 This monstrosity right here is my personal gaming rig, and it's actually served me really well for the last three years. At the time, the specs were pretty blazing fast. It had an extreme edition 8-core processor, calling 8-cores extreme these days seems kind of quaint, and a Titan X graphics card. But because it uses Nvidia's old Maxwell architecture, this Titan graphics card not only is much slower than modern gaming cards, it actually lacks a bunch of really cool features, like their updated video encoder, as well as, you know, RTX real-time ray tracing. So, today's video is all about upgrading it. But here's the thing. I don't have time to spend literally a year designing a custom paint job for the front. Okay, I didn't design that, but admittedly I do think it looks cool. And a completely custom enclosure for full loop water cooling in a rack mount chassis. That ain't happening. So today's gonna be all about, well, if I'm being honest, playing Anno 1800. Because I got that game, it ran like garbage on my 3440x1440 monitor, and so I reached out to Aorus and Nvidia, who put together this little care package that's gonna take us from very, very last gen to pretty much the fastest it gets. IBM is giving away 1500 DJI Telo drones. To enter to win, complete the IBM Developer Challenge. No prior coding knowledge is required, and the contest is open to residents of the US, Canada, UK, and Spain. You gotta be 18 years of age, so check it out at the link below. So I guess we'll start with a little classic unboxing of what has to be one of the coolest motherboard products to come down the pipe. In my opinion, at least the last year or so. This is the Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Extreme, what do they call it? Water Force 5G. And what's special about it is that this is like an $1,100 motherboard or something crazy like that. But it's also not as insane as it might sound. Because unlike most motherboards, this one actually includes a pre-binned and pre-overclocked CPU. So check this out. The board actually comes with the CPU pre-installed. So it's a Core i9-9900K that's been validated for 5.1 GHz. It's got all the usual features you'd expect, a handful of M.2s, SLI support, three PCIe 16x slots. Oh, this could throw a bit of a monkey wrench in the pudding. We've got a side-mounted 24-pin, hopefully that fits. My case is a little unconventional, but right. What's more interesting than all the features it has is what it doesn't have. Check that out. Bear chipset. Check that out. We've got bare VRMs. There's no cooling on this board. What kind of crazy person would buy a thousand dollar motherboard with absolutely no cooling on it whatsoever? So it turns out what I was looking for was actually in a clearly labeled separate box. This is the Aorus all-in-one monoblock. So a monoblock is basically a single block that is designed to cool multiple different components. So this one right here is designed to cool, check this out, the CPU, the VRM components, all three of your M.2 drives and the chipset. It weighs probably like, oh my goodness, like a kilo or two. And it looks like it includes not one, but two RGB lighting leads. Here's one and here's what appears to be another one, although I'm not 100% sure if that's right. Here we've got a bracket and a rubber, because when you got this much sex appeal, you never know what might accidentally happen. Am I right, my friends? And then we've got a bunch of, ah, a bunch of supplies for screwing. So our first order of business then is mounting the monoblock to the motherboard. Okay. And now we start to put in screws. One pro tip for installing any kind of block, whether it's an individual CPU block or some kind of a monoblock, whether it's graphics or full motherboard, is you never want to go in too tight. So I'm just putting these in a little bit to make sure they're not cross threaded. I am basically not tightening them at all, just holding them in place. I've determined that the washers are for these screws, not by reading the manual, of course, but by just noticing that they are either plastic or they're coated. And otherwise, these screws would be going into a bare PCB, which could cause a short because they're just normal metal screws. So these washers then are serving two purposes. One is to make sure that it doesn't short out. The second purpose of these washers is to ensure that the screws don't accidentally loosen over time. You might not realize this, but the inside of a computer can have a lot of vibrations, whether it's from fans or spinning discs. And unless you've got Loctite and or washers on anything that you've mounted, it is possible for them to vibrate loose over time. Wow. So as much as it kills me to bid adieu to my limited edition gold plated CPU block, this is pretty spiffy looking. So now I've got to take apart my old rig. All right, so the first thing we're going to do is pop out both the GPU and CPU. It's one of the things I love about soft tubing is that it is super quick, actually, to get your entire loop removed for system maintenance. There we go. So that gives me completely unfettered access to my motherboard area. Here's my Intel NIC. These days, every motherboard that's worth its salt ships with a better network card than this, so I'll be leaving this behind. You know, it's funny, I would say one of the most notable things about this machine is how not out of date certain components are. I mean, Corsair only replaced the AX1500i, I think like six months ago, and even then the 1600i, yeah, it's better, but it's not like, you know, a quantum leap forward in power supply performance or anything like that. And I actually will still get to reuse my Dominator DDR4 in here. So this is a 64 gig kit of CAS15 memory. Yeah, it only runs at 2666, designed for Gen 6, i5s, and i7s. But hey, if it fits, i6, right? I mean, to be clear, I'm not expecting XMP profiles to work or anything like that, but it should function. Now, a lot of people get into newfangled coolants with, you know, colorants or