this is a powerful gaming computer
we designed it specifically to deliver the most performance it possibly could
while being completely
silent it wasn't easy though because while Noctua's new nhp1 passive CPU
cooler works great it's also hard to fit
in many cases so we decided to do something a little more fun and
well creative like my segways to our sponsors like
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Linus
we started with this sweet little portable rig the highlights of which are
a 3060 ti graphics card and an Intel
core i7 11700k all with 32 gigs of crucial ballistics
ddr4 crammed into this teeny tiny little silverstone nlo8 this
thing manages to be powerful functional and certifiably cute just
look at this little handle it's like it's so fashionable
which is all well and good until
you hit the machine with a heavy load and it folds like an Intel macbook
which wait they're supposed to fold
thankfully Noctua has the solution so let's open this thing up and oh geez
how did this delightful little abc board book for children get in here
lttstore.com ah there it is
got em anyway holy crap is this thing ever massive
meet the nhp1 and it is both heavy and
completely unlike any other heat sink that i've seen it weighs in at just a
hair over two and a half pounds thanks to its huge stack of unconventionally
thick aluminum fins there are only 13
fins which is a fraction of what you'd have on a normal heat sink and the fins
are spaced super far apart like this so that the heated air they create has room
to convect itself upward and away from
the cooler allowing it to draw fresh air into it passively that's right it's
designed to be used on modern cpus without any fan
and this action is facilitated by six heat pipes that carry heat away from the
CPU and then the whole stack is actually
braced together so that these poor heat
pipes don't just bend under the weight
of this thing now looking back at Noctua's earlier prototype they've made
a lot of changes to the design notable ones include going from large tabbed
holes in the fins to smaller punched out ones and the way that they actually
reduced the number of the fins that
directly attach to the cold plate now i
would have thought that more fins directly soldered to the heat source is
more better but Noctua is clearly leaving the bulk of that work to the
heat pipes now of course it's time to find out if
it works oh yeah we're gonna need uh to make some
modifications here i think ladies and gentlemen
now the cooler we were using before is a Noctua nhl9i and it's great for its size
coming in at 59 points on Noctua's performance scale but
surely this thing will be better right wait
42 points is this even an upgrade
one way to find out i guess
what are these sharpie marks based on i put the cooler on and then put the
case on roughly where it went and marked it oh okay
uh all right good luck everybody i swear
i think colin is sabotaging me here okay oh god this is so approximate
in spite of my team's best attempts to sabotage me here i'm going to do a
bang-up job of this
and bang up top of here you put your thumb directly in the path of the razor blade because i didn't think of it did i
where's the top line though i think it might be there
did you draw it though i i can't recall
it was yesterday everything's a blur oh and there's a color on top of it see how
it fits okay come on
oh this isn't life altering minus it's
pretty life faulting it's case all time that's for sure i mean i don't know is that where it
goes just mock it up in the case and then put
the case back on it what oh crap
that's pretty straight so far
i mean straight-ish is it a plus
that's at least a b
do i get an a for that one no what shut up that is totally pretty straight ish
oh shut up you guys are being rude minus there there's an a-hole if i ever saw
one
don't mind me just using my sponsor to clean my sponsor got lttstore.com desk
pads that's how to clean it
for mounting Noctua seems to have made a revision to their superb secufirm 2 and
this is called secufirm two plus the main difference is that nocto has
switched to torx heads for these nuts and these posts are a little bit wider
than they used to be these nuts
oh uh have we test fitted this wait yes
and it goes on hey yes it's very tight
up against that vrm yeah yeah it's
it's a smidge you got a fudger in there okay
one of our concerns when i was talking to colin about this project was hey
colin the side panels for this case slide on are we gonna have to have like
a much bigger hole to account for that no no no dog because the cooler goes in
after the fact so
yeah
oh yeah oh yeah
torx me baby oh no there's so much extra over there
oh no
don't show that david get my good side
somewhat more convincing like that no that's not that bad oh it's really
big on this side too colin hey you scrubbed the lines you can't
blame me for that you did the cutting
i did but you put the lines on hey they were
