**The Evolution of Custom Water Cooling**

Custom water cooling has come a long way since its early days, when enthusiasts would scrape together whatever parts they could find to create a working system. In this article, we'll take a look at how far custom water cooling has evolved and explore some of the latest options available.

One of the most significant advancements in custom water cooling is the availability of affordable options. Just a few years ago, it was impossible to build a high-quality custom water loop without breaking the bank. However, thanks to the power of Chinese manufacturing and free international shipping, it's now possible to get reasonable performance and a coolness factor for about what you would pay for an all-in-one (AIO) cooler from a name brand.

For example, take a look at our latest build featuring an AliExpress loop. This system consists of a Cis Cooling SCP-67F block, which Jake found was the best bang for the buck. We've had this setup running for about 20 minutes to give it a chance to reach equilibrium, and we're sitting at around 65 degrees on average. While this is impressive, especially considering the price tag of $90, it's still not far off from our EK setup.

However, there are some areas where custom water cooling still falls short. For example, one of the biggest challenges is finding a good pump that can handle high flow rates without being too expensive. In this build, we're using a DDC pump, which Jake found was "not bad" but not great either. We've seen many DDCs fail in the past, and it's clear that a D5 would be a much better option.

**The Science of Heat Transfer**

So why do some water blocks perform so poorly when it comes to heat transfer? The answer lies in the surface area of the block. Most water blocks have channels or machined surfaces cut into them to increase their surface area, allowing for more efficient heat transfer. However, some blocks are designed with a minimal surface area, which can actually make them less effective at transferring heat.

In our latest build, we're testing out one such block that has a flat, smooth surface. We're not expecting much from this thing, but we're surprised to find that it's actually performing pretty well. The 5960X is running at around 65 degrees on average after 20 minutes of runtime, which is impressive considering the minimal surface area.

**The Benefits of Custom Water Cooling**

So what are the benefits of custom water cooling? Not only can you achieve better performance and a lower temperature than with an AIO cooler, but you also get to customize your system to fit your specific needs. With custom water cooling, you can choose from a wide range of blocks, pumps, and other components to create a system that's tailored to your build.

Of course, there are some trade-offs when it comes to custom water cooling. For example, you'll need to do more research and planning to ensure that your system is compatible with each component. You may also need to invest time and money into testing and tweaking your system to get the best performance possible.

Despite these challenges, many enthusiasts find that the benefits of custom water cooling are well worth it. Whether you're a seasoned veteran or just starting out, custom water cooling can be a fun and rewarding hobby that allows you to push the limits of what's possible with liquid cooling.

**The Tools of the Trade**

So what do you need to get started with custom water cooling? The good news is that there are plenty of affordable options available. Here are some of our favorite tools and resources for getting started:

* A good quality pump (DDC or D5 recommended)

* A suitable block (e.g. Cis Cooling SCP-67F)

* A 12V power supply

* Tubing and fittings

* Waterblock mounts and screws

**Mass Drop's Latest Deal**

In other news, Mass Drop has just released a new deal on the Sennheiser Open-Back HD 58X Jubilee headphones. These were tuned by Axel Grell, a renowned audio engineer from Sennheiser, and feature new 150 ohm drivers for a clear and dynamic sound profile. The headphones also have a glossy black headband, elliptical earcups, and replaceable soft velour ear pads.

