Liquid cooling

- There are few things that separate nerds from normals more than liquid cooling. By liquid cooling, I mean you take your CPU, and you put some big metal mount on it. This mount has got a hole in and a hole out. There's a bunch of holes in the middle, and liquid goes through this big mount, taking the heat away, and then it's run out and then cooled off somehow and cycled back. Liquid cooling's been around for a long, long time. Over 15 years now, and back in the old days, it was pretty ugly. There wasn't anything very standardized, and there was a lot of custom work that had to be done.

Things would leak from time to time, and in general, it wasn't very pretty. Today, it works really well. Now, before we go any further, I want to make sure you understand that there are two types of liquid cooling. The far more common type is called passive liquid cooling. Passive liquid cooling means the liquid goes through a big mount on top of the CPU. It gets all heated up. It's run through a radiator. The radiator cools it down some, and then a pump pushes it around again. Active liquid cooling is a refrigerator, and I am not kidding even to this day, you can buy a case, and the base of that case is a refrigerator, and you can literally pump refrigerant over your CPU.

Now, active cooling is only done by very, very strange people like me. Passive cooling is by far the most common type, and the one that you're gonna use on the comp t exam. So the nice thing today is that we can get premade liquid cooling systems. What makes this even nicer is I have an Antec case, so Antec actually makes a liquid cooling system that's designed to work with this particular case. And it manifests itself as basically these two pieces. I've got the CPU mount. This is the big metal piece that sits over the CPU.

And a big radiator. So basically what takes place is this guy's gonna have to be mounted onto the CPU itself, and then the radiator will be mounted to the side of the case. We'll put a fan on it, so the fan will blow right through the radiator. And that is a complete liquid cooling solution. So, it looks pretty easy. In fact, this one even comes with a couple of fans that are designed to... This is actually kind of cool. When I bought this case, I was wondering why it had a fan mount right here.

And I've now come to realization that it's designed to mount my fans for my liquid cooling system, so that's gonna be pretty cool. So, this should be really easy. All I have to do is go through my little instruction book, and start messing with, oh boy, this isn't going to be the easiest thing in the world, so this might take a minute. (elevator music) - Wow, see how easy that was? Okay, well I'm not gonna say that installing a liquid cooling system is as easy as putting in a fan for your CPU, but the results are often worth it.

And this particular case, I've dropped my CPU temperature by about 16 degrees centigrade, and it is much, much quieter. So, liquid cooling is definitely an opportunity if you really need a quiet system. It's also used by over clockers when they push their system beyond the rated speed since the extra heat generated by the CPU often requires a liquid cooling system. The only trick to remember about liquid cooling is that it works pretty much exactly the same in terms of connectivity to your motherboard as a fan.

You're still gonna have a CPU connection. You're still gonna need to provide it power, and if that liquid cooling system fails, you're still gonna get that same symptom. Your system is gonna reboot occasionally, your number one sign of a hot CPU. (elevator music)