 So the thing with water cooling is there's a few different reasons people do it. Some do it for performance, you know, getting them over clocks. Some people do it for looks, although that clearly wasn't the case here, and some do it for silence. Now, here's the thing though. No matter how many radiators you throw at your system, like you could put like six radiators on this thing, you could take all the fans off and it would easily dissipate the heat from a CPU and a graphics card, you are still going to be stuck with at least one moving part, and that's your pump. Now, sometimes pumps take the form of like a big standalone piece like this, like with a custom loop, while other times you're gonna have it kind of built in or integrated into something else. So this AIO from NZXT has the pump built into the CPU block, while others, I believe EK does this for example, build it into the radiator. But you're always gonna have that moving part, which is a point of failure and a source of noise. Unless you don't. This right here is a prototype water cooler with no pump. How on earth does that work? How well does it work? I guess there's only one way to find out, isn't there? By sitting through this sponsor spot from PIA. Private Internet Access keeps your IP hidden from anyone who wants to know and allows you to access services online, as though you are from a different country. Check it out at the link in the video description. So I first got turned on to the idea of pumpless water cooling when I was reading a post on extremesystems.org. That's a blast from the past. Way back in 2008. So a user by the name of OCZ Tony, who worked at, you guessed it, OCZ at the time, was doing some experimentation with their upcoming CPU water block, which I'm not sure if it ever got released or not, but it's hardly the point. And he posted that he had figured out a way to use convection, just the natural convection of the heat of the CPU warming the water, causing it to rise up one tube and then get cooled by the radiator, causing it to fall down the other tube in order to achieve enough circulation to get a functional, like custom-grade water cooling loop, all without any risk of failing components and without any noise whatsoever. Tony's approach had a couple of fatal flaws though. So for one thing, it wasn't possible to get a ton of circulation. So modern CPUs, like the 18 core one in here, we're gonna have no chance of moving enough water to carry all that heat away. And number two is that it relied on a very specific layout of the entire system so that the convection action could get started in the first place. So the radiator would absolutely need to be above the CPU socket, and then once you started to add multiple heat sources, like, you know, a graphics card or something, well then life gets really confusing. Fortunately, there are other ways to move fluid around inside a closed system. Take this, for example. This looks like an ordinary PC tower cooler, but inside these heat pipes are tiny capillaries that allow the coolant to flow up and down the heat pipe in order to allow it to transport heat much more quickly than just solid tubes of metal would be able to do. That's part of what makes these things so efficient. So in a nutshell then, capillary action is the phenomenon that you would observe if you took a cup of water and then something thin, like a straw for example, and stuck it in. You would actually see that the water level inside the straw would rise a little bit, even though the force of gravity is working against it. It's partly caused by surface tension, and it is the exact principle that our cooler here works on. Now I only gave you guys a really brief look at this before, but now we're going to take a bit of a closer gander. So first we've got a bog standard radiator. I think it's made of aluminum. And then we've got our CPU block here, which looks pretty normal. You've got your flat copper base, and there's only really a couple things about it that strike me as not ordinary. So one is this little, kind of looks like a fill port of some sort that's been terminated by pinching it shut, kind of like you would do with a heat pipe. And two, the fact that the fittings, the block itself, everything about this thing is like soldered shut, rather than using O-rings and screws in order to seal it. They are serious about keeping whatever's in here inside. But will it work? Now this is 10 out of 10 engineering sample stuff. Ragen Tech sent it over, but this is like, this is not to be evaluated for its performance or the packaging or anything like that. This is a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very for its performance or the packaging or anything like that. This is just a concept stage device. Which means that mounting this is probably not gonna be that simple. There's no instructions. So that kind of looks like it goes there. That kind of looks like it goes there, and there, and there. This really does just look like cobbled together from scrap metal they found in the warehouse or something. Are these thumb screws or just spacers? These are thumb screws. Well, you only live once, especially if you're this poor CPU. This is my favorite thing about. Oh no, did it go in the power supply? A screw in your power supply is a bad frigging time. One of the nuts appears to have gone missing. Well, hopefully we have an alternative nut. Oh, heck yeah, the nuts from my test bench work. That was easy, I didn't have to go very far at all. We're also gonna need a couple of cooling fans. Did they say something about it needing to be above? Trying to remember. Yeah, now there's some for sure. Whoa! So because this process is heat assisted, we're not actually expecting it to start flowing right away. Like how would it do that? What would power it? So we're actually waiting for the heat output from the CPU to move the water around. We're converting heat energy into mechanical energy. But that means if there's no load on the CPU, then it's gonna take a while for it to get hot enough down here to begin that process. And you can see here, our CPU is clearly not putting out a ton of heat. And that is a hefty copper block on it. So it's gonna take a while for it to appreciably heat up. Now that CPU is pretty toasty at this point. You can actually