**Tearing Down My Setup: A Lesson in Humility**

As I sit here reflecting on my latest attempt at winning the memory temperature challenge, I have to admit that I'm feeling a mix of emotions. On one hand, I'm disappointed with my results, especially considering how far I've come in previous attempts. On the other hand, I'm grateful for the experience and the opportunity to learn from my mistakes.

One of the key factors that contributed to my disappointing performance was the fact that I underestimated the complexity of the challenge. I had planned to use a Sli bridge with two Gaming X Trio cards, but as I soon discovered, it was much more difficult than I had anticipated. The Vram heatsinks, which were touted as a solution to this problem, proved to be even more challenging to install and configure than I expected.

I have to admit that I'm not one to shy away from a challenge, but sometimes it's necessary to take a step back and reassess your approach. In this case, I realized that I had been trying too hard to optimize my system for the memory temperature challenge, without considering the bigger picture. As a result, I ended up with a setup that was not as stable or efficient as I had hoped.

Despite my disappointment, I'm proud of what I've accomplished so far in this competition. I've learned a lot about the importance of thermal management and the impact it can have on system performance. I've also gained valuable experience working with new hardware and software, which will undoubtedly benefit me in future competitions.

**Planning for Next Year's Challenge**

As I look to the future, I'm already thinking about how I can improve my chances of success next year. One potential strategy that I'm considering is sourcing alternative memory cards besides the Gaming X Trio. While these cards have been a great performer in terms of speed and capacity, they may not be the best choice for this specific challenge.

I'm also interested in exploring other cooling methods, such as liquid nitrogen (LN2) cooling, which has been a game-changer for many competitors in previous years. This approach requires more expertise and equipment than traditional air cooling, but it offers the potential for significant performance gains.

Another area that I'd like to focus on next year is improving my setup's overall stability and reliability. While I've made some progress in this regard, there's still room for improvement. By refining my system and optimizing its components, I hope to be able to push my memory temperature even lower and stay competitive with the top teams.

**A Huge Thank You to My Supporters**

I'd like to take a moment to express my gratitude to all of the people who have supported me throughout this competition. To NVIDIA and MSI, thank you for providing me with the hardware I needed to compete at the highest level. Your support has been invaluable, and I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to work with such talented teams.

To Steven J, thank you for being a great sport and a worthy opponent. Our trash talk in the videos was all in good fun, but I know that we've both put in some hard work to make this competition what it is today.

I'd also like to extend my thanks to Cole, who came up with the clever solution of using a PCI Express extender to connect my memory cards. Thermaltake, thank you for providing me with the thermal blocks and other equipment I needed to complete my setup. And to Corsair, thank you for your solidarity – even if I didn't end up using much of their gear, it was great to have them behind me.

Finally, I want to thank all of the people who left helpful comments and suggestions in the comment section. Your advice and guidance were invaluable, and I'm grateful to be part of a community that's so supportive and encouraging.

**A Lesson in Humility**

As I look back on this experience, I realize that there are some valuable lessons to be learned. One of them is the importance of humility – never being afraid to ask for help or admit when you're not sure about something. Another lesson is the need to balance ambition with pragmatism – knowing when to push yourself and when to take a step back.