These are available now at the Mass Drop website, and as always, we recommend checking out their community forum to see what other customers are saying about these headphones.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enon multiple occasions we have tried liquid cooling a computer with the cheapest parts we could find be they from ebay or the local hardware store but the problem always comes back to this building a loop with parts designed for something else like say using an aquarium pump is pretty jank so we endeavored to track down some parts that are actually designed for cooling pcs but are as inexpensive as the non-purpose-built stuff and thanks to the power of aliexpress they are finally here and a total mess origin pc offers beautiful custom desktops and laptops such as their evo 15s that weighs only 4.3 pounds and is under an inch thick featuring smooth 144 hertz 1080p or 4k displays and an nvidia geforce gtx 1070 max q be sure to check them out at the link below the first step on our journey was of course to source the parts and because of that the surprises actually started early on i mean little did i know that there is a massive market of off-brand water cooling gear like brands i've never heard of like cis cooling and uh barrow and my two fang and some of it surprisingly like actually looks pretty legit so naturally we did what any sane person would do and ordered a freaking whack ton of it like a whole bunch of them including a few parts that i would describe as decent looking and a few that were not so much just sort of like a like a auto shoddy approach you know fire at the wall and see what sticks so once we had everything on order i figured yeah okay probably like a month for free delivery on a boat from china right wrong so we actually ordered most of the parts back in september of 2017 and the last one arrived in january of this year so needless to say that was quite the setback while we waited we also ended up buying a couple more odds and ends like uh which radiators are you talking about these radiators like these radiators and a couple of pumps so that's why it has taken us until july almost an entire year to actually make this video so like yay free international shipping you get what you pay for and what exactly is it that we did get jake like do i why do i just like go through this stuff yeah go for it holy crap look at this thing so this is just a copper plate a piece of plexi uh a gasket that doesn't even seem to be made of like any kind of malleable like soft material this is hard plastic and it's just a straight up like flat piece of copper on the bottom this one is based on a very similar design if you can call a flat piece of proper design this one's almost the same this is the same thing this is the same thing with a different bracket this bracket is stupider so i guess these guys are the the engineers of the dumps class okay but then these look all right the postings on the internet they don't give you that great description of what you're getting these guys went to school uh and this one actually looks not bad too so these are both kind of pin array style blocks that again are based on very similar designs so they are direction agnostic they just go in pass through some fins and then come out so is that all the cpu blocks oh yeah okay let's kind of this one looks ballin how much was this i think it's like 15 bucks 15 bucks it's cheap wow i mean and not including these ek of course right but like that's not a performance nickel plated these pumps look pretty freaking sketch though like look at this thing it's got some weight to it so i will give it that it's got some weight too it's not just a fragile little piece of trash but i don't know that that's necessarily meaningful so like these two are basically the same just a different top you see this a lot when you order stuff from china where this is the same company it's like designs that are clearly you know borrowing from each other or straight up produced at the same factory and then just rebranded with like chinese companies rebranding chinese products in the same way that like international companies just rebrand chinese products so it turns out these radios are actually aluminum okay so heads up for you guys you don't want to mix metals aluminum plus copper equals corrosion but the good news is that we did follow up the aluminum radiator orders like sometimes when you're ordering stuff from china you don't even know exactly what it is like one of the uh one thing we thought was a block is just an led to go in a block so you can get copper and brass radiators with just aluminum fins that don't touch the water for like five bucks more even if you're going the aliexpress water cooling route spend the extra five bucks now one thing you might notice that we didn't order any of is fittings and reservoirs and the reason for that is that while there are some really cheap options out there they don't affect performance so using them in this kind of a test where we're evaluating the performance serves no purpose other than to have more potential points of failure where we can leak water onto our hardware so we just stuck with the stuff that really affects performance like this led but how much did we pay for this it was like five bucks five bucks but then given that we probably paid about five bucks for this it's into one of these oh really uh oh it's the nice one so you can actually stick so this is just leds for this for blocks for blockers yeah okay of course no i've seen this kind of thing before probably worth the five bucks yeah it's not bad and not fun and haul videos for now though we need to actually test these things but before we can do that we need something to compare our numbers again some kind of standard