 With only our own hard work and brains, and very expensive 8K RID camera, Alex and I will now be finding out if, in fact, you can water cool a RED Digital Cinema 8K camera. You have not test reassembled this, have you? I have not. Alright, so this is gonna be an adventure, ladies and gentlemen. RIDG Wallet is the sleek way to keep wallet balls down with its compact frame and RFID blocking inner plates. Check out their new patterns and use the offer code LINUS to save 10% and get free worldwide shipping. Yeah, so we need to make one of these but the correct size. Mm-hmm, okay. We also probably should leak test the whole thing before we, you know, actually put it in the camera. Yeah, minor details. So this goes in the box, and we'll just, you know, take the little heat sinks, put them together, just kind of assemble it all here, fill it with water and see what happens. Okay, so in front of us, we've got our radiator, an alpha cool pump, and then we've also got two, basically Frankensteined blocks onto existing cooling systems within the camera. Once we're done, theoretically, the entire inside of the camera will be water cooled, but we will still have the air cooling fans running. Is this everything? So this is our other water block, and also this bucket that's filled with the RED camera. So I'm putting this on here, is that right? Yep. All right. It really helps if you take the screws out of the radiator on the other side first. Oh, I guess I should assume everything about this project's kind of screwed. Probably the most stressful bit of today is that we have to turn two of these heat pipes into the correctly bent heat pipes like this, and we only have four of them, and we bought the entire stock of them in Canada, so. And these are your previous attempts? Yep, these are- That doesn't bode well. Yeah. You're just guessing and checking? Do you have another way to do it? Well, I just assumed you had another way to do it. What do I pay you for? 2.25 millimeters, just give her a bit more. 2.12, just give her a little bit. 2.08 actually, we want to do a tiny bit more. You're going to overcook it. I'm not going to overcook it. You overcooked it. 2.01 millimeters. So you're still over, you undercooked it. That's- That's what I said. Absolutely nailed it. I'm just going to bend this tube here. You'd think that it's a bit more high tech than it is, but nope, we definitely could have made this ourselves instead of buying it, but here we go. The hard part is getting two of them exactly the same. You might be thinking, oh goodness, that's going the wrong way, which isn't fantastic, but we're just going to bend it back for here. Not recommended for sure. And there we go. We have basically a fully done heat pipe. So this is our one that we know fits correctly. Even if they're not totally bang on, we at least have two more tries and we haven't totally screwed these ones up yet. Okay, I'm back. I found some fittings. Thank you. I need a wrench. Do you? Yeah, I can't get this off. Do we not have an adjustable wrench? Why would you want that? It's under nut rounders. Nut grinders? Rounders. Also, I already got the fitting off with my hands. Hey, at least I managed to find the right fitting, smart guy. I could have found those too. But you didn't. This is going to be a really tight fit, you know. I can't get a tube in there. Like this hole should be even a quarter inch that way, and I'd be able to get it in there. These silicone hoses are normally used for bending hard line tubing, but, fun fact, you can actually use them to bend soft tubing as well. This is going to work way better than I could have possibly hoped. Zero kinkage. All along the top here, once it's tightened down, you can see that the O-ring is compressed. So we shouldn't have any leaks. Shouldn't. That's what I want to hear. So when I first planned out this loop, the pump was the other way around, but it eventually had to be flipped. There was a fitting spot, like a port, on the top that was going to be used to fill the whole thing, which we now don't have access to. Could we just put a hole in here? Maybe, but it probably wouldn't look good. There was a reason that I did it that way, and I don't quite remember what it was at this point. So this is our sensor cooling block. I don't know if you've actually seen it in the flesh yet. Wow, no, I haven't. Did you hand mill that? Kind of looks hand done. This right here was all done with the router. This was done on the mill. Does that have a bunch of junk in it though? What do you mean? Like it looks like there's like residue in it. Oh, it's just a bit of lube. Is there anything wrong with lube and lube? I just don't think lube is great for not dunking up the water. Yeah, that's fair. I'll run a pipe cleaner through it. Now because these fittings for the inside of the camera are so small, there's nowhere that they could really put an O-ring seal on them. So instead, we're using Teflon tape to seal up the threads. Umm... Now because we don't actually have a quick and easy way to leak test our blocks, we