Designing & Building a GPU Cooler - Engineering Lab Tour for Water Blocks

The need to know although hesitant first we were able to work with bits power to show some of the 3D modeling of components prior to production after taking initial scans of components downstairs using the manual wheel scrolling and dot placement solution. The technician sends the coordinates up to the modelers upstairs who begin 3D design in SolidWorks.

The company pulled up one of its designs that had already launched it to show us the models are made to accommodate component clearances and to ensure the right areas on the PCB like MOSFETs or other power components are all cleared from the time bits power receives the board. The company requires about 14 days to design prototype and test its cooler. This is one of the major benefits of doing everything in the house if bits power worked with third-party shops to manufacture its blocks it has to wait weeks two months on sampling stages because they'd have to send it out to a factory work with them on the design requirements and then get a sample and then probably get at least one more sample before moving forward to production. That takes a long time.

Instead, the engineers can email their files of the factory down the road which is owned by bits power and then drive by and pick it up later that day. This means that the company can rapidly prototype designs and potentially make multiple prototypes in a day then hook them all up for thermal testing to ensure the components are properly contacted and cooled. As said in the previous video, it takes something like 25 minutes for a copper block to be made for a CPU. A GPU would take longer it's a larger component but we didn't get specifics on that since bit power wasn't making any at the time we visited.

The acrylic pieces take somewhere around 11 minutes to make for a CPU and so the time to actually prototype something is relatively short. It would be reasonable for bits power to make a couple different versions and then hook up thermal probes and run testing as desired to make sure every part of the board is cooled as needed.

We asked bits power why it doesn't use skiving like closed-loop cold plate makers do. The company told us that it's a waste of time for its product according to bits power because of the pressure created by the jet plate and the flow path for the water. The additional service area of closer micro fins enters diminishing returns and only serves to drive up the defect rate which would increase the price for everybody including the customer.

Currently, the Finns are about 0.3 millimeters apart and although the company could make them closer with its existing processes it has determined that it's really better to just go with something that it knows works well and doesn't cause unnecessary defects and unnecessarily long manufacturing time while still providing what it thinks is about the same benefit.

If you're curious to see how toll plates are made for cl CS or a iOS, you can check one of our other tours where we looked at deep cool and cooler master factories. Where they make the cold plates in-house for their own coolers. It's typically done with skiving where a blade comes in and pushes up bits of the copper into the micro fin and follows this process repeatedly for every one of the micro fins in the block. It takes a long time to make a single unit and so the cost is high even for a company at the scale of Coolermaster which is one of the largest cooling companies in the industry.

They even make stuff for street lights for example, and so the time cost requirement for a company like bits power or other open-loop cooling solution companies is significant. It's one of the highest costs outside of real estate in the industry and machine time ultimately needs to be controlled and in this case it looks like 0.3 millimeters is about what they're going with.

Finally, there's one last QC process in the packaging area where everything is checked by eye so all this rnd equipment like the service level Mis measurements and the fitting dimensions checker that's used for both design and for QC after the development of the unit. The factory level they already have a couple of checks involved where the technicians will pull units out of the tray every 20 minutes or so and make sure everything looks visually good and also check the threads and the flush mnestheus of the fittings contacting the plates.