luckily jake keeps his test bench water cooled for some reason so we can just use that this is actually a pretty standard setup from one of the best in the biz ek water blocks so to cool the four gigahertz 5960x we've got ek supremacy evo mated to a 360 millimeter pe series radiator and a d5 pwm pump and we're gonna crank that pump to a hundred percent for the purposes of this test now with the baseline test out of the way it's time to take some of our aliexpress wonders for a spin now we're gonna assume that if you're buying some parts super cheap from aliexpress you're probably buying most of them there so because of that we're gonna build the whole loop out of these parts the only ek stuff we're using again reminder is the reservoir and the fittings so what do you want to start with you know i was thinking i really want to try one of these just like gross flat blocks sure but are we gonna save that for the climax yeah okay i think we should get like a proper do we want to do like the really legit looking yeah we can do like a baseline of our aliexpress stuff like sure like that's what you would actually buy yeah okay i don't think you should probably buy this but you can this is actually like have you taken this apart and put it back together or something because this is like not an amazing design actually from everything that i know about water yeah and it needs like a jet plate while jake builds up our first aliexpress loop let's talk pricing that ek config that we showed first with everything included would cost you a whopping 380 dollars i know that sounds like a lot but for custom water cooling that's not actually that outlandish now with that said what jake's building right now is around 90 dollars including everything that you need about a quarter as much okay so this is it we're on the full aliexpress loop the the express loop it sounds like a train or something thanks for the aliexpress loop uh with the cis cooling scp-67f which jake found was pretty much the best bang for the buck and we've had ida 64's fpu test running for about 20 minutes to give it a chance to reach equilibrium and we're sitting at about 65 degrees on average pretty darn impressive for the price really honestly not that far off our ek setup okay now i want to see the worst case scenario what happens when we throw this gutter trash that one's not going to fit this okay it's the same thing this gutter trash yeah all right try find out my favorite type of trash so it's done loop number two is set up using one of those completely flat blocks now our expectations for this thing pretty freaking low most water blocks have channels cut or like machined or something into the base to increase their surface area because more surface area means more heat transfer so we would think something with negligible surface area by comparison would perform very poorly and now that it's been running for about 20 minutes on a 5960x it's actually doing okay like way way better than i expected so conclusion time then custom water cooling has really evolved from the days of like basement scientists with their aquarium pumps and like you know weird hunks of metal that they got from like some one that one guy in australia that makes them and ships them around the world or whatever to having tons of options i mean everything from you know super high-end stuff that would scare away most newcomers just due to the sheer cost all the way down to thanks to the power of chinese manufacturing and free international shipping low end options where you can actually get reasonable performance and that coolness factor for about what you would pay for an aio from a name brand with that said the performance of your aio that would come with a warranty or even a high-end knock to air cooler that would also come with a warranty would also be pretty good so doing a build like this super cool was definitely fun to experiment i'm just not sure if we're gonna put the linus tech tips seal of approval especially on the pumps please don't cheap out on your pump not recommended it's not that bad i don't recommend it okay never recommend it well this thing would buy d5 nothing else what about ddc nothing else is acceptable no i've seen so many ddc's failed where's my d5 what about this thing didn't someone give this to you maybe i think so i don't know there's someone at ltx last year tx is like tomorrow and then look i fixed it i welded it oh lordy mass drop is back with another deal this time on the sennheiser open backed hd hd58x jubilee headphones these were tuned by axelgrell met him super cool for like an engineering german dude by the way of sennheiser and massdrop based on feedback from the community they feature new 150 ohm drivers and a colorway inspired by the hd 580s they're clear fast with a dynamic sound profile and they've got a glossy black headband elliptical earcups and replaceable soft velour ear pads they've got a detachable six foot cable and you can get yours today at the link in the video description seriously though axel cool guy so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button if you liked it hit like get subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description or maybe also link down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join okay hold on hold on no i'm gonna get this also link down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum oh no i'm gonna make it and our community forum also link down there is our merch tour which which has cool shirts like this one which has cool shirts like this one and our and our community forum last time last time okay i promise not even close also link down there is our merch tour which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join damn dammit oh my god i was waiting for