took one of those five-way manifolds that we didn't end up using, plugged four of them, connected the last one, connected that to the block, plugged the end with a pair of vice grips, and now we can hook up our EK leak tester here. So I'm just going to go ahead and pressurize the lube, and we're going to leave it for a little bit and see if our block leaks. I don't hear anything. Needle's not moving. I also want to make sure that this heat pipe right here didn't collapse. So the thing about a heat pipe is you need to have the fluid inside able to move freely. So if you accidentally kink it and you impede that movement, that can be a big problem for performance. So how do you test that then? Well, I'd like to say that there's a good way to do it, but... Oh, wait, hold on a second. Seriously? Yeah. So heating up heat pipes can cause them to explode, but presumably you're not going to heat it up much, right? No. Yeah, my finger's getting pretty hot. Okay, alright, alright, alright. Our block is leaking, but I don't think it's around the O-ring. I think it's around the fittings, and I popped one of them out, and that's clearly not enough Teflon tape. So we Teflon taped the bejesus out of these fittings, and it's sticking. Yeah, looks good. Whoo, that's very good news, because if it was the O-ring or something else about the block design, we were in trouble. This is the one I'm more concerned about. Like for the block itself actually leaking? Yeah. Oh, wow. She is. Yeah. I think we might have to submerge it, sir. Do we have a bucket of water? We can make a bucket of water. So it looks like the leak is actually in the fitment between the top cover and the bottom plate. I didn't want it to come to this, but we do have gasket maker. We could just give her. Oh! So we might be able to- This is just not flat enough. We might be able to skimmer. Alright, we have a lapping plate. Okay, cool. Let's do it. Round two. Here we go. Oh, dang it. Really? Okay, so we're boned now. I don't think we're boned. While drilling this hole right here, I went down a touch too far. So that means I need to go real heavy on the Teflon tape up at the top. I was thinking that we could put JB Weld in there and then run a tap through. I think this will hold. Is this the mangled remains of one of the original coolers? Yup. This was the one we were planning to try to reuse, isn't it? Yup. Oh, that seems like a lot. Yeah, that is a lot. Come on. Guys, it's right here. Yeah, but this one is already in my hand. Adjustable wrenches. There's nothing wrong with them for a part that you're going to use a couple times. Did we get it? No bubbles, though. I'm glad that we tested these beforehand. There's no way I was sticking this in a red and just calling it a day. Oh, I think we've got a bubble on the right side. Oh, yeah. Damn it. Technically, water is a bigger molecule. So if just a little bit of air gets out... That actually looks okay, though. Yeah, it does. So do we get to reassemble this damn thing? We do. Yes. Okay. What fan is this? That's the fan that's from the red. We're replacing it with Noctua. Yeah. Goodbye, fan. One holiday later. So our radiator and pump have apparently been leak tested now. So that's a big difference from before. And we are basically ready to reassemble now. Is that correct? Yeah. Let's do it. So I think sensor is a good spot to start. Okay. I think we need our guide. Sure, they could be in the unlabeled bag. How this went together was just like in my brain a month ago. How bad is it if I bend the seat pipe a little? A little is not bad. A lot is very bad. All right. Those are cranked on there. Hopefully the correct tightness. Yeah. Don't put that on quite yet. Oh, okay. It's easier if we put the other one on first. Neat. So I potentially have some rather bad news. This little thing that's on top of the heat sink. Yeah. Where is it? I have no clue. I am concerned that everything was put back in the bins by not me. Here it is. It's right here. Oh, it's just stuck to a bag. Okay. Good. I suspect this is temperature related. It has to be. So that's on there. You can hardly tell how wonderful the epoxy job was once that's on there. Yeah. I am so excited to find out if this thing works better now. Yeah. I kind of realized a little while ago that we probably could have got like 90% of the improvement by just swapping the thermal compound and putting in some new Noctua fans. And we probably could have found out if there was any purpose to this whatsoever by just using chilled air at the intake and seeing if the image quality improves. Yeah. Oh, I see. Yeah. Oh, that's really tight. It's really tight. Yeah. So this has to go on here, but this heat pipe has to go over on this side. But I have to put in a screw on the back of this. We're going to have to bend your heat pipes, Alex. No, we have to. Nope, we don't. Do we have enough clearance there? No, I think you're right. Okay. Yeah, we got to lock it off. Fun. Oh, I wonder if I can just use the pliers to turn the head of the screw, Alex. I wish these were