Finally, I want to say that this experience has been a huge success for me, regardless of my finish in the competition. I've learned so much and had the opportunity to work with some amazing people and hardware. As I move forward into next year's challenge, I'm excited to see what new opportunities and experiences await me.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enall right guys here it is part three for better for worse i'm going to be attempting to get even better scores with my two-way rtx 3090 sli setup i just posted my part two video this morning so thank you all for the feedback on that video there's actually a bunch of really good suggestions in the comments there so i'm gonna be trying some of those out but first things first i gotta tear this beast down excellent i buy power wanted to make an affordable custom liquid cooled desktop pc with hardline tubing three things allowed them to do it and the now available element cl first a custom front distribution plate holds the pump and reservoirs for standardized tube routing second sliding mechanisms built into the front panel and cpu block allow the element cl to support different motherboard and gpu layouts and third specialized push to connect fittings save time during assembly if you want ibuypower to build you a customized elementcl gaming pc click the sponsor link in the video description and i got my little shroud off so the first tip i'm gonna go with is one that's straight from brian aka bps customs everyone go subscribe to his youtube channel he's awesome but he's working with an asus strix rtx 3090v v-bass that has a higher overall board power than these cards i think it goes up to 420 or 430 watts whereas these cards are maxing at around i believe 380. so i want to plug those in and make sure it works first but i also wanted to do it one card at a time so i'm just going to unplug the pci express riser from each card and then i'll do the flash and then i'll swap to the other one and then i'll continue actually why bother doing that when i can just do it right here all right that was easy i should also do this this is the asus bios version so it looks like it was successful in the first card let's do the other one now all right drivers reinstalled and sli is working sweet and as you can see gpuz now thinks that i have an asus card for both sweet so two possible issues with this blocks mounting one was that the back bracket here on the other one i was using as sort of a guide for the amount of pressure i was using and i had flattened it all the way down to the pcb this one wasn't tightened down as much also position on my pci express brackets here is pretty important because it determines where the block will actually sit and this one was sitting slightly high on the gpu probably not an issue but i am shifting these just a little bit up and that will allow me to make it a little bit more centered all right i think that block is as good as i'm gonna get it so let's move back over to this setup i think i'm gonna reconfigure things a little bit just shifting so i can get the ac unit as close to the graphics cards as i can i think that also means i need to drop the graphics cards down level so probably gonna set them right here that also means i need to swap out my pci express extensions so cole thank you very very very much once again for meeting me on short notice and loaning me your pci express extension i'll get that back to you asap so next up i need to sort of refit this bracket i think i'm going to go with dual loops this time around that was another thing that was suggested in the comments so i think that will work out especially since i have that kind of double red configuration already good to go and then of course i need to rebuild this the box that has been routing all the air in the right direction with cardboard so that's still in the planning phases but we'll see what happens but one thing i am definitely going to be doing is reversing well i think i'm going to have fans forcing air over the cards directly from the air from the ac and then i might have some fans set up as exhaust but a lot of people pointed out that the way i had it before i was blowing air directly under the cards but i was also pulling in the potentially more humid air from the room which was probably causing some of my condensation problems so uh really good feedback from the comments and thank you guys again for all of your feedback all right let's move on strange logistical issues you have to deal with when doing setups like this these aren't quite long enough to reach down here and set the cards nicely on top of my stay spicy box which would be conveniently close to the exhaust from the ac so that would have been nice but i need to figure out either a way to get the entire rig down a little bit to line up better with the ac to raise up the ac or i don't know something in between but unfortunately my daughter is going to be home momentarily so i need to take a break from this yet again so i'll come back to this this evening all right it's saturday now let's take a look at what i was able to accomplish last night so first off was the v bios updates and i did manage to flash both of these with the v bios for the asus strix rtx 3090 so that should give me more headroom when it comes to the power limit for the cards again these are maxing out at about 370 to 380 watts each and the new v-bars should allow me to push up to 420 or 430 watts and i wanted to get that installed to make sure it was functional before i went ahead with everything else next based on some additional feedback from jay uh he did tell me that he put some heat sinks on his memory for that last test he did where he's getting close to 30 000. i was on the verge of ordering some of those earlier this week and i didn't and i kind of wish that i had but i have sort of an in-between solution here which is hopefully a little bit better than just leaving them bare i discovered that on the stock heatsink fans for these cards there's a square bracket that touches all of the memory modules so i was able to remove that just with some screws and then sort of remount it here i did have to cut it because i didn't want to unmount my gpu blocks and that allowed me to sort of fit it around the edge and then i do have some of these little mosfet copper heat sinks so i just stuck those on i only had enough to do seven on each card so i tried to position them in places where they would most effectively maybe dissipate some heat so i have no idea if that's going to help or not but that's my ghetto heatsink mod for the memory with 24 gigs of vram though there's memory on the backs of the pcbs as well so these back plates that msi attached to the gaming x trio actually does have some copper pipes back there i don't think they're heat pipes i think they're just sort of flattened lengths of copper but that is again definitely better than nothing so i had to fish out some screws with some nuts and i didn't have quite enough of those that were small enough but i did manage to get at least three mounted to each of them so that should hopefully be putting some pressure between this back plate and the memory on the back then hopefully with air flowing over the whole thing that will keep that memory a little bit cooler too finally i did raise up the ac unit just using some paint cans and there's a rubber mat that used to be what the dogs got their food served on and that brings it up so that the exhaust here is going to be much closer to where the cards are actually sitting i am sticking with these thermaltake riser cables because thermaltake said they did test them and they actually performed better than being just plugged into the board