But then after it's packaged and sent to this part of the headquarters testing is done to look at things more precisely like the tolerances the dimensions of the unit and then of course the more visual sense of things of just how does it come out. So that's everything for this setup for bits power you can check our previous tour for the CNC machining side of things. Subscribe for more to check out additional factory tours coming up soon, and you can go to stored eye cameras access or patreon.com slash cameras Nexus 2 helps out directly in pain for trips like this one.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enin a previous factory tour we talked about how bits powers qionghua taiwan factory manufactures its water cooling blocks fittings reservoirs and even ln2 pots today's tour looks at the company's R&D facility down the street where initial development and post manufacturing QC is handled most of this is done by the same four pieces of equipment but it's worth breaking it out into a separate video today we'll look at surface level this measurements something that we introduced into our own cooler reviews recently along side block keep out zone compliance planning quality control error and run to run variation in unit dimensions and the software side of development before that this video is brought to you by EVGA Tsar TX 28 e TI XE ultra the 28 e TI XE ultra is what we use in our CP reviews to avoid GPU bottlenecks the XE ultra uses hydraulic dynamic bearing fans for reduced noise features our TX support for DX our titles and uses a massive 2.75 slot cooler the cooler design allows the fans to spin slower and quieter while sinking heat further leveraging a mix of l-shaped and traditional fins to maximize airflow or contact learn more at the link in the description below before any of the previous tours machining takes place the company first has to design and prototype its products the previous tour looked at fitting manufacturing water block manufacturing and acrylic component manufacturing and you can find that torque and all of our other factory tours in the series in our factory to our playlist linked in the description below we'll start this process with planning bits power first faces a challenge that isn't related to mechanical engineering or its manufacturing but is instead related to relations and a different type of engineering social engineering the company has to get its hands on any new products coming to market as far in advance as possible and sometimes even has to wait until launch to buy new video cards or motherboards from a business perspective this has massive implications availability at launch is the difference between a successful product release for a cooling company and letting their competitor take the market because if bids power doesn't get to it on day one someone else competing with them surely will because of how restrictive Nvidia and AMD are with sampling it can sometimes be difficult to get components early enough to have measurements for block manufacturing so bits power has to rely on its relationships to pull through and with something like 90% of the blocks being sold being for NVIDIA cards and with how Nvidia is completely crazy when it comes to sampling it makes sense that this would be one of the most trying times for a company to try and get its new products together once this cloak-and-dagger process of talking to people is complete and the components are either acquired in advance of launch or are purchased bits power can begin the manufacturing process for this before making the parts bits power uses a scope that's hooked up to a computer and then magnifies the component either a motherboard or a video card and plots coordinates and software a technician uses physical wheels on the machines reposition the board under the magnifying glass then presses a button on the keyboard to place a point on the grid at the end of the process the points can be used in software to begin the design process for the block these measurements are needed because the topology of new boards is often different and keep out zones need to be established to avoid running into vrm components or other service mount devices there's only one of these stations set up so each day is spent measuring new boards and providing coordinates to the 3d modelers upstairs we asked if bits Power had any of the laser measurement systems and we're told that they might by next year but for now they're still using these semi manual means of measuring the sizing and height requirement for all of the blocks the neighboring depth gauge is for both development and quality control this set of midotaur equipment includes a $200,000 NTD marble slab or about $6,600 USD we asked a clarifying question about whether it's granite or marble since grant its more common for this type of thing but since we're not geologists we had to rely on translation and that came back as marble either way it's over 6 grand and it's only purpose in life is to be flat perfectly flat or very nearly so the slab is accompanied by a depth gauge similar to our own although much more expensive at $2,000 just for the data logger the middle Toyo serve test SJ 210 the gauge itself uses a probe and test the depth versus a known zero point to check the levelness of a surface this equipment is all expensive to buy but it's also expensive to set and trained for it needs to be tracked routinely for accuracy and recalibrated or at least recertified regularly like most precision instruments would its power uses this to check for level 'no sub new product surfaces and the check for engineering accuracy and also uses it for production units bits power checks roughly 30 to 40 pieces per 1000 units produced acting as another QC step after the factory level functionality QC steps and preceding the packaging level visual QC step any QC failures are thrown into the copper or aluminum recycling bins and sold back to the metal supplier for a rebate on the next order we explained that in the previous video but just as a recap a lot of this processing has some form of waste and fortunately most of it is a metal waste so it's relatively easy to recycle since