spring loaded. Can you get around it? Oh, yeah, there we go. Okay. We have defeated the nubbin. So now we can do a double check here. Okay. It's not supposed to be a pry tool. Some of them even say it on the side. Have you ever seen anyone use anything except for a flathead screwdriver to open up a paint can? Yes, they have paint can opening tools. That sounds stupid. I don't think you actually put any in the holes, really. I guess that of the two of us, you have more experience, you know. Critiquing others or? Well, I was going to say just like you have three children. So the problem is that the implement's a bit too big. I also have a lot of experience with that problem. Don't miss this. This is the double penetration moment. Oh, boy. Oh, we can't leave that in the video. I'll just get in there, give it a little wipe. This is how all the pro chefs do it. They just make an absolute mess on your plate and then they come in with a paper towel afterward. Should we wait for that to dry? No. Okay. Is there enough clearance for this heat sink? Yep. Oh, you sound very confident. So Mr. David, from a camera person's perspective, which where do you want the tubing coming out? Anywhere in those fans is fine. Anywhere? Yeah, the camera will sit on this. And so if it comes out here, that's fine. So right side, left side makes no difference to you? No, it's fine. Okay. And I bet if you just take out one of them, I can probably put both of them through it. I don't know if the side cutters are going to work. I don't know if you're going to work. Did you not see the rack over there when you came in? What rack? That's where you can check your attitude. Wow. All right. So how long do we think this needs to be? Like that, that's reasonable, right? I would just make it longer just for fun. Sure. I think the hardest part is done and now we're just reassembling it. If you know that what you're saying necessitates a knock on wood, why would you say it? Drama for the video, I guess. I don't need that drama. What is the purpose of these labels? I don't need to know what they do. I just need to... It says like what it is on the stuff. Oh, I see. Wait. What? You got port and starboard confused. Can we all agree that those connectors go right there? That does look correct, yes. Damn it, Alex. Where the hell does this go? You still have no recollection of this, do you? None at all. Is it possible it's where you did all your cable management? Yeah, I think it goes right in there. Oh crap. Wires kind of get managed. Sorry, I just poked it back through. That was my bad. I poked it with my finger. Oh, jeez. Yeah, it liked it though. Wow. Not required. Oh. Balls. Oh, easy, easy, easy, easy. Oh, did I go too far? You might have gone too far. Does it matter? Doesn't really. Okay, cool. Editor, could I get it? So off comes the block again. Like just... Like is it worth just like getting a little bit more? I know for a fact that engineers at RED will watch this video. Oh yeah. Realistically though guys, this was the best outcome you could have possibly hoped for. Yeah, even though this is like in some ways the jankiest thing we've done in a really long time, in other ways it's the least janky thing we've done in quite a long time. We could just cut out all of the bad stuff, editor. David senses something bad about to happen, turns the camera on. No, I've got this David. Hey, shut up. You realize that ring's turning your mouth all blue. Yeah, but this is my dessert for my lunch. I was a good boy, I ate all my lunch. This is the one we needed to massage a bit, I believe. I'd say you probably still need to do a fair bit there. That's so loud. So much sucking. I'll lose my mouth right now. Eight out of ten blue. Suck on that. So does it reach now? Yes. I knew that from the beginning. I was never concerned at all that this wouldn't fit. How'd you even get that through there? Jeez. Okay, Wi-Fi antenna connected. Fan connector number one. Connected. Connected, all right. Thank you for that. Ouch. Should we screw this in? No. Okay. We're quite sure that this heat pipe isn't going to touch the back of that PCB, right? Where's electrical tape? That's your solution? My only solution. Perfect. In. Yes, perfect. No. We can just use the PCB as we screw it down to push that heat pipe in the last couple of millimeters. Oh, no. So problem. You didn't think about how to get this out of the body. We forgot. You forgot. We forgot. I never knew. Oh, no. So we're really close now. So close, in fact, that Andy is actually tearing down the camera we've been shooting on so that we can steal all the accessories and hook them up to this one and find out if it actually works. So we're shooting on a plebeian Canon C200 now. The sides completely closed up. It's actually looking pretty finished right about now. You'd never know there was anything funky about it other than the giant tubes hanging out the back. All right. One, two, three. Here you go. Oh, my God. Now things getting sexy. Here's the plan. Okay. So. What? Hi, I'm being slow clapped right now. What