i don't know if that makes sense but i am now moving on to reconstructing this box uh shroud to help funnel the air i think i'm going to put 220 millimeter fans at this side to force air this way and then maybe do some exhaust at that side and then i was looking for like a box that could sort of house the whole thing but i think i'm going to start off with this pretty sturdy piece for the base cut some holes in it so i can feed these up through the bottom tuck the bracket over the back of that and hopefully make that a fairly stable structure in and of itself and i can integrate that with some of the cardboard that's still here from the original shroud but hopefully with a little bit better plan in mind this time to reduce down to the two 120 fans and then force as much cool air over that assembly as possible once i do that then i just got to get the loop going again uh and yeah i am going to go with the dual loops this time i do have another pump and it's convenient that this radiator assembly i'm using already has two reds so i could just use one rad for each pump setup and that's my plan for today so once again let's get started so new shroud v 2.0 smaller more agile note that it is not actually attached right now to the rest of the shreds i'm going to build the shroud around the gpus after i get the water cooling setup going that's gonna be fed by the two fans that i sort of just taped in there these are 2200 rpm ek vardar fans which are some of the highest rpm quality fans that i have i did carry over this part in honor of the first builds but next up i need to start attaching more on my tubing i think i'm going to do the pumps over here ice chest is right down there for now and i'm going to be wrapping stuff as i go this time so oops i forgot to close that up i believe that's known as pulling a kyle at this point right that's what he's known for all right both loops are filled the pumps seem to be working leak check seems to be successful or i mean i'm not finding any leaks at least not immediately i still need to build the additional housing around here and then of course gotta get the ice going but i think i'm gonna wait until this evening to do that for now a big moment of truth i'm going to replace the sli bridge now we get to see if this still works so the pumps going that's a good sign rgb look at that nice beautiful system still works that's awesome hey all right so i wasn't filming obviously but uh this had an adapter fitting on it and it just popped off so that loop is now empty like literally the adapter fitting itself failed and like what what god damn it emergency refilling this loop all right that loop probably has some salt water in it now but uh what can be done look we hit minus one that's that's something there that's cool power slider can go to 123 now i'm doing 120 to start that's running that's good oh crash only crash but look at that wattage now we're up uh up above 460. it's a bit higher than before i think we have a successful run oh that's better than before that is better that is an improvement temperatures i was at like 20 and 40 before now we're at 30 and 35 36 37 so do i need more ice clock speeds looking pretty good though hovering uh well above 2000 all pretty much across the board it looks like actually my second card is doing better and i did back off the power limit a little bit that time because i have a feeling that's what was causing the crashes so we seem to be stable or somewhat stable around 440 to 450 watts and last we have another successful run but that's about where i was at before look at this what's going on here now we're hitting 30 on gpu one getting up to 47 or 48 from gpu two what this is the one that was that was good before jeep i swapped them all right guys it is sunday morning now and it is time for the post-mortem i was a little too tired to do it last night but uh first off let's just take a look at the final rig here behind me there it is quite impressive looking i think and uh for all of my efforts here and this took i i spent about three days working on this they weren't full days some of the time will split up here and there but that's about the amount of time and effort that i put just assembling all this together and as i probably mentioned my main goal was to move everything a little bit closer to the ac unit and then focus the air in closer so it'll be flowing directly over the cards my original plan was to extend this shroud out a little bit and have some fans working for exhaust at the back but i kind of ran out of time for that so i just sort of zip tied a couple noctua fans there for exhaust i think this was pretty effective at feeding the air across the cards and i even sort of made this custom piece on top where i fed through the cables for the pcie brackets and the tubing for the returns going down to the radiators down here which were of course in the ice chest but there it is the final setup for better or for worse and of course i did a lot of wrapping here to try to deal with the condensation issues i was having there was still condensation forming i was able to use this system for longer than before but we did i did eventually get some drips down here on this top card although it's a lot harder to see in there now with all this cardboard around it fortunately though no shorts or anything like that really the main like major problem that i had was when i finally decided okay time to drop the ice in cool everything down and start running tests i had this stupid rotary fitting just just pop off it just broke not like it popped off the threads but the rotary fitting itself actually broke and suddenly my entire loop drained i had to frantically get down there into the ice to remove the fitting and replace it and then i had to refill this loop and that really threw me i thought i was gonna kill my attempts entirely last night but fortunately i was able to refill the loop and get everything up and running again that said i do think i lost some ice down in here and i think that's one of the things i could have done was have a higher ice to water ratio down in there but honestly i don't think that would have mattered but here's the fitting itself and it just popped off on the rotary part right there i popped it back on and then i realized like oh no i don't want to treat this as a working fitting so i taped it so i would know that it's a bad one let's just talk results now though here's my results from the pa the last video the part 2 video 28 256. my score now is 28 363. that's right all of my efforts in the past three days have led to a plus 107 point difference which is honestly not all that much considering that we're dealing with scores in the 28 000 range i'm still in third but i'm still a good distance behind jay he is 1 374 points ahead of me with his current score of twenty nine thousand seven hundred and thirty seven an interesting thing i saw pop up yesterday is this score here from uh og 10k tech which is old guy with 10 kids tech and he has a i believe youtube and twitch channels and the interesting thing about him is he is doing air cooling still and he managed to beat meyer cool score by a decent amount with a score of 28 133 so he's actually pretty close to my score here with all of my water cooling efforts the thing i thought was really interesting about old guy with 10 kids here is uh he's using founders edition cards so i don't know where he sourced these or if he just paid exorbitant amounts of money for them but uh that is a really nice thing to have right now and something that i haven't seen elsewhere on the list so a very good question still as to how cherry-picked the gpus and the founders edition cards are and then of course the