that to happen i knew it was gonna happen linus you really should leave juggling to the professionals and a mac useron multiple occasions we have tried liquid cooling a computer with the cheapest parts we could find be they from ebay or the local hardware store but the problem always comes back to this building a loop with parts designed for something else like say using an aquarium pump is pretty jank so we endeavored to track down some parts that are actually designed for cooling pcs but are as inexpensive as the non-purpose-built stuff and thanks to the power of aliexpress they are finally here and a total mess origin pc offers beautiful custom desktops and laptops such as their evo 15s that weighs only 4.3 pounds and is under an inch thick featuring smooth 144 hertz 1080p or 4k displays and an nvidia geforce gtx 1070 max q be sure to check them out at the link below the first step on our journey was of course to source the parts and because of that the surprises actually started early on i mean little did i know that there is a massive market of off-brand water cooling gear like brands i've never heard of like cis cooling and uh barrow and my two fang and some of it surprisingly like actually looks pretty legit so naturally we did what any sane person would do and ordered a freaking whack ton of it like a whole bunch of them including a few parts that i would describe as decent looking and a few that were not so much just sort of like a like a auto shoddy approach you know fire at the wall and see what sticks so once we had everything on order i figured yeah okay probably like a month for free delivery on a boat from china right wrong so we actually ordered most of the parts back in september of 2017 and the last one arrived in january of this year so needless to say that was quite the setback while we waited we also ended up buying a couple more odds and ends like uh which radiators are you talking about these radiators like these radiators and a couple of pumps so that's why it has taken us until july almost an entire year to actually make this video so like yay free international shipping you get what you pay for and what exactly is it that we did get jake like do i why do i just like go through this stuff yeah go for it holy crap look at this thing so this is just a copper plate a piece of plexi uh a gasket that doesn't even seem to be made of like any kind of malleable like soft material this is hard plastic and it's just a straight up like flat piece of copper on the bottom this one is based on a very similar design if you can call a flat piece of proper design this one's almost the same this is the same thing this is the same thing with a different bracket this bracket is stupider so i guess these guys are the the engineers of the dumps class okay but then these look all right the postings on the internet they don't give you that great description of what you're getting these guys went to school uh and this one actually looks not bad too so these are both kind of pin array style blocks that again are based on very similar designs so they are direction agnostic they just go in pass through some fins and then come out so is that all the cpu blocks oh yeah okay let's kind of this one looks ballin how much was this i think it's like 15 bucks 15 bucks it's cheap wow i mean and not including these ek of course right but like that's not a performance nickel plated these pumps look pretty freaking sketch though like look at this thing it's got some weight to it so i will give it that it's got some weight too it's not just a fragile little piece of trash but i don't know that that's necessarily meaningful so like these two are basically the same just a different top you see this a lot when you order stuff from china where this is the same company it's like designs that are clearly you know borrowing from each other or straight up produced at the same factory and then just rebranded with like chinese companies rebranding chinese products in the same way that like international companies just rebrand chinese products so it turns out these radios are actually aluminum okay so heads up for you guys you don't want to mix metals aluminum plus copper equals corrosion but the good news is that we did follow up the aluminum radiator orders like sometimes when you're ordering stuff from china you don't even know exactly what it is like one of the uh one thing we thought was a block is just an led to go in a block so you can get copper and brass radiators with just aluminum fins that don't touch the water for like five bucks more even if you're going the aliexpress water cooling route spend the extra five bucks now one thing you might notice that we didn't order any of is fittings and reservoirs and the reason for that is that while there are some really cheap options out there they don't affect performance so using them in this kind of a test where we're evaluating the performance serves no purpose other than to have more potential points of failure where we can leak water onto our hardware so we just stuck with the stuff that really affects performance like this led but how much did we pay for this it was like five bucks five bucks but then given that we probably paid about five bucks for this it's into one of these oh really uh oh it's the nice one so you can actually stick so this is just leds for this for blocks for blockers yeah okay of course no i've seen this kind of thing before probably worth the five bucks yeah it's not bad and not fun and haul videos for now though we need to actually test these things but before we can do that we need something to compare our numbers again some kind of standard luckily jake keeps his test bench water cooled for some reason so we can just use that this is actually a pretty