it's not contaminated in the process of manufacturing it's just cut down with the excess removes from the stock block that's purchased from a supplier and then discard it into a bin all these are bagged up and sold back to the supplier for a discount and again that's at the spot price for copper aluminum or whatever the material may be plus the agreements in place with the supplier another station in this room is for obstacle inspection of components against known measurements from the engineers the microscope is hooked up to a backlight and a computer with CAD files loaded to establish known guidelines for acceptable variance in manufacturing the equipment is used for both quality control testing and for pre-production planning as is all the other equipment in this room and it's only partially automated the computer detects the outline in the product silhouette under the magnifying glass and on top of the light box and then optically measures the dimensions of the product without much human input in this instance a fitting is being checked for acceptable diameters and lengths the machine has an error of 0.005 millimeters and the spec for acceptable manufacturing tolerance was barred from being shown on camera but a technician cross-references the known guidance against what's shown on the screen then passes or fails the component obviously there's a lot of trade secrets at these places so we can't always show everything but they have guidelines that they follow and that's all you need to know although hesitant first we were able to work with bits power to show some of the 3d modeling of components prior to production after taking initial scans of components downstairs using the manual wheel scrolling and dot placement solution the technician sends the coordinates up to the modelers upstairs who begin 3d design in SolidWorks the company pulled up one of its designs that had already launched it to show us the models are made to accommodate component clearances and to ensure the right areas on the PCB like MOSFETs or other power components are all cleared from the time bits power receives the board the company requires about 14 days to design prototype and test its cooler this is one of the major benefits of doing everything in the house if bits power worked with third-party shops to manufacture its blocks it has to wait weeks two months on sampling stages because they'd have to send it out to a factory work with them on the design requirements and then get a sample and then probably get at least one more sample before moving forward to production that takes a long time instead the engineers can email their files of the factory down the road which is owned by bits power and then drive by and pick it up later that day this means that the company can rapidly prototype designs and potentially make multiple prototypes in a day then hook them all up for thermal testing to ensure the components are properly contacted and cooled as we said in the previous video it takes something like 25 minutes for a copper block to be made for a CPU a GPU would take longer it's a larger component but we didn't get specifics on that since bit power wasn't making any at the time we visited the acrylic pieces take somewhere around 11 minutes to make for a CPU and so the time to actually prototype something is relatively short it would be reasonable four bits power to make a couple different versions and then hook up thermal probes and run testing as desired to make sure every part of the board is cooled as needed we asked bits power why it doesn't use skiving like closed-loop cold plate makers do and the company told us that it's a waste of time for its product according to bits power because of the pressure created by the jet plate and the flow path for the water the additional service area of closer micro fins enters diminishing returns and only serves to drive up the defect rate which would increase the price for everybody including the customer currently the Finns are about 0.3 millimeters apart and although the company could make them closer with its existing processes it has determined that it's really better to just go with something that it knows works well and doesn't cause unnecessary defects and unnecessarily long manufacturing time while still providing what it thinks is about the same benefit if you're curious to see how toll plates are made for cl CS or a iOS you can check one of our other tours where we looked at deep cool and cooler master factories where they make the cold plates in-house for their own coolers it's typically done with skiving where a blade comes in and pushes up bits of the copper into the micro fin and follows this process repeatedly for every one of the micro fins in the block it takes a long time to make a single unit and so the cost is high even for a company at the scale of Coolermaster which is one of the largest cooling companies in the industry they even make stuff for street lights for example and so the time cost requirement for a company like bits power or other open-loop cooling solution companies is significant it's one of the highest costs outside of real estate in the industry and machine time ultimately needs to be controlled and in this case it looks like 0.3 millimeters is about what they're going with finally as discussed in the previous video there's one last QC process in the packaging area where everything is checked by eye so all this rnd equipment like the service level Mis measurements and the fitting dimensions checker that's used for both design and for QC after the development of the unit the factory level they already have a couple of checks involved where the technicians will pull units out of the tray every 20 minutes or so and make sure everything looks visually good and also check the threads and the flush mnestheus of the fittings contacting the plates but then after it's packaged and sent to this part of the headquarters testing is done to look at things more precisely like the tolerances the dimensions of the unit and then of course the more visual sense of things of just how does it look when it came out so that's everything for this setup for bits power you can check