effectiveness of their coolers more on that in a second but just to go over the rest of my results and i wrote down some notes because my mind is a little fried right now i wanted to make sure i didn't miss anything my total board power with the asus strix v bios's was getting up a lot higher than it was before to about 445 to 470 watts depending on where i set the power limit so it was definitely successful in raising that and i think that would have resulted in some higher scores some significantly higher scores if i could have paired that with cooler running memory i don't know how hot the memory was getting all i know is that it was still getting unstable if i tried to push past about plus 550 whereas with the air cooler on the card which had much better cooling for the memory i was able to get up to about 11.50 so if we look at the detailed results here and this is jay's result we can actually determine some stuff about maybe next steps for overclocking his clock frequency was 2205 so he had some really good cooling on there and his average temperature was only 17 degrees celsius so he's also getting really good contact with this block so he has good mounts there with the i believe repurposed ek blocks that he's using on his evga for the win three cards so you need both of those that higher frequency and especially the higher average clock frequency which you're gonna get by running at a lower temperature and then you also need that memory clock frequency and this is i think definitely what was holding me back this is the old guy with 10 kids results with the founder's edition cards and you can see he's actually still running his memory at a higher frequency even the average clock frequency than j here at 13 32. so i think that just goes to show that we're gonna need maybe some full cover blocks or of course liquid nitrogen which will cool everything around the gpu as well as the gpu itself because it's down at negative 160 degrees celsius but you definitely need both of these things working together to get yourself a high score we can also see here that he's using air coolers but with ac assistance so his average temperature is quite low at 42 degrees c my average temperature for my good run was 29 degrees c and then of jay's of course was 17 degrees my average clock frequency was 2078 megahertz and there's my average memory clock 1283. so if this series has caught your interest and you're gonna keep an eye on these port royal leaderboards or the other 3dmark leaderboards for people who are doing extreme overclocking i think there's a few things that is going to help people who push their cards higher than the scores that we already have first is going to be that total board power and as grateful as i am for the use of the msi gaming x trio cards that i have been testing with their peak total board power is definitely significantly lower than the asus strix cards or the evga for the wing carts and that's not necessarily a mistake on msi's parts they set the v-bios to work with the hardware that's in the cards themselves i actually got an email from bildzoid last night and he was trying to give me a few tips to help me out which is also greatly greatly appreciated and i still need to reply to his email but i did read it and take some of the advice and he was concerned that with the higher tbp v bios especially the asus strix ones that i was using that i might blow a fuse on the card or the cards uh fortunately i didn't do that but i have to imagine that if i was using asus strix cards that were designed for that higher board power that i might have had better results when it comes to the gpu frequencies but then of course there's the memory and you really need to scale up the memory overclocking along with the gpu in order to hit those high overall clocks i could definitely see that the memory was holding me back and keeping me at a peak in the low 28 000 range so better memory cooling can be done either with a full cover water block and hopefully those will be available soon with actual vram heat sinks or memory heat sinks like the kind that jay used as opposed to the extremely hacked on solution that i was attempting which didn't work very well at all or of course what we're expecting to be coming next very very soon from uh probably gamers nexus and j which is ln2 overclocking which cools everything around the entire gpu including the memory but then of course there's the founders edition results as well and there's a lot of speculation that nvidia is keeping the best gpus for the founders edition cards so i'm really interested to see what custom cooling solutions on the founders edition cards are able to do and how much higher those are able to scale compared to the numbers we've been getting here in the first few weeks after launch i actually wrote a lot of notes i wanted to cover my problems or the specific issues that i encountered just to have them all here in one place there was of course that rotary fitting that failed that really sucked then of course there's the mismatched v bios with the cards i'm using and so that can potentially cause issues it was functional and i did get a slightly higher score but i have to imagine that if i was using evga for the win three cards with the evga for the win v bios that had the higher total board power limit that that might have improved things what really made me decide to take a step back here though was my gpu temperatures and i think my my gpu block mounts as janky and tacked in as and as fun as they were just aren't really getting the job done i don't know if those brackets are bending over time or if it's just a matter of not having enough pressure there but i think that could definitely be improved with the setup before i was hitting 20c and 40c and this time around it did seem like i was getting lower overall temperatures i was getting down to negative one but i was still hitting 35c and even upwards of 45c on the cards from time to time depending on the test i was running and that definitely indicates to me that i do not have an ideal setup when it comes to the water cooling even though i split stuff up and did two separate loops this time around i was still dealing with some condensation issues not as bad as before since i had everything wrapped up but i was still getting some drips down there so that was enough of a concern to me that uh doing this long term or getting extensive testing and was gonna be challenging and then the fact that i have a very customized cooling setup here with the box that i built around the shroud and everything i tried to make it sort of modular as i was assembling it but by the time i got to the point where i had to build the shroud around everything i just had to tape it all in there which means if i needed to do anything like swap the cards to put a different card in the number one slot that was a much more challenging prospect than just taking the cards out and moving from one slot to the other mostly though and it's sad to say this because this is probably the thing that would have been the most accessible for me if it wasn't for the fact that i initially thought oh no i need to try to find these on friday and then i just couldn't source any over the weekend is vram heatsinks and i think doing that to keep the memory temperature down would have let me creep my score up there a little bit closer to jay so guys at this point as much as i hate to do it i'm going to be tearing down this setup and i know a lot of you are going to be saying wait paul get those vram heatsinks and stick them on and do it again but uh trust me that is a lot more difficult than it sounds and i have been spending a pretty exorbitant amount of time on this over the