 Now for years, Corsair has sold all-in-one liquid coolers for gaming PCs on the basis of how easy and fast they are to install with great results. Well now, they're dipping their toes in the custom water cooling market with their Hydro-X line and they reached out to sponsor this video to show you guys just how fast and easy it is to do a full custom loop if you go all Corsair. So we're going to be putting it to the test using Corsair's cooling configurator to design and build a full loop, ballin' out, tricked out gaming rig as quickly as we possibly can. And... Go! Motherboard model MSI X570 ACE CPU model 3900X. We're going 12 core, baby. So the point of the configurator is to make sure that you order stuff that is compatible. MSI helpfully co-sponsored this video, so they sent over their Ventus 2080 Ti. There it is. We have one of those and now we get to see our recommended setup. Hopefully we have this stuff. Jake, do we have an AMD version of the block? XC7 RGB. Yes! Good! Cooling performance. They want a stage two configuration. Your case contains Corsair fans. The number of included fans has been deducted from the total to optimize the cost to you. We're apparently going with Light Loop RGBs in white. And I think we're good on fittings, tools, they even sent over, they've got their own loop filling squeezy bottle. So we should be pretty much ready to rock. Alright, so step one of this Corsair sponsored video is to clear all this Corsair stuff off the table. You won't need that until later. And I was just teasing my bros over at Corsair. We actually do need their stuff almost right away here. Now by default it comes with the Intel mounting hardware, but you can see that Corsair has faithfully borrowed the Asetek ring mounting system. So changing it over to AMD is as simple as popping that on there like that. Oh, I went and inserted an extra step there. The thermal compound is pre-applied. Schwamp. Now this is a bit of a tight fit, but I think it's gonna be worth it. I'm gonna route the RGB cable for my CPU block. That's the challenge with RGB. Yes, it looks cool, but you run the risk of adding a whole bunch of wires and stuff that do not look cool. That's pretty clean. I'm still waiting for the next innovation. Motherboard manufacturers putting holes in their motherboards so that you can pass through RGB like directly from your CPU and GPU and stuff. Now it's time for RAM. Naturally, we've gone with Corsair's Vengeance Pro. This kit right here is a 4 by 8 gig 32 gig kit that clocks in at 3600 megahertz. Not too shabby as you guys probably saw in one of our previous videos. For third-gen Ryzen, that is a great middle ground for price to performance. Won't be really leaving anything on the table, but you don't have to spend a fortune on a top-spec memory kit. Now this next step is highly optional, but because Corsair did happen to send over some of their white light loops, and I have not yet had a chance to check them out, I wanted to integrate them into this machine. I'm into it. All right, so we're gonna throw four of these in. One at the back, I'm into it. And then three at the front. I'm into it. Now one of the trickiest aspects of building any water-cooled system is getting the radiator mounted with all the fans. If you can avoid it, don't put your fittings at the bottom. It's much more difficult for your pump to push the air bubbles down against gravity to bleed the air out of your loop. So fittings at the top if you can. Second, while having the fans on this side pushing air through or having them on this side pulling air through, doesn't actually make that much of a difference to performance. For maintenance, it can be quite a lot easier to have the fans on this side pulling air through because then cleaning off the dust or cat hair or whatever else is that simple. Now, this is a filtered case. I'm gonna say it's probably not gonna get that much dust in it. Now here's another little trick to watch out for. Corsair actually includes three full sets of mounting screws for their radiators in the box, and this can be a little bit confusing for new users. You've got your short one. That's pretty obvious. That's for if you're mounting the rad directly to the case. Boom. There you go. But then there's two long ones. There's one that just barely extends past the frame of the fan. So that's the one in my left hand here. And then there's one that extends quite a bit past the frame of the fan such that it would actually dig into the radiator fins if you didn't have something like a thick piece of acrylic or a big thick case in the way on the other side. So that is what that longer one is for. We're gonna use the medium life one. The anti-vibration pads on these light loop fans are actually so thick that I ended up needing the longer screws. So we're gonna switch over to those and I'm gonna do the opposite corner here in order to get the radiator mostly in position here. You know, it's funny. I was sitting here thinking this build isn't so simple or fast after all, is it? But it's not the water cooling that's taking all the time. It's actually all the RGB lighting that we're putting into it. Wow, we are actually making great progress on this thing. So with our fans and our radiator installed, we're gonna go ahead and throw in our