our previous tour for the CNC the machining side of things subscribe for more to check out additional factory tours coming up soon and you can go to stored eye cameras access or patreon.com slash cameras Nexus 2 helps out directly in pain for trips like this one thanks for watching and we'll see you all next timein a previous factory tour we talked about how bits powers qionghua taiwan factory manufactures its water cooling blocks fittings reservoirs and even ln2 pots today's tour looks at the company's R&D facility down the street where initial development and post manufacturing QC is handled most of this is done by the same four pieces of equipment but it's worth breaking it out into a separate video today we'll look at surface level this measurements something that we introduced into our own cooler reviews recently along side block keep out zone compliance planning quality control error and run to run variation in unit dimensions and the software side of development before that this video is brought to you by EVGA Tsar TX 28 e TI XE ultra the 28 e TI XE ultra is what we use in our CP reviews to avoid GPU bottlenecks the XE ultra uses hydraulic dynamic bearing fans for reduced noise features our TX support for DX our titles and uses a massive 2.75 slot cooler the cooler design allows the fans to spin slower and quieter while sinking heat further leveraging a mix of l-shaped and traditional fins to maximize airflow or contact learn more at the link in the description below before any of the previous tours machining takes place the company first has to design and prototype its products the previous tour looked at fitting manufacturing water block manufacturing and acrylic component manufacturing and you can find that torque and all of our other factory tours in the series in our factory to our playlist linked in the description below we'll start this process with planning bits power first faces a challenge that isn't related to mechanical engineering or its manufacturing but is instead related to relations and a different type of engineering social engineering the company has to get its hands on any new products coming to market as far in advance as possible and sometimes even has to wait until launch to buy new video cards or motherboards from a business perspective this has massive implications availability at launch is the difference between a successful product release for a cooling company and letting their competitor take the market because if bids power doesn't get to it on day one someone else competing with them surely will because of how restrictive Nvidia and AMD are with sampling it can sometimes be difficult to get components early enough to have measurements for block manufacturing so bits power has to rely on its relationships to pull through and with something like 90% of the blocks being sold being for NVIDIA cards and with how Nvidia is completely crazy when it comes to sampling it makes sense that this would be one of the most trying times for a company to try and get its new products together once this cloak-and-dagger process of talking to people is complete and the components are either acquired in advance of launch or are purchased bits power can begin the manufacturing process for this before making the parts bits power uses a scope that's hooked up to a computer and then magnifies the component either a motherboard or a video card and plots coordinates and software a technician uses physical wheels on the machines reposition the board under the magnifying glass then presses a button on the keyboard to place a point on the grid at the end of the process the points can be used in software to begin the design process for the block these measurements are needed because the topology of new boards is often different and keep out zones need to be established to avoid running into vrm components or other service mount devices there's only one of these stations set up so each day is spent measuring new boards and providing coordinates to the 3d modelers upstairs we asked if bits Power had any of the laser measurement systems and we're told that they might by next year but for now they're still using these semi manual means of measuring the sizing and height requirement for all of the blocks the neighboring depth gauge is for both development and quality control this set of midotaur equipment includes a $200,000 NTD marble slab or about $6,600 USD we asked a clarifying question about whether it's granite or marble since grant its more common for this type of thing but since we're not geologists we had to rely on translation and that came back as marble either way it's over 6 grand and it's only purpose in life is to be flat perfectly flat or very nearly so the slab is accompanied by a depth gauge similar to our own although much more expensive at $2,000 just for the data logger the middle Toyo serve test SJ 210 the gauge itself uses a probe and test the depth versus a known zero point to check the levelness of a surface this equipment is all expensive to buy but it's also expensive to set and trained for it needs to be tracked routinely for accuracy and recalibrated or at least recertified regularly like most precision instruments would its power uses this to check for level 'no sub new product surfaces and the check for engineering accuracy and also uses it for production units bits power checks roughly 30 to 40 pieces per 1000 units produced acting as another QC step after the factory level functionality QC steps and preceding the packaging level visual QC step any QC failures are thrown into the copper or aluminum recycling bins and sold back to the metal supplier for a rebate on the next order we explained that in the previous video but just as a recap a lot of this processing has some form of waste and fortunately most of it is a metal waste so it's relatively easy to recycle since it's not contaminated in the process of manufacturing it's just cut down with the excess removes from the stock block that's purchased from a supplier and then discard it into a bin all these are bagged up and sold back to the supplier for a discount and again that's at the spot price for copper aluminum or whatever