past week and a half or so so i need to take a little bit of a break for now i think and focus on other things i am planning to shoot a vlog this week so if you've just been really interested in the sort of taping cardboard together and all that stuff that i've been doing i will be covering a bit of the tear down process so stay tuned for that maybe hit the subscribe button if you're not already and i'm not ruling out coming back and trying this again in the next week or two it just kind of depends on how things go and what steve and jay do i might see if i can source some other cards besides the gaming x trio cards and see if that does any good uh the vram heatsinks of course is something i could add maybe if full cover blocks come out that would be a great solution for keeping the gpu and the memory cool with ice water and then one of the other things buildzoid suggested was really really high rpm fans which i don't really have we're talking 3000 to 5000 rpm range like they use in enterprise server grade environments those can be really loud but they have two really good effects one is they move a lot of air over stuff so that would really be helpful for keeping the memory cool and because it's moving so much air if you're going sub ambient it helps keep things dry because it dries off any moisture or condensation that might be forming i need to say some huge thank yous to all the people and organizations that have helped me out with this project nvidia and msi of course for uh the gpus the sli bridges and the graphics cards steven j thank you guys so much as well it's been really fun joining you guys in this competition and for any of the little pokes that we've been sending back and forth to each other uh in the videos uh it's all in good fun and we've been actually talking behind the scenes and they've been providing me some assistance as well some tips and suggestions along the way so i don't think i would have gotten this far out without them huge thank you of course to cole for uh coming in clutch with that pci express extender uh thermaltake for the blocks and the memory corsair mainly for solidarity i didn't end up using much of the stuff that they sent but they still did send me stuff to use brian bps customs i was talking to him he's the one who tipped me off to the asus strix v bios so it was great to be able to try that out bill zoid who totally just reached out of his own accord to offer me some suggestions and advice as well and then all the people who left helpful comments and suggestions down in the comment section because i got great advice there too in closing though i've had the thought many times recently which is uh it's like a quote about like it's better to have tried and failed and to have never tried at all something along those lines i wouldn't say i consider this a fail completely i am in third place but uh i guess i was just hoping to to do a little bit more with this final setup here but if you look at my attempts from a couple years ago i was not ready for the phase one and this year i was more ready for phase one and i did better there this year i would say i was less ready for phase two the water cooling the ice water cooling i'd never really done that before and having some experience there is definitely a huge help but if we do come back to this challenge in the future i'm hoping i can build on that and maybe next time i will do better in both round one and round two and then maybe i'll give a heavier consideration to continuing round three and getting some ln2 and trying that out but however things go thank you guys once again so much for all of your feedback support and encouragement throughout this series it really has been the most fun i have had making videos in a really long time if you want to check my star out on your way out you can do that it's paul's hardware dot net also linked in the video subscription i got shirts mugs pint glasses and other high quality merchandise thank you guys so much once again for watching this video we'll see you in the next one youall right guys here it is part three for better for worse i'm going to be attempting to get even better scores with my two-way rtx 3090 sli setup i just posted my part two video this morning so thank you all for the feedback on that video there's actually a bunch of really good suggestions in the comments there so i'm gonna be trying some of those out but first things first i gotta tear this beast down excellent i buy power wanted to make an affordable custom liquid cooled desktop pc with hardline tubing three things allowed them to do it and the now available element cl first a custom front distribution plate holds the pump and reservoirs for standardized tube routing second sliding mechanisms built into the front panel and cpu block allow the element cl to support different motherboard and gpu layouts and third specialized push to connect fittings save time during assembly if you want ibuypower to build you a customized elementcl gaming pc click the sponsor link in the video description and i got my little shroud off so the first tip i'm gonna go with is one that's straight from brian aka bps customs everyone go subscribe to his youtube channel he's awesome but he's working with an asus strix rtx 3090v v-bass that has a higher overall board power than these cards i think it goes up to 420 or 430 watts whereas these cards are maxing at around i believe 380. so i want to plug those in and make sure it works first but i also wanted to do it one card at a time so i'm just going to unplug the pci express riser from each card and then i'll do the flash and then i'll swap to the other one and then i'll continue actually why bother doing that when i can just do it right here all right that was easy i should also do this this is the asus bios version so it looks like it was successful in the first card let's do the other one now all right drivers reinstalled and sli is working sweet and as you can see gpuz now thinks that i have an asus card for both sweet so two possible issues with this blocks mounting one was that the back bracket here on the other one i was using as sort of a guide for the amount of pressure i was using and i had flattened it all the way down to the pcb this one wasn't tightened down as much also position on my pci express brackets here is pretty important because it determines where the block will actually sit and this one was sitting slightly high on the gpu probably not an issue but i am shifting these just a little bit up and that will allow me to make it a little bit more centered all right i think that block is as good as i'm gonna get it so let's move back over to this setup i think i'm gonna reconfigure things a little bit just shifting so i can get the ac unit as close to the graphics cards as i can i think that also means i need to drop the graphics cards down level so probably gonna set them right here that also means i need to swap out my pci express extensions so cole thank you very very very much once again for meeting me on short notice and loaning me your pci express extension i'll get that back to you asap so next up i need to sort of refit this bracket i think i'm going to go with dual loops this time around that was another thing that was suggested in the comments so i think that will work out especially since i have that kind of double red configuration already good to go and then of course i need to rebuild this the box that has been routing all the air in the right direction with cardboard so that's still in the planning phases but we'll see what happens but one thing i am definitely going to be doing is reversing well i think i'm going to have fans forcing air over the cards directly from the air