motherboard. This is a feature I've always loved about Corsair's cases though. That nubbin that they have in the middle that holds your motherboard in place while you fish around for the right screw to put it in. So I always think storage is last, but nowadays your storage like this MP600 PCI Express Gen 4 SSD. While in most cases we would install our SSD, peel this thermal pad off, and then we would throw that back in our motherboard, we're actually not gonna do that. Instead opting to just leave our SSD exposed. That way it will also get some airflow from the air moving through our system. Now we can unpack our power supply. So I don't have any scientific evidence for this, but in a case where most of my cooling is being handled by water, I do tend to put my power supplies fan up because the rationale would be that when they're running fanlessly, as this one will, when it's under very low load, that way they can passively convect heat up more easily. That's my theory. I'm sticking to it. Now this is a bit of an unusual one, but I actually like to run my modular cables backwards. Starting up at the motherboard and then ending down at the power supply. And it's just because I find it a little bit easier to to push my cables through this way than to try to bring them up through the back. Next up is our reservoir. Now this is one of the places where I think Corsair had to be the most careful. Because the reservoir and pump in most cases are the most difficult to mount, you know, cleanly and nicely. Because for years we've had this incredible assortment of water cooling ready cases on the market that have radiator mount spacing, but have given no thought whatsoever to where to put the pump and the reservoir. So one thing that makes our lives a little bit easier is that they're completely integrated as a single unit, and they've got a bunch of different mounting options included. So what we could do is we could use this 120 millimeter bracket mounted here, but that would look stupid. We're not going to do that. We could also actually mount it here, which is far more reasonable. We might end up doing that. This is a nice little inclusion. So this is one of those jumpers so you can leak test your loop before you power on your system if you're not comfortable just sticking a wire into your power supply. I'm comfortable sticking a wire into the end of my power supply, so I'll put that away. This is our outlet, and this one here is our inlet. Now this is something I wish I had thought of before I put the motherboard in. This is a very, it would be a very unusual build order for me to put in all my water cooling stuff before I started putting in PC components, but it might have actually been better in this case because with my motherboard installed, it's actually a little bit tricky to get at the mounting screws at the back here. Now it's worth noting that you can mount the bracket this way like I have or this way if you want more vertical play. So we're almost totally wired up now, which means it's time for the dark side of RGB. Oh! Now we don't need the basic lighting controller that came with the case anymore, but it's more work to remove it than to just cable manage it at this point. So we're just gonna leave that kind of here-ish. Ah ha ha ha! This is a really nice touch actually. I never noticed this. This particular Corsair case happens to have exactly the spacing you need for an RGB strip down the side here. Freaking gorgeous. Okay, so power connectors for both our Commander Pro and our Fan Hub are taken care of now, and we did have to go and grab a Molex connector for our D5 pump. Grumble grumble. And now we're ready for what is ironically the easy part of this build. We had to go back to water cooling again. So something that a lot of people don't know is that while Nvidia Founders Edition cards have the greatest compatibility with third-party water blocks like this one from Corsair, a lot of the time even non-Founders Edition cards use the same reference PCB mounting holes, so you can still use a third-party block. Alright, well, let's find out which screws aren't all the way out. Shwoop! Shwoop! Shwoop! MSI's design is different from the Founders Edition in that it uses this big gigantic heat spreader to actually handle most of the mount points for the back plate that just kind of keep the card sandwiched together, so it's got like a like a heat spreader sandwich. So this part is really important. When it comes time to reassemble your graphics card, maybe you need to submit an RMA or you know, take the water cooler off it because you want to sell it on Craigslist. It doesn't matter. You want to put all your thermal pads back exactly where you found them, and in some cases that can even include going through and scraping the ones that are left on the card off with a knife and then putting them back on where they came from. Because otherwise, once you reassemble it, a lot of these other components on the board might not have temperature sensors and the card might not know to thermal throttle if they're not adequately cooled, and you could end up bricking the card even if your, you know, GPU temps are very good because you did a great job of repasting it. And then the other key is to carefully put all the screws back where they came