'Probably the worst build of my entire life': This YouTuber spent two months building a gaming PC with titanium liquid cooling, galvanic corrosion be damned

YouTuber Jakkuh (previously a member of Linus Tech Tips) has spent two months designing a high-spec gaming PC kitted with an RTX 5090 and $1,300 worth of RAM to test out titanium liquid cooling, and the idea came from their love of cars.

In their latest video, Jakkuh talks about looking at car exhausts on eBay, only to spot one with bent titanium tubing. This inspired them to buy six meters of the stuff to wrap around a gaming rig.

Jakkuh calls it 'the fastest computer I've ever had', and it's kitted with an impressive list of components:

• AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D
• RTX 5090 (with Optimus RTX 5090 PNY water block)
• 96 GB of G.Skill Trident Z5 NEDO DDR5 memory
• 4 TB of Sabrent Rocket 5 Gen5 storage
• Seasonic Prime TX 1600 W power supply

Before actually bending the tubing, Jakkuh made a 3D model of the PC with all of the other hardware in it, in order to create an accurate model to create the distro plate, which then pumps water around the build to keep it cool.

They opted to bend their own tubes with a $140 tubing bender, instead of using a $30,000 mandrel bender, which tends to get used in industrial bending. To account for that difference, Jakkuh custom printed a vice to use in their own bender to avoid clamping too hard on a single point, and ended up filling the tubing with sand, so the bend doesn't damage the tubing.

In case you're wondering why the build took so long, Jakkuh spent a week working on the distro plate, and they had multiple packages go missing throughout the process. Jakkuh also realised early on that two water blocks had water flows that were the opposite of each other, so they had to build a custom diagonal channel to send the two flows past each other.

This is all before they realised the acrylic they bought was .3 inches smaller than the distro plate they designed. Most of the video is Jakkuh talking about the various mistakes and hiccups made throughout building the PC, which maps onto my experience doing anything new with a gaming PC.

Jakkuh calls the rig "probably the worst build of my entire life. The most difficult, most annoying computer I have ever had to build. And I don't even know if it leaks yet."

It turns out the build does in fact work, and doesn't leak. Jakkuh says, "Other than the pump sounding like death, it's pumping".

In fairness, it looks absolutely gorgeous in the Havn HS 420 fishtank case, the grey titanium accenting the whites and blacks of the rig itself. And CPU temps, while idle, sit around 40 °C. In Overwatch (no longer called Overwatch 2), the rig reaches 500 fps, and CPU temps sit consistently under 75°C, with GPU temps sitting below 50°C.

"Titanium tubing. Questionable. Would I do it again? Most definitely not", says Jakkuh.

This is before mentioning that titanium tubing, paired with copper, will accelerate copper corrosion. This means that the internals that use copper can take damage over time, with plain water running through them. You can put anti-corrosive agents in water coolers, which should slow down that process, but Jakkuh appears to simply pour in water from their own bottle in the video.

As one commenter points out, "If you check a "Galvanic Reaction Chart" I think having titanium tubing will make the copper internals of each component to corrode more. Don't really know if this is a problem but take it into account". Jakkuh's response? "YOLO."