from the ac and then i might have some fans set up as exhaust but a lot of people pointed out that the way i had it before i was blowing air directly under the cards but i was also pulling in the potentially more humid air from the room which was probably causing some of my condensation problems so uh really good feedback from the comments and thank you guys again for all of your feedback all right let's move on strange logistical issues you have to deal with when doing setups like this these aren't quite long enough to reach down here and set the cards nicely on top of my stay spicy box which would be conveniently close to the exhaust from the ac so that would have been nice but i need to figure out either a way to get the entire rig down a little bit to line up better with the ac to raise up the ac or i don't know something in between but unfortunately my daughter is going to be home momentarily so i need to take a break from this yet again so i'll come back to this this evening all right it's saturday now let's take a look at what i was able to accomplish last night so first off was the v bios updates and i did manage to flash both of these with the v bios for the asus strix rtx 3090 so that should give me more headroom when it comes to the power limit for the cards again these are maxing out at about 370 to 380 watts each and the new v-bars should allow me to push up to 420 or 430 watts and i wanted to get that installed to make sure it was functional before i went ahead with everything else next based on some additional feedback from jay uh he did tell me that he put some heat sinks on his memory for that last test he did where he's getting close to 30 000. i was on the verge of ordering some of those earlier this week and i didn't and i kind of wish that i had but i have sort of an in-between solution here which is hopefully a little bit better than just leaving them bare i discovered that on the stock heatsink fans for these cards there's a square bracket that touches all of the memory modules so i was able to remove that just with some screws and then sort of remount it here i did have to cut it because i didn't want to unmount my gpu blocks and that allowed me to sort of fit it around the edge and then i do have some of these little mosfet copper heat sinks so i just stuck those on i only had enough to do seven on each card so i tried to position them in places where they would most effectively maybe dissipate some heat so i have no idea if that's going to help or not but that's my ghetto heatsink mod for the memory with 24 gigs of vram though there's memory on the backs of the pcbs as well so these back plates that msi attached to the gaming x trio actually does have some copper pipes back there i don't think they're heat pipes i think they're just sort of flattened lengths of copper but that is again definitely better than nothing so i had to fish out some screws with some nuts and i didn't have quite enough of those that were small enough but i did manage to get at least three mounted to each of them so that should hopefully be putting some pressure between this back plate and the memory on the back then hopefully with air flowing over the whole thing that will keep that memory a little bit cooler too finally i did raise up the ac unit just using some paint cans and there's a rubber mat that used to be what the dogs got their food served on and that brings it up so that the exhaust here is going to be much closer to where the cards are actually sitting i am sticking with these thermaltake riser cables because thermaltake said they did test them and they actually performed better than being just plugged into the board i don't know if that makes sense but i am now moving on to reconstructing this box uh shroud to help funnel the air i think i'm going to put 220 millimeter fans at this side to force air this way and then maybe do some exhaust at that side and then i was looking for like a box that could sort of house the whole thing but i think i'm going to start off with this pretty sturdy piece for the base cut some holes in it so i can feed these up through the bottom tuck the bracket over the back of that and hopefully make that a fairly stable structure in and of itself and i can integrate that with some of the cardboard that's still here from the original shroud but hopefully with a little bit better plan in mind this time to reduce down to the two 120 fans and then force as much cool air over that assembly as possible once i do that then i just got to get the loop going again uh and yeah i am going to go with the dual loops this time i do have another pump and it's convenient that this radiator assembly i'm using already has two reds so i could just use one rad for each pump setup and that's my plan for today so once again let's get started so new shroud v 2.0 smaller more agile note that it is not actually attached right now to the rest of the shreds i'm going to build the shroud around the gpus after i get the water cooling setup going that's gonna be fed by the two fans that i sort of just taped in there these are 2200 rpm ek vardar fans which are some of the highest rpm quality fans that i have i did carry over this part in honor of the first builds but next up i need to start attaching more on my tubing i think i'm going to do the pumps over here ice chest is right down there for now and i'm going to be wrapping stuff as i go this time so oops i forgot to close that up i believe that's known as pulling a kyle at this point right that's what he's known for all right both loops are filled the pumps seem to be working leak check seems to be successful or i mean i'm not finding any leaks at least not immediately i still need to build the additional housing around here and then of course gotta get the ice going but i think i'm gonna wait until this evening to do that for now a big moment of truth i'm going to replace the sli bridge now we get to see if this still works so the pumps going that's a good sign rgb look at that nice beautiful system still works that's awesome hey all right so i wasn't filming obviously but uh this had an adapter fitting on it and it just popped off so that loop is now empty like literally the adapter fitting itself failed and like what what god damn it emergency refilling this loop all right that loop probably has some salt water in it now but uh what can be done look we hit minus one that's that's something there that's cool power slider can go to 123 now i'm doing 120 to start that's running that's good oh crash only crash but look at that wattage now we're up uh up above 460. it's a bit higher than before i think we have a successful run oh that's better than before that is better that is an improvement temperatures i was at like 20 and 40 before now we're at 30 and 35 36 37 so do i need more ice clock speeds looking pretty good though hovering uh well above 2000 all pretty much across the board it looks like actually my second card is doing better and i did back off the power limit a little bit that time because i have a feeling that's what was causing the crashes so we seem to be stable or somewhat stable around 440 to 450 watts and last we have another successful run but that's about where i was at before look at this what's going on here now we're hitting 30 on gpu one getting up to 47 or 48 from gpu two what this is the one that was that was good before jeep i swapped them all right guys it is sunday morning now and it is time for the post-mortem i was a little too tired to do it last night but uh first off let's just take a look at the final rig here behind me there it is quite impressive looking i think and uh for all of my efforts here and this took i i spent about three days