from. So once again, part of Corsair's schtick is that as long as you're willing to strip down a GPU, it's supposed to be relatively simple. So it's got pre-applied thermal compound, thermal pads don't even need like covers taken off them or anything. You just go ahead and line up the holes, then chuck the back plate on and screw the whole thing together. And now all that's left is to install it and plan out our coolant runs. In a perfect world we might have done that a little while ago, but we don't live in a perfect world, do we? I'm excited. This is really coming together now. We're close. Wow, that's tight. Oh boy. Here comes our GPU power. Let's see if we can get this in. Ah, you know what? Maybe Apple's onto something with the whole extra long PCI Express slot and no external power connectors. Ah, there we go. Let's do some tubing, shall we? We are going to go straight from our pump into our CPU block and then we're gonna see how things go from there. Now we're gonna go from the outlet over to our radiator. Oh, right angles. Oh, yes, thank you, Jake. All right. We just got saved by a wild Jake who appeared. Yes. Ah, that's way better. Nice. The wild Jake bearing right angle and 45 degree fitting saved the day. World's prettiest water cooling loop? No, but we weren't going for that award. We were going for something that's relatively simple to throw together and the actual plumbing portion of this build, assuming that you're comfortable with, you know, installing a CPU cooler or mounting a bracket to a radiator or whatever else, only took what, like, I don't know, 10 minutes? Not too shabby. Now Corsair actually sent over a bottle of their red coolant. They have a bunch of different coolant colors, but I'm gonna take this opportunity to advise against one Corsair product in favor of another one. We're gonna be using plain old water because if you put colored liquid in an RGB setup, you're locking yourself in. You're eliminating your options. We've got an RGB reservoir here, kids. Don't squeeze this too hard, hey? No. No. No. Yeah, I don't know if I'm the biggest fan of this one. Here we go. All right, you gotta live a little, kids. There it goes. Ah, that's more like it. Why would Corsair choose me to do their all Hydro-X water-cooled build? Whoa. That RGB though. So the pump won't pump until the air is out of it, and you can see there's still air bubbles coming up. Yeah, come on. Okay, time for a classic Linus live fill. Live fill. So now that our OS is installed, all of our fans are lighting up and we did have to remove one of our RGB strips, which is fine because I had only intended to do three in the first place, so we threw an extension in the bottom, and now one, two, three RGB strips, res, block, and other block, all lit up. Also, you guys might notice the system is basically silent. So everything in here can be configured from within Corsair's IQ software. We can change colors, we can change performance characteristics, like, oh, I don't know, let's say we want all of these fans to be in extreme mode. All red for extreme. Wait, where's my RAM? Boom, all red on everything. Once you have the fan curves based on the temps IQ monitors and lighting setup just the way you like it, it's super easy to create a profile with an IQ to save the configuration, allowing you to quickly switch between profiles on the fly. You can have multiple configs for gaming, each with their own color setups, a profile for movie watching and studying where your fans are set super quiet, and my personal favorite, an automatic lights out profile for nighttime so that awesome RGB setup you just installed doesn't interrupt your sleep. So we're just gonna fire up hardware info and have a look at what our temps look like. I'm just gonna grab a quick blender project. We're gonna hit our CPU and see how this thing flies. Is it all flash or does it have some dash as well? Alright, so our CPU is comfortably turboing well past 4 GHz, which is nice to see. Let's see how it handles an all core load now. We jumped up to 60 degrees, not bad, and we're turboing right around 4 GHz, which is exactly what we'd expect from a 3900X. Really nice to see. One of the coolest things about IQ for me is the profiles though. So everything from performance of the fans to temp monitoring to RGB lighting effects can all be set up as profiles. So I've only adjusted lighting here, but you can see I've got my unicorn barf profile running right now. If I want to go fast, I need red for that high performance. Everything changes over to red or if I'm the kind of person who just doesn't like RGB, I can just turn it off. And it's gone. So there you have it guys. This whole build took us about three and a half hours and that includes actually building a PC, setting up the RGB lighting, which was the single most time-consuming part of it, and custom water cooling, which I'd say if we were to isolate that part as maybe an hour to an hour and a half. So yeah, it's not as fast or as budget friendly as an AIO water cooler, but if you want the best results, I have always said that custom water cooling is the only way to get it. Speaking of custom water cooling, custom water cool your body. LTTstore.com. Now that's it. That's all I was going to say about that. See you at the next video guys.