Transcription
This was the fastest PC that I've ever built. Two RTX 5090s, the latest 64 core Thread Ripper, 128 GB of RAM. It's so fast it needed a 2200 W power supply just to keep it running. But there's one major problem. This top GPU is overheating. And I don't mean just like a little bit warm. That top GPU is hitting 87° C after just a few minutes of rendering. At that point, the fans are screaming. The temperatures are way too hot, and I'm actually losing a bit of performance from that GPU as well. Basically, I have no option but to try and fix this. At least, I'm going to try to because I've never liquid cooled anything close to the amount of heat load that this thing is pushing out.
But let's start with the easy part, the CPU. This is a Thread Ripper 9980X. 64 cores, 128 threads, and believe it or not, it actually doesn't need as much cooling as you think, especially out of the box. Still though, we are hooking it up to the custom loop. And for that, I've gone with this block here from Heatkiller. Finding a Thread Ripper water block was actually surprisingly difficult. But no complaints with this one at all. Full coverage, really clean, and the mounting is super straightforward.
But now for the hard part, tearing down these 5090s. It's a shame because this super efficient two slot caller design on the new FE cards is one of my favorite things about them. I've got to be really careful not to break anything here. So, there's still the option to go back to them. I'm also going to tear down both at the same time because there's a lot of steps. The first few are simple enough. We've got the IO bracket at the rear with a bunch of screws underneath there as well. And then there's two more screws at the other end. Then there's this hourglass piece on the back plate that's held in with magnets. I wedged a little plastic scraper tool in there which seem to work pretty well. Then we've got four more screws here which lock in those two side parts on the back plate. And this is where it gets really weird. The PCIe connector on the Founders Edition GPUs are actually a separate piece. It's connected here with six more screws and its own little retention bracket. I'm being very careful with this part because you don't want to break this. You're probably thinking that this is insane overengineering for a GPU by now. But it gets even crazier. After that, we've got four more screws holding in the main part of the back plate, which we lift off and reveal the insanely dense back portion of the PCB. Then we get to one of the more tedious parts, these tiny cables. One of them is this tiny two pin cable with a sliding latch. And then there are two more ribbon cables with latches that need to be carefully lifted up. If you have a small tool, like even like a toothpick, that will make this a lot easier. Then there's this part right here. This is actually the connector for the rear IO. All of your 4K ray traced frames are sent right through this thing here, which is just so insane. From there, we've got the four main screws clamping the GPU down to the heat sink. And I was super careful here. I barely did one full screw turn at a time just to make sure it releases as evenly as possible. Even the retention bracket is just straight up nuts when you really take a look at it because Nvidia don't use any springs for mounting. It's just the pure tension that you get from this pre-bent bracket. And that's it. We can now lift up the main ingredient of what makes an RTX 1590. I knew this thing was small and dense, but holding it in person and seeing how close all of the components are together, man, it is just something else. I mean, the GPU itself is massive. The GDDR7 memory stacked so closely, it's practically overlapping. And don't forget, this board also includes all of the dense power circuitry as well. There's basically no room for anything else. Making the circuit board this small is one of the main reasons the cooling is so good on the 5090 FE. Air can push right through the heat sink and right past the circuit board completely unobstructed. Liquid metal is also one of those reasons, allowing for a higher thermal conductivity to the heatsink. We'll be reapplying this with something fresh in just a minute. And there's actually one more thing. We still need that IO cable if we want to make a complete GPU. These are the last steps to completely disassembling this card. Removing the fans, wrestling with the heat sink and the annoying clips that it's held in by, and then super carefully removing that insane connector after applying a bit of heat. And that's it. That's the 5090 FE completely torn down like 8 million parts later.
And then fast forward a bit of time later, here they are with the water blocks installed. And man, just take a look at these. These are some of the nicest GPU water blocks that I've personally ever seen. For me, this workstation just pure performance aesthetic absolutely annihilates the typical gaming GPU water blocks that you'll see with acrylic and RGB. Also, can you believe that this is a 5090? I mean, it's still kind of blowing my mind how small this thing is. Very compact, single slot, 234 ms in length, inlet and outlet ports at the very end. And believe it or not, half of the block is actually just empty space. It's just there to make a bit of a gap for that IO cable that we just pulled out. It was also pretty cool to see the 5090 diet up close and just kind of geek out for a bit because it has this really cool gasket that surrounds the GPU. There's like three gasket barriers to protect the liquid metal from degradation and from like spilling onto the circuitry. And it seems to be doing a pretty good job because the liquid metal that was on there originally looked brand new. I actually bought these from AliExpress. They're from Bixie. They took about a month to arrive. They also arrived a little bit scratched on this mirror plate on the front here, but yeah, overall still really happy with how they look. And I cannot wait to get these fired up.