working on this they weren't full days some of the time will split up here and there but that's about the amount of time and effort that i put just assembling all this together and as i probably mentioned my main goal was to move everything a little bit closer to the ac unit and then focus the air in closer so it'll be flowing directly over the cards my original plan was to extend this shroud out a little bit and have some fans working for exhaust at the back but i kind of ran out of time for that so i just sort of zip tied a couple noctua fans there for exhaust i think this was pretty effective at feeding the air across the cards and i even sort of made this custom piece on top where i fed through the cables for the pcie brackets and the tubing for the returns going down to the radiators down here which were of course in the ice chest but there it is the final setup for better or for worse and of course i did a lot of wrapping here to try to deal with the condensation issues i was having there was still condensation forming i was able to use this system for longer than before but we did i did eventually get some drips down here on this top card although it's a lot harder to see in there now with all this cardboard around it fortunately though no shorts or anything like that really the main like major problem that i had was when i finally decided okay time to drop the ice in cool everything down and start running tests i had this stupid rotary fitting just just pop off it just broke not like it popped off the threads but the rotary fitting itself actually broke and suddenly my entire loop drained i had to frantically get down there into the ice to remove the fitting and replace it and then i had to refill this loop and that really threw me i thought i was gonna kill my attempts entirely last night but fortunately i was able to refill the loop and get everything up and running again that said i do think i lost some ice down in here and i think that's one of the things i could have done was have a higher ice to water ratio down in there but honestly i don't think that would have mattered but here's the fitting itself and it just popped off on the rotary part right there i popped it back on and then i realized like oh no i don't want to treat this as a working fitting so i taped it so i would know that it's a bad one let's just talk results now though here's my results from the pa the last video the part 2 video 28 256. my score now is 28 363. that's right all of my efforts in the past three days have led to a plus 107 point difference which is honestly not all that much considering that we're dealing with scores in the 28 000 range i'm still in third but i'm still a good distance behind jay he is 1 374 points ahead of me with his current score of twenty nine thousand seven hundred and thirty seven an interesting thing i saw pop up yesterday is this score here from uh og 10k tech which is old guy with 10 kids tech and he has a i believe youtube and twitch channels and the interesting thing about him is he is doing air cooling still and he managed to beat meyer cool score by a decent amount with a score of 28 133 so he's actually pretty close to my score here with all of my water cooling efforts the thing i thought was really interesting about old guy with 10 kids here is uh he's using founders edition cards so i don't know where he sourced these or if he just paid exorbitant amounts of money for them but uh that is a really nice thing to have right now and something that i haven't seen elsewhere on the list so a very good question still as to how cherry-picked the gpus and the founders edition cards are and then of course the effectiveness of their coolers more on that in a second but just to go over the rest of my results and i wrote down some notes because my mind is a little fried right now i wanted to make sure i didn't miss anything my total board power with the asus strix v bios's was getting up a lot higher than it was before to about 445 to 470 watts depending on where i set the power limit so it was definitely successful in raising that and i think that would have resulted in some higher scores some significantly higher scores if i could have paired that with cooler running memory i don't know how hot the memory was getting all i know is that it was still getting unstable if i tried to push past about plus 550 whereas with the air cooler on the card which had much better cooling for the memory i was able to get up to about 11.50 so if we look at the detailed results here and this is jay's result we can actually determine some stuff about maybe next steps for overclocking his clock frequency was 2205 so he had some really good cooling on there and his average temperature was only 17 degrees celsius so he's also getting really good contact with this block so he has good mounts there with the i believe repurposed ek blocks that he's using on his evga for the win three cards so you need both of those that higher frequency and especially the higher average clock frequency which you're gonna get by running at a lower temperature and then you also need that memory clock frequency and this is i think definitely what was holding me back this is the old guy with 10 kids results with the founder's edition cards and you can see he's actually still running his memory at a higher frequency even the average clock frequency than j here at 13 32. so i think that just goes to show that we're gonna need maybe some full cover blocks or of course liquid nitrogen which will cool everything around the gpu as well as the gpu itself because it's down at negative 160 degrees celsius but you definitely need both of these things working together to get yourself a high score we can also see here that he's using air coolers but with ac assistance so his average temperature is quite low at 42 degrees c my average temperature for my good run was 29 degrees c and then of jay's of course was 17 degrees my average clock frequency was 2078 megahertz and there's my average memory clock 1283. so if this series has caught your interest and you're gonna keep an eye on these port royal leaderboards or the other 3dmark leaderboards for people who are doing extreme overclocking i think there's a few things that is going to help people who push their cards higher than the scores that we already have first is going to be that total board power and as grateful as i am for the use of the msi gaming x trio cards that i have been testing with their peak total board power is definitely significantly lower than the asus strix cards or the evga for the wing carts and that's not necessarily a mistake on msi's parts they set the v-bios to work with the hardware that's in the cards themselves i actually got an email from bildzoid last night and he was trying to give me a few tips to help me out which is also greatly greatly appreciated and i still need to reply to his email but i did read it and take some of the advice and he was concerned that with the higher tbp v bios especially the asus strix ones that i was using that i might blow a fuse on the card or the cards uh fortunately i didn't do that but i have to imagine that if i was using asus strix cards that were designed for that higher board power that i might have had better results when it comes to the gpu frequencies but then of course there's the memory and you really need to scale up the memory overclocking along with the gpu in order to hit those high overall clocks i could definitely see that the memory was holding me back and keeping me at a peak in the low 28 000 range so better memory cooling can be done either with a full cover water block and hopefully those will be available soon with actual vram heat sinks or