additives or whatever else, but I have always been a proponent of straight-up water, and I will show you guys why. Because even with plain water, you can see that the flow over time, like water will erode pretty much anything, we've managed to strip the nickel plating from some parts of this block, exposing the original copper. Also, even with pure water, although that is with a couple of drops of biocide, we still get a little bit of like, you know, corrosion and stuff like that. But what you don't see is any microbial growth. Because the thing is, a little bit of corrosion or a little bit of erosion, which is what we're looking at here, is not going to kill your system. Microbial growth, that will gunk up your blocks like that. And it is pretty much game over. It's funny, it feels like such a downgrade, going from the HEDT or the high-end desktop platform of YOR, to a mainstream solution. But not only does this consumer, you know, mainstream CPU have just as many processing cores, they are so much faster than my old rig that I'm expecting from the CPU alone, a double digits performance uplift. Okay, I think it's in. It's not in. Okay. Okay. Whoo! So now that our motherboard's in, we're ready for the main event of this upgrade. So, this is it. Looks so good, I almost feel bad taking the like, sexy air-cooled shroud off it, but we definitely have to do that. So this is part of Corsair's entire new lineup of full custom water cooling products. It took them a long time to enter this segment of the market, but they've been a big name in the AIO cooler space for a long time. So I'm excited to see just how this new endeavor works out for them. Overall, I have to say I'm not, like, my initial impressions of the build quality don't really blow me away. Like, especially when you compare the stock backplate, which is like this thick friggin' thing. This looks very plain and kind of flimsy by comparison. Also, their block seems to be designed to help save them some copper, because this shroud on the outside, while very stylish and sexy looking, is made of aluminum, which is quite a lot cheaper. And then they've also gone with some kind of molded plastic for the fittings up here. That is... ooh. So this saves them, like, a lot of copper, but when you compare that to the high-end blocks from other manufacturers, it really sets them behind in terms of build quality. Okay, so here's the situation. I've got the board cleaned up, so we're pretty much ready to mount. Man, that is a big GPU. Couple key developments. We've got the Corsair block installed. Actually, on the card, it looks pretty sharp. I will give them that. Not bad, Corsair. Not bad. So our GPU is gonna go in here, and then out like this, a little something like that. So let's go ahead and plug in the motherboard first. So I actually had the length of this cable done up custom for this case and the old motherboard, so that means it's gonna be a little bit wonky now. Go ahead and pop that in there. The good news is that it fits. I was really worried that this reservoir bracket was gonna interfere, but it just barely fits on there, so that's pretty sick. All right. GPU is going in. Okay. Not bad. Not bad. Oh, I think my original tube here might make it. That looks so tacky. I love it so much. It's horrible. There we go. That's it, ladies and gentlemen. That is my upgraded personal rig until I upgrade anything else about it. However, oh, that's heavy. That's really, really heavy. One moment, please. All right. So I borrowed a power cable. I found my trusty mini funnel, and we are ready to fill this puppy. Go, go, go, go, go. Come on, baby. Whoo, there it goes. Oh, it's backwards. Wait, there may actually still be time to rectify this. One moment. I'm going to flip it up onto its faceplate. You can see the water draining out of the CPU block there. See that? Now the GPU doesn't matter. Doesn't care which way it flows, but our CPU block does. So what we need to do is we need to get a new run that goes from here to here instead and from here to here. Oh, yes. OK. Of course, it would be cruel and unusual punishment if we didn't at least see if it runs the game well. And also if it works. So I grabbed Riley's monitor off his desk, which happens to be the exact model that I use for gaming at home. And we're going to go ahead and fire this baby up. Hey, where's my keyboard and mouse? All right. Then options. Oh, look at that. That's what faulted me to lots of crazy settings. That's cool. OK. I will just load up the sandbox game. All right. Oh, that is so much better. So by comparison with my old system, I was running at medium details and I was chugging down to as low as like 40 FPS. Now there's actually a frame rate counter up in the top left here. I'm at ultra everything, except I turned anti-aliasing down to 2x and I'm hovering in the 45 to 70 frames per second, which is fine for a game like this. More than fine, especially if you're running a G-Sync monitor. Thanks to IBM for sponsoring this video. The IBM Developer Drone Giveaway is back by popular demand and they're giving away another 1500 DJI Telo drones. Just complete the IBM Developer Challenge to enter the competition. It teaches you how to use IBM Watson with no prior coding knowledge required. Winners will get the Telo drone along with access to additional IBM Developer tutorials that will teach you how to connect the drone to IBM Watson visual recognition and AI so it can identify objects and send information to the cloud. This analysis can allow developers to implement all kinds of things from assessing wildfire damage to finding your dog's tennis ball. The contest is open to residents of the US, Canada, UK, and Spain and open to people 18 years or older. Check it out at the link in the video description. So thanks for watching guys. If you disliked this video, you can hit that button. But if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed, or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description. Also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join.