 So it's time for another crazy cooling experiment with Linus and Alex! This time our victim is going to be the Dell Alienware Area 51M. So this is notable for having a desktop 9900K 8-core processor in it that runs at 100 degrees at all times. So we are going to be trying to tame the beast, but there's going to be a couple of key differences today. Difference number one, they kicked us out of the boardroom. So we're in the kitchen. And difference number two, we have...... Hello. Steven Burke from Gamers Nexus! So let's see what we can do with this thing. With GlassWire, you can instantly see your current and past network activity, detect malware, and block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android device. Use offer code LINUS and get 25% off GlassWire at the link below. This is a lot of gear. Why is there a calculator? He never goes anywhere without his TI-84. Are you serious? Yeah, it's just nice if you want to cut things. Do you have a phone? Yeah, but it's bad. Okay. So we're not going to know what or how we can mount an alternative cooling solution to this thing until we've opened it up and figured out exactly what kind of mounting holes Dell's using. We require mounting holes that are quite close to the socket, and we don't know if we're going to find that inside. Yeah, we're not going to. I'm trying to put some suspense in the video, Alex. I know that. So is this CPU and GPU? Are they exposed on this side? Yeah, they are. Okay. Is your plan to leave the motherboard mounted in the laptop? Yep. So the other option is you sit it precariously on its side, and we just look at the screen like this while the cooler is hooked up like that. Yeah, that could work. Do you know the story of my chiller? I bought this for the sole purpose of hooking it up to my daily driver E6600, and you can tell that it's very... Did it ever hurt anybody? 17-year-old me engineered. It has not hurt anyone yet, but the possibility of being hurt is definitely real. So I would ask that while it's plugged in, you refrain from touching this. That thing's terrifying. Is this a ground terminal? Any of the bare leads here? Yeah, yeah, that's just hanging there. Okay, you don't need ground? We don't see ourselves as being grounded type people. Okay. Neither of us wants to use our liability insurance. Yeah. What I think is going to have to happen is we're going to take these really, really cheap blocks and machine a new piece of acrylic that'll fit the mounting holes. This doesn't have any micro fins, does it? No, it's just a flat piece of copper. Oh, no. It's like $4 on AliExpress. What do you want, man? Maybe $6 on AliExpress? I don't know. I fix it's going to hate this. I couldn't find a Marlin, so this is their old precision screwdriver set. I'm assuming there's no IHS on the CPU, right? Is there really? So it's literally a desktop. Okay. I know, right? Is it socketed? Yeah, yeah. Oh, interesting. I didn't know that. So it's two 10 millimeter heat pipes on the CPU, and then GPU is here? Yep. What is the GPU? Full blown 2080. You said the CPU is 100 degrees. Was that only with overclocking, I'm assuming? That's at max. So you just put it in performance mode, and it hits 100 degrees. Wow, okay. One of the things that we're probably going to have to figure out, because having a look at the cooling solution here, Steven identified that there's actually a fair amount of VRM cooling going on. So they're not just cooling the CPU, but this aluminum plate right here is actually making thermal pad contact with... The MOSFETs and the inductors. All of this, interesting. So Alex, this is going to be a little bit tricky. We're going to have to get airflow onto this heat sink somehow, even if we do just go with the stock solution and put this back in here. Is the GPU going to be under a chiller also? Yeah. Is the chiller like, what is it, like zero degrees? It's whatever you want it to be, baby. Okay. So it's been a couple hours. Where are you at? We're good to cut things. So it looks kind of stupid. This is the GPU one. It does look kind of stupid. It looks like you screwed it up. And because we just moved our router, I don't know how accurate it is at the moment. And until we test that, I'm just making all of the holes way bigger. So hopefully it fits anyway. You have the O-ring groove and everything sort of... Oh, right. There's no groove. Yeah, no groove, just flat. So we reused the stock O-ring that came with our Chinese blog. How does this compare to how organized and professional you thought we were, Steve? That's about what I thought. I deserve that. Hey, I get to be the coolest looking one too. Hey. Oh no. What up? There you go. So that's our CPU mount, right? Yep. Cool. Sorry, Steve. It's not as bad if you're making the noise, which is why I always volunteer for tap duty. That's why. This one's a bit off, but I think we can just drill through it and it'll be fine. The PCB or the... I feel like tops. Isn't it going to be beautiful when you have the mill and it will actually just be like vroom? How much was it again? 