the material may be plus the agreements in place with the supplier another station in this room is for obstacle inspection of components against known measurements from the engineers the microscope is hooked up to a backlight and a computer with CAD files loaded to establish known guidelines for acceptable variance in manufacturing the equipment is used for both quality control testing and for pre-production planning as is all the other equipment in this room and it's only partially automated the computer detects the outline in the product silhouette under the magnifying glass and on top of the light box and then optically measures the dimensions of the product without much human input in this instance a fitting is being checked for acceptable diameters and lengths the machine has an error of 0.005 millimeters and the spec for acceptable manufacturing tolerance was barred from being shown on camera but a technician cross-references the known guidance against what's shown on the screen then passes or fails the component obviously there's a lot of trade secrets at these places so we can't always show everything but they have guidelines that they follow and that's all you need to know although hesitant first we were able to work with bits power to show some of the 3d modeling of components prior to production after taking initial scans of components downstairs using the manual wheel scrolling and dot placement solution the technician sends the coordinates up to the modelers upstairs who begin 3d design in SolidWorks the company pulled up one of its designs that had already launched it to show us the models are made to accommodate component clearances and to ensure the right areas on the PCB like MOSFETs or other power components are all cleared from the time bits power receives the board the company requires about 14 days to design prototype and test its cooler this is one of the major benefits of doing everything in the house if bits power worked with third-party shops to manufacture its blocks it has to wait weeks two months on sampling stages because they'd have to send it out to a factory work with them on the design requirements and then get a sample and then probably get at least one more sample before moving forward to production that takes a long time instead the engineers can email their files of the factory down the road which is owned by bits power and then drive by and pick it up later that day this means that the company can rapidly prototype designs and potentially make multiple prototypes in a day then hook them all up for thermal testing to ensure the components are properly contacted and cooled as we said in the previous video it takes something like 25 minutes for a copper block to be made for a CPU a GPU would take longer it's a larger component but we didn't get specifics on that since bit power wasn't making any at the time we visited the acrylic pieces take somewhere around 11 minutes to make for a CPU and so the time to actually prototype something is relatively short it would be reasonable four bits power to make a couple different versions and then hook up thermal probes and run testing as desired to make sure every part of the board is cooled as needed we asked bits power why it doesn't use skiving like closed-loop cold plate makers do and the company told us that it's a waste of time for its product according to bits power because of the pressure created by the jet plate and the flow path for the water the additional service area of closer micro fins enters diminishing returns and only serves to drive up the defect rate which would increase the price for everybody including the customer currently the Finns are about 0.3 millimeters apart and although the company could make them closer with its existing processes it has determined that it's really better to just go with something that it knows works well and doesn't cause unnecessary defects and unnecessarily long manufacturing time while still providing what it thinks is about the same benefit if you're curious to see how toll plates are made for cl CS or a iOS you can check one of our other tours where we looked at deep cool and cooler master factories where they make the cold plates in-house for their own coolers it's typically done with skiving where a blade comes in and pushes up bits of the copper into the micro fin and follows this process repeatedly for every one of the micro fins in the block it takes a long time to make a single unit and so the cost is high even for a company at the scale of Coolermaster which is one of the largest cooling companies in the industry they even make stuff for street lights for example and so the time cost requirement for a company like bits power or other open-loop cooling solution companies is significant it's one of the highest costs outside of real estate in the industry and machine time ultimately needs to be controlled and in this case it looks like 0.3 millimeters is about what they're going with finally as discussed in the previous video there's one last QC process in the packaging area where everything is checked by eye so all this rnd equipment like the service level Mis measurements and the fitting dimensions checker that's used for both design and for QC after the development of the unit the factory level they already have a couple of checks involved where the technicians will pull units out of the tray every 20 minutes or so and make sure everything looks visually good and also check the threads and the flush mnestheus of the fittings contacting the plates but then after it's packaged and sent to this part of the headquarters testing is done to look at things more precisely like the tolerances the dimensions of the unit and then of course the more visual sense of things of just how does it look when it came out so that's everything for this setup for bits power you can check our previous tour for the CNC the machining side of things subscribe for more to check out additional factory tours coming up soon and you can go to stored eye cameras access or patreon.com slash cameras Nexus 2 helps out directly in pain for trips like this one thanks for watching and we'll see you all next time\n"