 If we're gonna break it, we might as well at least get it on camera. Okay, okay. I like Asus. They're a valued partner, the quality of the products is generally pretty good, and for the most part, they try and do the right thing for consumers. But the quality of their implementation of Thunderbolt on their motherboards has been so bad for so long that I just can't put off doing this video any longer. Because my wife won't let me. Because every time this is across multiple docks, multiple cables, and now multiple motherboards, every time she tries to wake her display from sleep, oh yeah, and I changed the graphics card too, it simply won't do it. So this is it, it's wife personal rig upgrade time, and I am cutting Asus out of the equation. Guys, you gotta fix your stuff. Just like I'm gonna fix this segue to our sponsor. InnoFoods is currently doing a huge product giveaway for LTT viewers. Just head to the InnoFoods YouTube channel to get all the details. We'll have it linked below. [♪ music playing, video game sounds and music playing over the music playing in background. One of the best things about having rack-mounted PCs in a server cabinet is that performing maintenance is as simple as, we're sliding them out and you're good to go. Now the astute among you will probably have noticed that the hardware in here is not exactly old and shouldn't really need an upgrade. That's because as part of this process of getting my wife's workstation all cable managed up and upgraded to the latest tech, I threw in an Asus X299 Prime motherboard with built-in Thunderbolt 3. The problem is that her Thunderbolt 3 is not working, and with the distance between our server cabinet and her desktop monitor, I can't just run a regular DisplayPort cable. This is just too flaky. Because this wasn't a planned project, my parts choices were dictated less by what I think actually makes sense and more by what I had lying around at the office. So I'll be using this 10-year-old Swift Tech radiator with some screws that I found in a bin, this ice ball reservoir, which was the only res that I could find that was really designed to be mounted in a horizontal case. It's even got RGB lighting, although it uses a weird connector, and I don't think I have any way of hooking it up. And finally, the Z490 Aorus Extreme Water Force. This is a motherboard that words cannot describe how little sense it would make to actually buy, but it was one of the few sitting in our warehouse that happens to be not Asus and have built-in Thunderbolt 3. So I'll be equipping this puppy, which is the only reason I'm water cooling the system at all, with a Core i9-10900K. Now, I need to put this down. I just looked up how much this thing actually costs. It is $2,000 US dollars. For that kind of price, it better come with a flippin' amazing accessory package. I mean, to be clear, it's loaded for bear in terms of features. It's got super robust power delivery, it's got 3M.2s, 10 gigabit networking, and 2.5 gigabit networking. And of course, the big highlight is the included full cover water block. What is going on here? Part of me feels like no matter how high end I go, this motherboard is going to be shaming me for not spending more on the things I plug into it. This RAM is particularly, you know, unworthy. 16 gig sticks of 3200 megahertz. Gross. Good lord, that is a lot of thermal pads. It's like a handful. This does not look any less complicated than just buying a normal motherboard and water blocking it after the- Look at all these screws. Oh, you gotta be kidding me. Here I was all set up to put on the thermal pads. You don't have to apply them the first time. That's only if you need to reapply it. Oh, for crying out loud, Gigabyte. Glad I saw that. Now I just got to plug the RGB connector in and line the thing up with the thing. Yeah, yeah, we good. Oh, nice. Oh, oh, nailed it. You know, it's funny. The wife made an offhand comment about how like she's not getting a $5,000 Intel Extreme Tech upgrade. Why didn't I get one of those for her? I'm getting it for all the other staff. I'm like, hon, you're getting a $5,000 Extreme Tech upgrade. Awkward thing. I just blew the entire budget on your motherboard. I feel like a bad person soft tubing water cooling this thing, but like I don't want to spend that much time on it. Come on. This block has a super cool flow path so it can go down through the CPU and bypass here or go to the chipset. So this helps keep the restriction low while also allowing it to do a great job of cooling everything involved. And now that the hard part's out of the way, all I got to do is a quick board swap. Wait a minute. Normally when you got Thunderbolt on board, you have a display port in. How does that work? See, this is what I'm talking about. You got your display port injection here from the GPU. A quick Google search tells me this may work or I may need a Gigabyte Titan Ridge add-in card or something. Because it's water cooled, there's really no way for me to find out without actually building up the system, which is okay because the other motherboard that I will use, this one doesn't work, is also pre water cooled, which is why I was resigned to just building a water cooled system because there were the only two motherboards with Thunderbolt in the entire building. Can you imagine engineering a whole motherboard for like six people to actually buy it? And then one of them to put an air cooled graphics card in it? It's crazy how many builds I'm like pulling all the SATA devices out of now. Unless you need local storage, which if you've got a NAS, you don't. There's just no reason to have these cables anymore. You can get eight terabyte M.2s. I mean, they're not affordable, but you already got a $2,000 motherboard. Good enough cable management for a wifey PC. Time for some water cooling. Got a mounting bracket. So I can put it like there, but wow, how would that make any sense? Turns out it is not well regarded. That's okay because I'll be using a D5 to assist it. So in the event that this does fail, I'll be good to go. I just got to find somewhere to mount this stupid thing. So that's it. We're going right there. Oh, sick. Yep. Oh, shoot. Kind of wish I'd plugged in the front