviously there's a 30,5 84 so we hey we beat a thread Ripper W 29 2990wx if you have one of those he just got just got beat by an i7 with a $250 Loop but anyway I digress um that's way worse than anything we would ever see I mean you see look right now the package is at 32 as we're chilling right here our hottest core hit looks like 88 yeah hottest P core was 88 hottest e core was 74 and again those temps yes they're no better than putting like a octa or something on there which would be cheaper than this Loop entirely well or about roughly the same there's definitely Air Towers out there that are cheaper than this Loop that would perform better that's the fault of our $14.98 set water block not the $249 Loop so like I already mentioned there's another block coming that will be better and maybe I'll even check not just like the $20 block that I'm getting cuz I was trying to do like super budget but I'll find like maybe like a realistic like $5 $50 block that maybe gives us something some good quality to add to this Loop making it still less than $300 but giving us a good uh a really good result in our cooling versus a $14 piece of of copper but so far I'm actually impressed with the fact that it can once you get it to sort of lay flat laying flat is very important but it's actually done better than 88c I expected worse I mean yeah aios could do just as good of a job but uh this is about making sure we have an upgrade path and such and which we do we can change the block we can upgrade uh the GPU in the loop we have a 360 red we have more than enough we can add another radiator to Loop if we wanted I could put another one down here technically or something all right let's go ahead and see what a more realistic type of workflow looks like by using cinch uh or not cinebench but U time spy so for those of you that may have noticed this is a my processor was at 144% utilization 155% on the PES and 123% on the E cores that's a bug with hardware monitor I've had people email me about that asking what's the deal with this is this percentage of overclock um no it's actually just a bug in hardware monitor okay here we go so there's 43 42 51 46 45 61 65 54 63 actually did a lot better than I thought it would so maybe I'll go ahead and do extreme cuz I didn't really push the CPU that hard at all okay it just doesn't care I mean there's more wattage there it's 151 Watts at 56c 65 that's more realistic 57 71 6070 yeah I mean that's that's a more realistic like real world test that's the kind of temps we'd more than likely see while gaming and stuff but you know what though ultimately I expected I think I expected worse out of this block to be honest cuz it it was a backup like I said it was a filler because I messed up the block I ERS won't be here for another week and I'm like dang it I can't wait that long because we've got other things happening in between now and then so I'll test that block when it comes later and then like I said I think I'll do another test of like a more realistic like $50 block or something maybe check out like borotech or something like that that has more affordable blocks are actually intended and designed for LGA 1700 um but not bad honestly I think it could be worse the reservoir and the pump combo I'm extremely impressed with the build quality of it not impressed with their mounting mechanism so the mounting brackets as you can see I've got them kind of Jimmy rigged on there I kind they're intended to mount to 120 mm fans the problem is the lanol 216 I'm using here has 180 mm front fans very actually no they're 160s I think yeah they're 160s so they have Provisions for 120s 140s and 160s which is really unique so because I didn't have fans that I bought for this changing out those fans would then change the price of the loop so I have one bracket coming off one side and one bracket coming off the other and then there's like a zip tie holding it but it's still screwed in it's just I needed it tied in more more securely but it's it's working perfectly uh my biggest drawback to it is that fact that there's no like return port on the bottom of the pump I don't like that it has to come in only on the top everything else though the fittings worked exactly as I expected because I've used them in the past the radiator's build quality is pretty good um as far as I can tell I looked down inside I could see where there was actually a flow path where fluid has been flowing through it so it's clear that they do leased a leak test and a pressure test um it also looks like they might have done some sort of cleaning in there because I can tell where there's a little bit of rainbowing and stuff which uh typically is from like the Heat and stuff they use when they do the flux melting so they they they heat the whole rad the flux will flow and and then the solder it solders all the rows on the end tanks uh it looks like they did a cleaning on that cuz when a radiator hasn't been cleaned or at least at least a flush you can see a lot of granular type of material in there and that's not at present at all and if it were we would actually kind of see it floating through the reservoir um over time but the reservoir is pretty clear it hasn't run long enough for it to really turn dirty but I time W tell whether or not that's that's dirty or not pretty impressed with the fact that you could actually build for $250 a completely custom open loop question is whether or not it's worth it if you're only going to cool your CPU when much cheaper aios that have just as good a build quality exist so that's where you get same with air cooling there's air coolers out there obviously the the noctua D15 is like extremely popular um which would perform just as good if not better even on this CPU than that block the question is going to be once I change that block out then how well does it do and then we'll probably have to do another further test after that where we throw a GPU in the loop and see how the whole Loop does cuz now we're beyond the realm of what an air cooler and an AIO can do which is the whole point of an open loop you can change the parts out you can expand it to typically has better build quality it's serviceable and that's some of the benefits to that all right guys I'm going to get on out of here hope this has taught you something I'm still a little flabbergasted at the fact that this exists because I tried to do this back in 2013 and 300 bucks did not get me anything near this quality so all right guys thanks for watching as always we'll see you in the next one\n"