can I do for you? It was painted so nice. So while Alex is off looking for a funnel, we're going to fill the loop the manly way. Why can't you just wait for me to go and get a funnel and then we can do it right. There's nothing that can go wrong here without you just pouring it straight in the hole. He's back with his stupid funnel. What a weakling. Oh crap. Okay. Power it off. Power it off. How do I power it off? You hold it. Oh, hold on. We got. Okay. Power it off anyway. Power it off anyway. I don't want to burn out this pump. Hold it down. Hold it down. Well, just pour. What? No, I can't. I can't. It doesn't work that way. Let's just try to bleed the rad. All right. Is that working? Yep. That's working. Okay. Just bite it off. Kind of wish I had a bubble to watch move, you know? Oh, there it is. Oh, yeah. Hey. It's some of it. Hey, there's the rest of it. There it goes. Oh, yeah. Yeah. If that one was in your vein, you'd die. Okay. Oh, that was gross. Yeah. Did I just launch a snot rocket? Where'd that go? I think it went on the floor. I'll save you for later. So this is it then. It's time to power on this camera and find out if we made it better or worse. And now you might immediately point at the giant cooling box that we have hanging off it and say, well, it's definitely worse. But I would direct your attention to this photograph of our camera operator. Would another box hanging off of him really make a difference? Probably not. So we are getting a fan drive error, but that's okay. We knew that that was happening. So whether that's the knock to us up here or the pump or the fan here, they might not be hitting the RPM that Red is expecting. But in terms of the cooling performance, we are sitting at a mere 31 slash 33 degrees right now. So everything seems to be working as we'd expect. But Red actually has their own built-in fan speed control. So when you're recording, it should actually drop the speed of the fan. So acid test time. Are you ready to find out? Oh, we're now recording. Doesn't seem to be dropping. Oh, it's a setting. Oh, Alex, what are you doing? I'm adding a low fan noise adapter. Yeah, you said we don't need it, but it's loud right now. Let me just change it to quiet mode outright. That did not make it quiet. You can put your low noise adapter on it. Wait, is this just a three pin fan? So I go ahead and press record now then, right? Here we go. We are now recording 8K footage. Hey, it's a Mexican standoff. Who's going to shoot first? Trick question. We're both shooting already. I am locked at 35 degrees right now. Damn. 35, 55. What are you at? 38, 55. So then I guess all that's left to do now is our full suite of temperature, acoustic, and image quality testing to find out what, if anything, has changed since we water cooled the camera. I cannot believe that this worked. This was easily the hardest thing, like the hardest project we've ever done. But so many things that we did just had such a high probability of not working. Is it safe to say mission accomplished yet? I'm still at 35. I think it's safe to say. I'm at 35. Yeah. We don't even need to do a whole lot of other stuff. We can just be like, yeah, here's the graphs. It's better. For testing before and after, we ran the camera for 30 minutes in a climate controlled room. In both situations, our sensor temp stayed rock solid at 39 degrees Celsius, which is great given that changes in temperature can affect the image quality slightly. But what was really impressive about our water cooled camera was the noise. Our initial test had the camera slowly get louder and louder during the shot in order to maintain that sensor temperature, up to 46 decibels in our testing. Our water cooled camera, however, never even got over the 34 decibel noise floor of the office we were testing in. That is damn impressive. Huge thanks by the way to Joe from SolidWorks for helping us with the flow simulations. Oh Canada tool supply for supplying, well, many of the tools. Alpha cool for their tiny cooling components. And of course Noctua for their silent fans. Manegear's Element gaming laptop is available at 25 micro center locations as well as on Amazon. There's an Intel Core i7-9750H processor, GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q graphics, 32 gigs of RAM, a 2 terabyte NVMe SSD. And if you buy it at your nearest micro center store, you can save an additional $100. In fact, you can even save an additional $100 if you buy it at a micro center store. That isn't the nearest one to you. Wow. So check it out and other micro center specials at the link in the video description. I mean, they're not going to check your ID and make sure that it's the closest one. So thanks for watching guys. If you enjoyed this video, maybe check out one of our other cool water cooling projects where we liquid cooled a network switch. That one was, we thought that one was challenging at the time. Yeah. It's still working too. It's in there. Yeah. That's actually running in our camera den right now. And for a 10 gig switch, quiet? It's quiet.