standard setup from one of the best in the biz ek water blocks so to cool the four gigahertz 5960x we've got ek supremacy evo mated to a 360 millimeter pe series radiator and a d5 pwm pump and we're gonna crank that pump to a hundred percent for the purposes of this test now with the baseline test out of the way it's time to take some of our aliexpress wonders for a spin now we're gonna assume that if you're buying some parts super cheap from aliexpress you're probably buying most of them there so because of that we're gonna build the whole loop out of these parts the only ek stuff we're using again reminder is the reservoir and the fittings so what do you want to start with you know i was thinking i really want to try one of these just like gross flat blocks sure but are we gonna save that for the climax yeah okay i think we should get like a proper do we want to do like the really legit looking yeah we can do like a baseline of our aliexpress stuff like sure like that's what you would actually buy yeah okay i don't think you should probably buy this but you can this is actually like have you taken this apart and put it back together or something because this is like not an amazing design actually from everything that i know about water yeah and it needs like a jet plate while jake builds up our first aliexpress loop let's talk pricing that ek config that we showed first with everything included would cost you a whopping 380 dollars i know that sounds like a lot but for custom water cooling that's not actually that outlandish now with that said what jake's building right now is around 90 dollars including everything that you need about a quarter as much okay so this is it we're on the full aliexpress loop the the express loop it sounds like a train or something thanks for the aliexpress loop uh with the cis cooling scp-67f which jake found was pretty much the best bang for the buck and we've had ida 64's fpu test running for about 20 minutes to give it a chance to reach equilibrium and we're sitting at about 65 degrees on average pretty darn impressive for the price really honestly not that far off our ek setup okay now i want to see the worst case scenario what happens when we throw this gutter trash that one's not going to fit this okay it's the same thing this gutter trash yeah all right try find out my favorite type of trash so it's done loop number two is set up using one of those completely flat blocks now our expectations for this thing pretty freaking low most water blocks have channels cut or like machined or something into the base to increase their surface area because more surface area means more heat transfer so we would think something with negligible surface area by comparison would perform very poorly and now that it's been running for about 20 minutes on a 5960x it's actually doing okay like way way better than i expected so conclusion time then custom water cooling has really evolved from the days of like basement scientists with their aquarium pumps and like you know weird hunks of metal that they got from like some one that one guy in australia that makes them and ships them around the world or whatever to having tons of options i mean everything from you know super high-end stuff that would scare away most newcomers just due to the sheer cost all the way down to thanks to the power of chinese manufacturing and free international shipping low end options where you can actually get reasonable performance and that coolness factor for about what you would pay for an aio from a name brand with that said the performance of your aio that would come with a warranty or even a high-end knock to air cooler that would also come with a warranty would also be pretty good so doing a build like this super cool was definitely fun to experiment i'm just not sure if we're gonna put the linus tech tips seal of approval especially on the pumps please don't cheap out on your pump not recommended it's not that bad i don't recommend it okay never recommend it well this thing would buy d5 nothing else what about ddc nothing else is acceptable no i've seen so many ddc's failed where's my d5 what about this thing didn't someone give this to you maybe i think so i don't know there's someone at ltx last year tx is like tomorrow and then look i fixed it i welded it oh lordy mass drop is back with another deal this time on the sennheiser open backed hd hd58x jubilee headphones these were tuned by axelgrell met him super cool for like an engineering german dude by the way of sennheiser and massdrop based on feedback from the community they feature new 150 ohm drivers and a colorway inspired by the hd 580s they're clear fast with a dynamic sound profile and they've got a glossy black headband elliptical earcups and replaceable soft velour ear pads they've got a detachable six foot cable and you can get yours today at the link in the video description seriously though axel cool guy so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button if you liked it hit like get subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description or maybe also link down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join okay hold on hold on no i'm gonna get this also link down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum oh no i'm gonna make it and our community forum also link down there is our merch tour which which has cool shirts like this one which has cool shirts like this one and our and our community forum last time last time okay i promise not even close also link down there is our merch tour which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join damn dammit oh my god i was waiting for that to happen i knew it was gonna happen linus you really should leave juggling to the professionals and a mac user\n"