memory heat sinks like the kind that jay used as opposed to the extremely hacked on solution that i was attempting which didn't work very well at all or of course what we're expecting to be coming next very very soon from uh probably gamers nexus and j which is ln2 overclocking which cools everything around the entire gpu including the memory but then of course there's the founders edition results as well and there's a lot of speculation that nvidia is keeping the best gpus for the founders edition cards so i'm really interested to see what custom cooling solutions on the founders edition cards are able to do and how much higher those are able to scale compared to the numbers we've been getting here in the first few weeks after launch i actually wrote a lot of notes i wanted to cover my problems or the specific issues that i encountered just to have them all here in one place there was of course that rotary fitting that failed that really sucked then of course there's the mismatched v bios with the cards i'm using and so that can potentially cause issues it was functional and i did get a slightly higher score but i have to imagine that if i was using evga for the win three cards with the evga for the win v bios that had the higher total board power limit that that might have improved things what really made me decide to take a step back here though was my gpu temperatures and i think my my gpu block mounts as janky and tacked in as and as fun as they were just aren't really getting the job done i don't know if those brackets are bending over time or if it's just a matter of not having enough pressure there but i think that could definitely be improved with the setup before i was hitting 20c and 40c and this time around it did seem like i was getting lower overall temperatures i was getting down to negative one but i was still hitting 35c and even upwards of 45c on the cards from time to time depending on the test i was running and that definitely indicates to me that i do not have an ideal setup when it comes to the water cooling even though i split stuff up and did two separate loops this time around i was still dealing with some condensation issues not as bad as before since i had everything wrapped up but i was still getting some drips down there so that was enough of a concern to me that uh doing this long term or getting extensive testing and was gonna be challenging and then the fact that i have a very customized cooling setup here with the box that i built around the shroud and everything i tried to make it sort of modular as i was assembling it but by the time i got to the point where i had to build the shroud around everything i just had to tape it all in there which means if i needed to do anything like swap the cards to put a different card in the number one slot that was a much more challenging prospect than just taking the cards out and moving from one slot to the other mostly though and it's sad to say this because this is probably the thing that would have been the most accessible for me if it wasn't for the fact that i initially thought oh no i need to try to find these on friday and then i just couldn't source any over the weekend is vram heatsinks and i think doing that to keep the memory temperature down would have let me creep my score up there a little bit closer to jay so guys at this point as much as i hate to do it i'm going to be tearing down this setup and i know a lot of you are going to be saying wait paul get those vram heatsinks and stick them on and do it again but uh trust me that is a lot more difficult than it sounds and i have been spending a pretty exorbitant amount of time on this over the past week and a half or so so i need to take a little bit of a break for now i think and focus on other things i am planning to shoot a vlog this week so if you've just been really interested in the sort of taping cardboard together and all that stuff that i've been doing i will be covering a bit of the tear down process so stay tuned for that maybe hit the subscribe button if you're not already and i'm not ruling out coming back and trying this again in the next week or two it just kind of depends on how things go and what steve and jay do i might see if i can source some other cards besides the gaming x trio cards and see if that does any good uh the vram heatsinks of course is something i could add maybe if full cover blocks come out that would be a great solution for keeping the gpu and the memory cool with ice water and then one of the other things buildzoid suggested was really really high rpm fans which i don't really have we're talking 3000 to 5000 rpm range like they use in enterprise server grade environments those can be really loud but they have two really good effects one is they move a lot of air over stuff so that would really be helpful for keeping the memory cool and because it's moving so much air if you're going sub ambient it helps keep things dry because it dries off any moisture or condensation that might be forming i need to say some huge thank yous to all the people and organizations that have helped me out with this project nvidia and msi of course for uh the gpus the sli bridges and the graphics cards steven j thank you guys so much as well it's been really fun joining you guys in this competition and for any of the little pokes that we've been sending back and forth to each other uh in the videos uh it's all in good fun and we've been actually talking behind the scenes and they've been providing me some assistance as well some tips and suggestions along the way so i don't think i would have gotten this far out without them huge thank you of course to cole for uh coming in clutch with that pci express extender uh thermaltake for the blocks and the memory corsair mainly for solidarity i didn't end up using much of the stuff that they sent but they still did send me stuff to use brian bps customs i was talking to him he's the one who tipped me off to the asus strix v bios so it was great to be able to try that out bill zoid who totally just reached out of his own accord to offer me some suggestions and advice as well and then all the people who left helpful comments and suggestions down in the comment section because i got great advice there too in closing though i've had the thought many times recently which is uh it's like a quote about like it's better to have tried and failed and to have never tried at all something along those lines i wouldn't say i consider this a fail completely i am in third place but uh i guess i was just hoping to to do a little bit more with this final setup here but if you look at my attempts from a couple years ago i was not ready for the phase one and this year i was more ready for phase one and i did better there this year i would say i was less ready for phase two the water cooling the ice water cooling i'd never really done that before and having some experience there is definitely a huge help but if we do come back to this challenge in the future i'm hoping i can build on that and maybe next time i will do better in both round one and round two and then maybe i'll give a heavier consideration to continuing round three and getting some ln2 and trying that out but however things go thank you guys once again so much for all of your feedback support and encouragement throughout this series it really has been the most fun i have had making videos in a really long time if you want to check my star out on your way out you can do that it's paul's hardware dot net also linked in the video subscription i got shirts mugs pint glasses and other high quality merchandise thank you guys so much once again for watching this video we'll see you in the next one you\n"