5K. Oh God, no, I don't know about that. Good enough? Heck yeah. It's not perfect, but that's not what we're going for. The label on this bin really does not bode well for the water cooling process. Sorry, Steve. I promise we'll get to the part where we really need your expertise, the overclocking very soon. Just got to fabricate some crap. Do you want a vise to secure the block? No, I have that. Would you like to use it? No, no, I'm good. Thank you. Just making sure. I'm going to go back to writing my scripts for your next video. Yeah. Ow! I wonder if this is how like EK Waterbox makes theirs. Yeah, EK definitely uses a drill by hand right through the top. That was gnarly. Why is Alex not wearing gloves but Linus has to protect his little baby hands? That's why. We're getting close then, aren't we? Yeah. Hell yeah. Actually, we have a lot of crap on the floor. Steve, around the thing there, there's a Dyson. I know that you're really good at vacuuming. I saw you did a review once of a vacuum cleaner. Is the money still in it? Just vacuum it. It's not sucking up the dirt. We have to cut a new one, Alex. It's not going to hold. While Alex is recutting our GPU acrylic top, we're going to mount our CPU block as best we can. Now, in order to make our lives a little bit easier. Oh no, you're not using one of those, are you? Yeah, why not? Thermal face is going to be better thermally. Those are just good for their endurance because you can use it a long time. Actually, coffee lake lying down the middle. You know what? Just for you. Wait, what? This is the Skylake X technique, sir. I've read that smiley faces improve the thermals a bit. Okay, how much are you putting on here? It's just going to squish out. Exactly. Who's going to clean it? I don't know. I won't be here. Linus, one of my longest standing sponsors is Thermal Grizzly. There needs to be more thermal face. There needs to be more thermal face. Work it back in. I'm all about the wiggle technique. So what do you think? Looks really ghetto, but like in a good way. So our expectation right now. Turn on. This will turn on? Yes. Okay, want to throw that heat sink back on there? Yep. Three, two, one. Wait, oh, I saw a flash on the keyboard. Oh no, it's powering up. Battery. That sounds like it wants a battery. Okay, sure. Let's try putting a battery in. Okay. You can screw that down. No, that's fine. Like at least one. You got to hold the heat sink. Do you want to? Hold the heat sink, Alex. Alex, the heat sink. No one's holding it. Okay, are we re- I mean, are we reassembling it at this point? No. It's all flicker. Yeah, fans do like one rotation and stop. So basically here's what happened. The problem was that the memory slots are actually labeled one, two, three, four, which is pretty typical. What's a little less typical is that it wasn't booting with memory in slots one and I guess it would have been four. Apparently the system is firing up. So all that's left now is to retighten up our CPU block, mount our GPU block, and then finally one day later leverage the talents of Steven Burke here. I might actually do something now. How about we start with just a little below ambient, stay above the dew point. Okay. Yeah. I like the sounds of that. I'm going to lift this up and we are going to put this in there. You can see this well-crafted cutout right here. That's for this right here. Okay. All right. Okay. Yeah, that needs to go. Perfect. Thank you. That's some very rusty metal. Okay. Tubing. Here's some scrap tubing we had lying around with fitting in. It's not a race, Alex. Well if it is, I'm winning. Done. Damn it. Seems fine. Well, let's maybe give it one minute. I mean remember these are Linus tapped holes. Also one of the first fittings that you put on just didn't have an O-ring. Really? Are you sure it didn't come off or something? No, I really did check. It's just drawing the cables into the fans so they're shredding the cable sleeving which is creating strands of cable sleeving that get into them more easily. Wait, what's going on? It's a good solution though. Well, only if it works. We've got our water cooling working. Our temperatures are great. At idle we're what? Like 15 degrees, 10 degrees? Yeah, 15 and 13 on the GPU. And we're at six Celsius on the chiller. Wonderful. Except for one small thing. No matter what we do in the extreme tuning utility, I'm using air quotes here, it's not applying. We're getting lower scores in the CPU test and 3D mark. So we've got core ratio overrides