The dislike of overclockers for the standard links of the thermal chain when cooling the processor has long been known. They change the standard interface and remove the heat spreader covers. One of the experimenters recently even turned the original processor cover into a water block, obtaining controversial results.
Image source: Octppus, YouTube
Video blogger Octppus from China, according to UNIKO’s Hardware and Tom’s Hardware, teamed up with one of his subscribers for his experiment, who owns equipment for mechanical processing of metal products with numerical control. According to the author of the experiment, the standard cover of the Intel Core i9-14900KS heat spreader was to be turned into the base of the water block, using a milling cutter to cut out microchannels for the coolant, a groove for the sealant and holes for attaching the transparent cover of the improvised water block.
Despite the filigree nature of such operations and the high risk of damaging the processor cover, the idea was successfully implemented in practice. A water block cover of suitable size was cut out of transparent polymer, holes for fasteners and fittings for supplying and removing cooling liquid were provided in it, respectively. The processor with such an “integrated water block” was installed in the motherboard, and for the purity of the experiment, water was pumped through the system from an ordinary plastic bucket, allowing to control both the volume of liquid and its temperature. The liquid that passed through the water block was drained into a separate bottle, facilitating the task of increasing the efficiency of the system.
The author of the experiment gradually reduced the pump performance, at a certain speed of pumping the liquid the temperature of the processor began to rise, and the improvised cooling system began to be inferior to the one manufactured in industrial conditions. In fact, the efficiency of such an “integrated” water block turned out to be quite low, since the length of the channels and the area of the washed surface were limited by the design dimensions of the processor cover. Specialized water blocks have both longer microchannels and an increased area of contact of the liquid with the base, so they are more effective in cooling even with moderate pump performance. In other words, the experiment showed that such a cooling system has questionable viability without properly selected other components.