just guidelines and put the case on roughly where it went and marked it oh
okay oh it's a good thing it has this light on
it because otherwise i'd have no way of knowing it turned on
come on baby whoa hey there it is
let's go ahead and run our 16 threads of small fft prime 95 and when we ran this
before on the l9i the cooler became heat soaked almost immediately causing our
CPU to clock down to 3.2 gigahertz to protect itself
and here in spite of the lower estimated
performance rating you're gonna actually see our CPU is still running at 4.4
gigahertz that is because there is so much more
thermal mass in a passive solution like this one that it'll take a lot longer to
thermal throttle that is if it thermal throttles at all i mean
we're giving it a pretty big advantage putting it outside the case
and there it is after only a few minutes you can see it's
steadily going down as the temperatures go up and then reach a ceiling so modern
processors have a mechanism to protect themselves where they will actually
clock down their frequency until they reach a point of equilibrium with the
cooler that they are equipped with so we're going to allow this one to keep
running here but i also want to disclaim this
demonstration by pointing out that in the real world this kind of synthetic
test would never really happen unless
you're super into folding at home or you habitually run things like long blender
renders like the huge amount of thermal
mass that the nhp1 has would allow it to soak up short you know one or two minute
spikes in heat output so it would be able to maintain its turbo clock speeds
then once the load is alleviated for a while
it could slowly cool off while you're performing light tasks so by
artificially hitting it with a 100 load we are intentionally using up all that
thermal mass and then testing the maximum amount that the cooler is able
to radiate away now as for whether you would want a product
like this it comes with a six-year warranty
but given that it has no moving parts whatsoever i'd say that's the warranty
on the cooler is kind of the least of your concerns and the bigger issue to me
is that passive systems aside from CPU temperatures which are going to range
between 90 and 100 degrees can have other components nearby running at
higher temperatures than i would deem comfortable like the power delivery on
the motherboard and while the last few years of laptop engineering has taught
us that 100 degrees on a CPU is apparently okay
it hasn't taught us that it's necessarily okay for the other heat
sensitive components around it now you could alleviate that issue by
mounting a fan which more than doubles
Noctua's performance rating to 89
but if you're gonna put a fan on this thing
an nhu 12s redux is rated for over three
times the performance according to the same manufacturer and cost less than
half as much so
just get that right not quite putting on a fan like the nfa
12 that Noctua recommends allows you to set that fan to only spin up for high
stress situations just like the seasonic sgx650 power supply that we used for our
test system here so that means that the rest of the time you can reap the
benefits of just using convection to move air around for zero fan noise and
way less dust being sucked into your case
although hundred and ten dollars seems like a steep price to pay for marginally less
noise and a little less dust so how could not to up possibly justify
releasing this thing for you we asked
number one it took a long time to develop number two the much thicker
cooling fins meant a new costly stamping process number three they know it's a
niche product that isn't gonna sell at particularly high volume number four
aluminum prices have exploded over the last year and this is a full kilogram of
it and number five it comes with Noctua's more expensive nth2 thermal
paste and a high quality torx screwdriver
and besides a little less dust doesn't really do the
value of a product like this justice colin for example has a perfect use case
for a cooler like this in his workshop which by the way we are going to be
upgrading soon with a new file server and cad machine so get subscribed so you
don't miss that in a workshop environment dust be it
from unsealed concrete floors or from active projects gets inside
everything and that can not just hamper cooling performance over the long term
but depending what kind of dust it is it can destroy sensitive electronics
so pairing this guy with a power supply
like we did that can also run fanlessly would be perfect for an environment like
that and well worth the price you pay
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privacy.com forward slash Linus if you guys are a fan of these
kinds of overdone small form factor builds why
not check out our original hot rod pc we're gonna have that linked in the end
screen for you to enjoy like
my urine is stuck
i am the tech tips guy mr tech tips