for one to eight cores. Do you want to just set those in here? No, we'll do that next to you if we can. Okay. All right. So after painstakingly applying their in BIOS overclocking settings, we are supposedly at 5.2 gigahertz on any load up to six cores and then 4.9 for seven and eight core loads. But we're pretty sure that this is nonsense. So ideally with overclocking, the biggest limits you run into are thermal and potentially voltage which triggers thermal and then power limits. And so we're running out of power, which I know for two reasons. One is because hardware info 64 tells us we're hitting power limits. And the other one is because you can see the cores throttling, but we're well under TJ Mac. The issue then is that when I try to increase the power limits here and it doesn't look like they've really changed from that BIOS change. When I increase the power limits next to you, it just says you can't do that. Or it increases them in such a small way that it doesn't do anything useful for us. All right. Let's see what happens. Yeah, I was going to tell you this clearly isn't working because we're at 246 watts. We got higher than that before. Alienware's pre-overclock here is actually doing nothing. So their pre-overclock is actually, it is 52 on six cores, but it's actually doing 4.8 on all cores. So let's just manually tell it to do 49X. And then I want to change these, but I don't think it does anything based on what we've seen. So let's just run this as a baseline and see what the cores are doing. So amusingly enough, turning our clock speed target down to 4.9, but on all cores, actually yields slightly higher power consumption and a higher score. So the reason this happens for anyone who doesn't know is because when you set the configuration too aggressive, but your power throttling, it's throttling harder to try and account for that. So you might actually drop your multiplier from something like 49X down to all the way into the 20s or 30s. I'm going to increase the cache ratio now. A general rule of thumb is I like to keep cache ratio like maybe four ticks below all core, but we're going to push for maybe 47X and see if that holds. And this is also known as reboot required. In XTU on this laptop, it seems like reboot required basically means it's not going to work. No wonder you prefer working with desktops. At least they're designed for this sort of thing. I think this is designed for it. I think so too. I think Alienware had this in mind. So after beating our heads against the wall, turns out there's a new BIOS for this laptop. Really enhanced the performance of the system. Perfect. Thank you, BIOS engineers. Hopefully this gives us a bit more control. Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on a second. No, this is good. Power limit one is 210 watts now. Oh yeah. That's the change. Okay. I have some hope now because if we can get another 60 watts. That should be substantial. Yeah. I doubt you're going to be able to actually change it to 230 or whatever. Yeah. I don't think that's happening, man. I guess I should note as well. I did drop the chiller a bit more. So I forget where we're at. About 10 degrees Fahrenheit. I don't really use Fahrenheit despite being American. So I'm not sure what that is. But our load temps were around 50 to 55 degrees across all cores. We're below zero Celsius is what really matters. So we're expecting a better result this time because we got up to almost 250 watts here. Okay. Good for the full system. CPU temps are also a touch higher in the mid 60s. So it's definitely working harder. So we're changing power management mode for the GPU to performance instead of optimal power. We're changing texture filtering from quality to high performance. Kinpin, OGS, all those real overclockers do this. It's permissible. So we've got that done. It is actually at, what was it? 290? Yeah. Okay. Well, that's very promising. This is better than the first BIOS for sure. Yeah. And we haven't touched voltage yet. So if we have to overvolt, we might be able to. It's just going to be a power limitation issue. You know what? If we had that, it peaked at 300. So 300 is going to be our new maximum power. It looks like. Use of throttle stop to bypass these throttling schemes is at your own risk and can result in permanent damage to your power adapter or computer. Perfect. I'm applying the setting. It's saying reboot required. I hit discard. I apply the setting and then it works. And if I reboot, it doesn't work. It gives an error message. It's held 295. It's holding up there longer. Our frequency was at actually like 50 the whole time. And I technically applied 51, but I don't know if it actually worked. It's at 679. So this is the error that we get every time we try to actually listen to