So, with the water blocks installed, it was time to get everything mounted in the case, hooked up, and ready for some water cooling madness. But this is where I hit a major roadblock. The case that I used for this build wasn't exactly cooperating with what I had planned. I had an assortment of 360 mil radiators ready, but they barely fit. And also, there was no way to properly mount one to the bottom. I had this epic plan. You know, this build was going to have a ton of cooling. It was going to look dense and insane. But that's not where things were heading. It's definitely not Fantex's fault. You know, this case is really nice if you want to build something similar to my initial air cooled build, but extreme liquid cooling, yeah, that's not happening. So, I gave up and got myself a new Apple Mac Pro. I'm just kidding. This is actually a PC case. It's the Apollo X from McPro. I've had this case sitting around for about a year now, and I've been waiting for something really epic to do with it, and I think now is the perfect time. It looks like an Apple Mac Pro from every angle. And I'm not talking like fake cheap Mac Pro. I mean, look at this thing. Even up close, the anodizing and the quality are really close to what you would get from Apple. This cheese grater CNC front panel as well, I think looks incredible. I know it's like the fake PC version, but hey, it's pretty close to what Apple's putting out as far as I can see. These chrome handles as well run through the entire case just like the real thing. It is actually a bit more compact than the Fantex case that I was using for air calling, but somehow it fits my EATX Thread Ripper board no problem at all. And you know, before I swapped over to this thing, I had to make sure that it would be suitable for extreme liquid cooling in terms of how much radiator volume you could fit in here. So, I got out the measuring tape just to make sure. And turns out you can fit quite a bit in here. This is Alphacall's 360 mil monster, and it comes in at 86 mm thick. For reference, your typical AIO has a radiator thickness of 27 to 28 mm. So, this is like three of those stacked together. The fin density though on the other hand is pretty low. You know, apparently performance on this is best in a pushpull setup with lower fan speeds. So, I'll keep that in mind once we get this up and running. For the fans, I've gone with the P12 Pros from Arctic. I haven't used these before, but if it's anything like their other stuff, the air flow and the noise should be really good. Fitting in that massive front radiator though was definitely a challenge. You know, I had done the measurements. I knew it would fit, but I had to put the build upside down to prevent scratching anything. And I also had to go with slim fans on the rear. Otherwise, it was actually blocking the motherboard 24 pin. With slim fans though, it's basically as perfect as the clearance can possibly get. So, no complaints there. And the cooling should hopefully still be really insane. And believe it or not, there's still room at the bottom for a 240. We can't go as thick for this one as we've got that bottom GPU to think about, but this extra rad should help lower things by a few extra degrees at least. And then just a couple extra 80 mil fans from Noctua running in the rear as exhaust to just help out those 5090s a little bit more. They need as much cooling as they can get.
Now the build was really getting somewhere. And actually I realized I could fit a lot more in this compact midtower than I thought. But there's one more part that we need, and it's this, the pump and reservoir. And the one I've gone with here is this insanely clean UNI240D from Steel Key with an Apex D5 pump from Alphacore. This is not only going to pump coolant throughout the entire loop, but it serves as a nice distribution block as well and a tank for some spare liquid. The problem though is finding somewhere to mount it. We don't exactly have much space left over. Luckily though, before I installed any of the parts, I actually 3D scanned the interior of the case. That way, I had an accurate reference to then create a quick 3D model in Fusion and then work on some custom mounting for this pump and resz. I've actually done this exact thing a number of times in way smaller builds, too, but this one was really tricky. The only empty space left in this entire build is in front of the motherboard, and this thing just barely fits between the front and rear fans. There's basically 5 mm of clearance on either side. Making things worse, the mounting points on this pump res are behind it. So, I can't exactly just, you know, fit it in and screw it in. I need to make something that was hidden and clean and also toolless and secure. After about an hour of playing around, I came up with this. It's a sliding rail kind of design with a little notch on the other side, so it kind of locks itself in. But if you really want to release it, you can just by applying enough force. At least that's how I imagine it to work. I ended up 3D printing this in resin on the Formlabs Form 4 because it ended up actually being a bit faster than filament when I looked at the print files and also because the tolerances for these sliding parts need to be basically perfect and it actually worked. The rail slides in and self-locks just how I imagined. I did have to reprint this though just to get the mounts lined up perfectly and also to thicken up the ones on the pump res side. But yeah, now it sits really nicely in that top part of the build. And the best part is if I need to pull it out to access the RAM or the CPU, I can do that really easily without a single tool.
The only thing left to do was to drop in those 5090s, hook up the tubing, fill it up with coolant, and finally see if everything had worked. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat.
This thing turned out really, really nice. I actually can't believe that this is my new machine. But now is the moment I've been waiting for. You know, how are the temperatures specifically on those two 5090s? That's the entire reason I water cooled this machine in the first place. The air cooled version of this system was pretty much unusable if I'm honest with one of those GPUs being thermally limited. Well, not anymore. Now, at full load in Blender, these 5090s sit below 50°. I don't think I've ever had a system with GPU temps this cool. Even with both side panels on, lowering the fan speeds, adding the Thread Ripper to the rendering, the GPUs sit below 60, and that's with an ambient temp of around 24. Also, because the GPUs are running cooler, they're naturally going to run a little bit faster with lower power draw than an aircooled variant of it, but I wasn't expecting performance like this. We're seeing boost clocks up almost 200 MHz, and the power draw is sitting around 400 W. Now granted, Blender doesn't push both GPUs to the absolute limit. It's like 95 96% usage when rendering, but I have just tested V-Ray and still I'm seeing like 450 W on those GPUs. Sounds like a lot, but remember out of the box, these cards usually pull like 575 600 W. So yeah, the power reduction and the performance increase just from liquid cooling. I mean, it's a cheat code. And I am actually really glad I went with this case. It is extremely convincing as an Apple Mac Pro, but then you take the side panel off and it looks like something from a different planet. The performance of this, by the way, compared to a fully speced Mac Pro is in a completely different dimension. Apple is still really lagging behind when it comes to GPU compute on the enthusiast end. So, you know, MacBooks, Mac minis, I personally love those, but for this stuff, rendering, gaming, just pure GPU horsepower, it's not even close. So yeah, I cannot wait to put this thing to some very good use.