panel connectors before I did this. You know what, guys? Come sleep. Come back to it tomorrow. While I was sleeping, a wild helper appeared. As I was test fitting the radiator, I was reminded of a couple of significant oversights in the design of this case, which of course are on me since this is a custom design case. In the front bay of fans, there is interference from the USB ports and the power and reset switch. So there's nowhere to really fit this tank without cramming it in there in a way that can break the power switch, which I have done on my case. And for this one, there's a ridge here that makes it so that you can't actually get a screwdriver in to screw in the fans and the radiator. And that is unless you like disassemble the whole thing and then put it together after the fact. The boy says we're going to go about it this way and just, if we got to sacrifice some cables and mash them, then that's what we're going to do. Now, this is an older style radiator. It's super dumb. It has the actual tubes for the coolant right under where the screws go in. Can you imagine how that would cause a problem? So that means we have to double check the length of these screws and I think they're too long. You can see they pop out a little bit. Fortunately, we have new screws that I brought. Oh, yeah. It's absolutely perfect. Don't let it, don't let it, you got to go in straight. Yeah, keep going. There you go. Perfect. Now, my boy, we need to do, who am I talking to, the camera or the kid? We need to do tubing because I don't want to do any maintenance on this ever. I'm using an extremely non-porous walled tubing. This is the same stuff that we used for our six workstations, one CPU. Now that I'm on the last tubing run, it can go one of two places. It can either go back to the motherboard mono block or we could water cool the graphics card, which would make the whole thing actually look nicer and obviously the graphics card would then be water cool. I did bring a block. It's like right here, propping up the case. I just really don't feel like it. What do you think, boy? Should we spend a whole bunch of extra time to water cool the graphics card? No. I mean, what could go wrong? Let's actually try a smaller funnel. That's tiny. Yeah, well, we're going to go slow. If we're going to break it, we might as well at least get it on camera. Okay, just pour nice and slow. Okay, slow. Wait, wait, wait, go back, go back, go back, go back. Okay, okay. You can't dump it like that. Got to go slow. Bigger funnel, please. Oh, okay. That's not bad. Now to find out if the thing still works. Boy, you want to hit the power button? Oh, that's not a good sign. After fully stripping down the board, it's no more obvious what caused the failure than before. I thought, now maybe some liquid got on there that I didn't notice, but nothing. It's bone dry. So the only explanation I can come up with now is that maybe the mounting pressure of the water block was too much and crushed some of the traces inside the PCB because I can't see any physical damage on the surface. I have had this happen before, but I didn't think it was that tight. At any rate, back there is the new board, a Z490 Aqua from ASRock. See what I'm talking about? The only Thunderbolt boards I had were water-cooled ones. So let's give this one a shot. Now that I'm using a completely different motherboard, it feels only right to tell you a little bit about it. The Z490 Aqua is from ASRock. It similarly comes with a pre-done water cooling solution, except it doesn't cool the chipset. It only does the power delivery CPU and 10 gigabit networking chip. It also has three M.2s. It also has Thunderbolt 3. It's got a couple of them. It does have the display port in, so I'm sure that this one's actually going to work in my experience with ASRock's Thunderbolt 3, at least on their X570 Aqua, has been pretty positive so far. And it's a veritable bargain, comparatively speaking. At only $1,100 US dollars. So let's put it in, finally fire this thing up. Kudos to ASRock, by the way. This thing is so much more user-friendly. All the little grommets on the board are pre-applied. There's so many fewer screws. I'm liking it. I'm liking it. It has not been my day. I just realized I hooked the inlets of both pumps up to each other. This thing would have like burned itself out or not freaking cool at all. If I had actually managed to turn it on with the previous motherboard. Not that that was the problem with the previous motherboard because we never got that far, but also all these tubing runs just need to be redone now because they're not quite long enough to reach where they now need to go. What happens when you're like, you know, I'm feeling ambitious. I'm not just going to fix the wife's machine. I'm going to make a video about it. And I don't even need no stinking film crew. I'm just I'm YOLO in it. Find out if it works. All right. There we go. Oh, we got a display. I just got to get this stupid reservoir filled. It takes forever. And it's in the rack. So all that remains is to leave this for one minute and let the screen go to sleep and see if it wakes up. Finally test time. Yay. That's all I asked. Thank you, Asrock. And thank you to our sponsor. Do you need to create a beautiful website without the hassle? Well, check out Squarespace. Their all-in-one platform makes it easy to get up and running quickly. They've got award-winning templates that you can use as a starting point for a wide range of projects. And if you ever need additional help, Squarespace offers webinars, a full series of help guides, or you can contact their customer support 24-7 via live chat and email. If you already have a third party domain, you don't have to give it up. You can just transfer it over to Squarespace. Plus every Squarespace site includes e-commerce features to help you sell merch or services online and easily manage your inventory and orders. So don't wait. Go to squarespace.com forward slash LTT and get 10% off your first purchase. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe you just love videos where you see me tearing my hair out. How about the one where we lost all our data? That's a good one. Oh, yeah. It's a roller coaster.