see we're getting some more bubble. I can, whoa! We're getting some real bubble action here. There's a big bubble, look at it go. See that? It's actually starting to flow now. Now what's interesting is you actually see bubbles flowing out of both sides. Now why would that be? So you can see we're getting a little bit of kind of jerky coolant flow, but CPU temperatures are actually well within spec. It seems to kind of correspond actually to little bits of coolant kind of dripping down into the block. So I actually may have recalled incorrectly, this one may rely on some gravity assistance here. So let's go ahead and provide it. So now this is kind of like having your radiator installed in the top of your case. Oh, and CPU temps are way down. They were up near 90, now they're in the upper 60s. And they're more consistent. Okay, so theoretically we're all set up properly-ish now. You can see that our CPU temps have settled in at around the low 60s, and that's not great, obviously. This is an 8,700K by the way. That's not great for idle temperatures. It's not even doing anything right now. But you gotta remember that this doesn't work unless we add enough heat, and it's clearly working well enough that even though that's a high idle temperature, we're well within spec. So in order to get our coolant flowing more rapidly and to get the cooler working better, we actually have to hit it with a load. So why don't we go ahead and do that? Sure, small FFT, 12, 13. Oh, that's probably gonna crush this poor thing, but let's give it a shot. Whoa, okay, so our temps shoot up to 100 degrees basically instantly, but what's interesting is you can see there's a lot more action down here at the cooler. We're also gonna wanna check out what kind of clock speed we managed to maintain throughout this. So we're still at 3.7 gigahertz, which means we're getting enough coolant flow that the thing's not just like, gonna immediately die. We hope. Now let's have a look at our coolant flow here. So what's weird is we've actually got liquid returns on both of these, which would suggest that it's turning to vapor to move up to this radiator. So maybe the configuration can be tweaked once more. Just trying to remember what their instructions were. I could have looked this up before we started, but what fun would that be? Sorry, I'm leaving now. It's possible that the design expects the motherboard to be oriented the way it would in a typical tower case. So why don't we go ahead and do that? Just hold the board in place. There we go. All right, now let's see how she goes. Ooh, interesting. Our temps are down in the high 90s range now. Also our speed, which had fallen down to about 3.5 gigahertz, is up to 3.63. We're clearly turboing higher. What's weird is that it appears as though it's operating more like a heat pipe cooler right now with the thick tube doing most of both the liquid and gas movement. Why use only capillary action when you can use convection as well? We could tell that all the action was in our top tube here, but the top one was the thick one. So if we were to change it around and use our skinny one as the top, instead of having those two forces work against each other, we could hopefully have them work together. But we can't use temperatures to differentiate our orientations here because they're all going to hit 100 degrees in thermal throttle. But what we can see is how far it throttles. And this actually throttles much worse than our previous configuration. Now we're back up to, now we're up to 3.8 gigahertz. What is your logic? So this is clearly the hot side, and this side is pretty hot too. Okay, so I gave in, I consulted the materials they sent over back when they provided this unit, and it appears as though this was the correct configuration with the small tube on the bottom, the big one on top, and the radiator up above. So let's go ahead and try it one last time. So this is the best result we've gotten so far. We've only got one core that's at 100 degrees, and we're turboing up to about 3.8 mid to 3.8 high gigahertz. That is not a bad result. Now, it's obviously not a perfect result, which is probably a big part of the reason that this, even though they've shown samples of it as long as like a year and a half ago, hasn't turned into a commercial product yet, because there's a lot of fine tuning to make this work. For one, basically endless tuning and tweaking could be done on the diameter of the tubes in order to allow for better coolant flow. For another, there's all kinds of different fluids with low boiling points, which is part of what actually allows this rapid movement that could be used to charge a system like this. We don't know what they're using inside. I'm sure once they figured out a formula that works, they would hold that as a very closely guarded trade secret. For another thing, remember how we showed that this whole system was sealed up? Well, maybe they're maintaining it at something other than atmospheric pressure. That could also affect the characteristics of the entire system. So, nothing like this is available from, you know, any household brand that you'd recognize at this point in time, but I would say that this works well enough that there is still potential for this technology. And I'm personally very excited for the truly silent water cooler. I mean, ignoring that this particular one has fans on it and that it'd be very difficult to DIY something like this, but details, details, details. Oh yeah, and the bubbling does actually make noise. You can probably hear it. So, get access to amazing games, books, comics, and more at Humble Bundle and save money at the same time. They believe that when you pay for things, you should have the ability to select how much you wanna give to each party, the creator, a charity, or even Humble Bundle itself. And you can either shop on specific titles through their store page or through their bundle sets. Pick the bundle that you want or subscribe to their monthly bundle to save even more. So go check them out at our partner link, LMG.GG slash Humble Bundle. We're gonna have that down below. 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. Actually, this is a brand new design. Let me know if you guys like it in the comments. And our community forum, which you should totally join.