the software and reboot. And then it just doesn't apply anything that was changed. Yeah. In fact, it reset everything else. So after playing around with all the dials and XTU, it turns out that the only thing that really changed with the BIOS update was that the default power limit is higher. The good news though is now we can start pushing our GPU, which we should be able to get a pretty good overclock on, right? Yes. NVIDIA GPUs especially are really temperature dependent. And for about every maybe five degrees Celsius you drop, you'll keep getting frequency increases without even doing any work. We do not have a lot of time. We're starting to sweat. Yes. Air will create condensation. So I would limit air access to components. I'll let you do that. Worst case scenario, Alienware gets back a laptop that doesn't work. So 11236. We are up on graphics significantly. Hey! Some success. So we are up from 10,201 to 11236, about 10% and seven degrees on the GPU after running. So then let's get this back towards the VRM. Perfect. How hot is that? It's getting warm. Yeah, memory was getting a little bit toasty too. And our memory is shoved under there, I think. So that's, I would like to get a fan kind of this direction. Oh, we need to. But we need, yeah. Slight the CPU a bit. Well, that's the best I think we can really hope for right now. I'm going to put some more towel around the fittings up here at the top. Is the compressor still running? Are we still bringing this down? Yeah, you know, I'm going to, I think we're going to call this the limit because we're starting to sweat more than I'm really comfortable with. We're going to start getting drops running down the tubes onto the motherboard here pretty soon. So you crank, did you crank it all the way? So this is basically it. This is what we're going for. Plus 180 on the GPU core, plus 1120 on the GPU memory and five gigahertz on the CPU. Now to be clear, there are other things that Steve could do if he had more time tuning the clock speeds for individual cores because I mean, 3D Mark, especially when you're running a GPU test actually doesn't hit all the cores. So you could avoid a power limit by not running all of them at five gigahertz. So we have well over a 10% improvement. Yeah, not bad. What are our GPU and CPU temps look like? I see, is that nine on the GPU I see over here? CPU, so max was about 74 degrees Celsius. And then the GPU, we don't have it logged. Actually we do. The max was 28 degrees. 28 degrees. Woo! Really not bad. That's awesome. So anyway, I think we can be happy with this knowing that within the time and the software parameters we unfortunately have, we're at 11,406 versus? 10,186. So that is way outside of margin of error. We've actually improved it. The graphics score is 11,614. The CPU wasn't really that great. It was 10,360. So it could improve there. There's a throttling issue. So setting CPU core offset was 160 megahertz. Memory we did 1120 megahertz. I tried 1180. I tried 1220. Both of those really heavily artifacted and crashed. And performance mode in the power management for Nvidia drivers. We changed texture filtration to high performance from quality, which is allowed. So that's it. Massive thank you to Alienware for permitting us to do this to their machine. I'm just kidding. They didn't permit this. They did not permit any of this. But thanks to Steve for coming out and having some fun with us. It was a lot of fun. First time laptop extreme overclocking? Yes. Very fun. Very impressed with Alex's CNC turnaround on the blocks. Extremely quick water cooling solution for a laptop. It's going to be a new business opportunity for us. I think create custom laptop water blocks. Lots of money in that. Speaking of lots of money in that, Ting is the mobile carrier that's focused on customer service and customer satisfaction. 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So lower your phone bill at linus.ting.com and get $25 in Ting credit. We'll have that linked below. So thanks for watching guys, if you disliked hit that button, but if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed, especially to Steve. You can find him over at Gamers Nexus. There is no apostrophe, even though it seems like maybe there should be. Don't stress about it. Also what else? Oh yeah, you can check out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description. I wouldn't recommend using it like this. Also down there is our merch store. And what the hey, why don't we put Steve's merch store down there as well? Do you have these mod mats again yet? They will be here pretty soon. Yeah. Okay. So these things are fantastic. Whatever your tech project is, whether you're working on a computer like him or a mobile phone or whatever. Just call me a computer.