everything about this computer is designed to do one thing beat the
competition price for practicality be damned rtx 3090 ti 1200 motherboard
graphene infused liquid coolants and the
centerpiece of our so fast it's kind of stupid computer the Intel core i9 12900
ks a product that as far as we can tell only exists so that Intel can still say
no matter how many asterisks they have the fastest gaming CPU and what do you
do with something like that well you don't really bother to review it because
it's never going to make any sense instead you take things one step further
by making it even dumber that's right we have obtained the rocket cool copper ihs
for 12th gen this is a product that assumes you have so much disposable
income you can not only buy the fastest thing just have the bragging rights but
you can spend more risk destroying it
and all just to drop your CPU temps by a few degrees well like 15 some people say
15 degrees 15. holy crap well this is
going to be fun then in it almost as fun as telling you about our sponsor build
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building your pc right now rocket cools claims raise a lot of questions for me
there's no doubt that copper's an excellent conductor of heat or that the
12900 ks is a hot power hungry chip that
could benefit from additional cooling but here's the issue
integrated heat spreaders have been made of holy is this one not
copper ah yes it is integrated heat spreaders
have been made of copper basically going back
as long as i've been an enthusiast i mean this is a pentium 4 from 2003.
of course you might say but that copper has this other stuff on top of it
but that's the thing that's not a problem that's nickel
plating nickel plating performance coolers has been common practice for
over 10 years and the layer is so thin that it's been well demonstrated that it
doesn't have any impact on cooling according to rocket cool it comes down
to their design which supposedly improves surface area by nine and a half
percent as well as their quality they say that their ihs is extremely flat
which we know should have a positive impact on our cooling but here's the
thing alex i know that Intel is mass producing these things by literally the
millions but is it conceivable that in that mass production they're allowing
their tolerances to slip such that some random could make it more perfectly more
accurately yeah i really doubt that Intel spends 33 dollars on their ihs i'm
sure it's clear to everyone that neither of these are 33 worth of copper and both
of them had to be cnc machined so what makes one of them
more expensive to machine the tighter your tolerance is so the flatter it is
the more expensive it gets why better machine more time both but then why
wouldn't Intel just use a better machine at their scale well because they're
doing so much scale they only have to make a couple of these guys Intel is
making thousands and thousands of those that adds up fast so they want to go
fast yeah they want to go fast could it make that much of a difference we can
actually get some idea by taking a closer look at the thermal paste pattern
of our stock ihs it looks like there's way more pressure right in the center
which is good that's right where the dye is and then around that not so much so i
imagine this part not doing a whole lot of cooling but enough talk now it's time
to perform surgery on the 800 CPU that i just bought yesterday can you believe
Intel wouldn't send us a second sample after the review what a bunch of jerks i
know right ah there are a few different configurations that you can get your
copper ihs upgrade kitten you can get just this and that's 33. or if you don't
have any de-litting tools or anything like that you can get the full kit for
80 us dollars which is everything you need to take apart and reassemble your
CPU well there's no glue you need to buy the glue separate oh you just go buy
silicone glue oh that's probably fine uh they recommend ca actually it seems like
yeah i would think it'd be too brittle all right well we're gonna follow the
instructions
jeez sorry the d lidding tool is
machined to delrin not as fancy as devourers and you actually have to
insert your CPU and then screw it shut in order to
operate it which is a little less user friendly but it's also significantly
lower cost and they say the whole thing can be done in a few minutes and from
the look of it i believe them wait why am i using this thing when i have an
lttstore.com screwdriver
the next stage of the instructions are pretty crap it just says set a two-minute timer with a heat gun no
mention of temperatures or anything like that fortunately we're fairly smart we
can figure out that we need to melt the solder that is attaching the original
ihs to the die oh that's actually a benefit to the delrin it'll sap away
less heat once we clamshell it up what are we at looks like we're right around
130 degrees so that isn't hot enough to melt solder probably lead free around
270 degrees but it is going to be getting softer for sure the delrin's at
about 140 degrees right now so probably don't touch it we're gonna want to move
reasonably quickly here this seems like a crap ton of pressure i feel like i'm
ruining it i found on soldered cpus if it doesn't feel quite right when it
starts moving in one direction like it doesn't pop off if you flip it and then
push it the other way you can kind of just strain fatigue well it's moving
freely now so that's cool look at that beautiful and not even that
burny the next step is to scrape it then right
what are you scraping i'm going to scrape the solder okay well first we need to get rid of the black crap just
one step at a time i told you they include a scraping tool and i can't believe that we bought this
yesterday and we are already doing this to it
this is an abuse we're making faster
scraping tool just feels like just the right hardness
sorry how exactly does this tape gun work the blade is recessed i just push
the thing when you have a box you know it goes over you push it it comes out oh
that's actually quite clever which is good because i think i paid a lot for this thing like
way back in the day it's taped down now what oh this is the cool part i really
like how they've done this instead of you know sometimes you have to use like
a razor to get the solder off and it's just terrible here you just use
chemicals i believe this is indium and it eats away the solder so you just
apply it shut up spread it around and
it gets rid of it okay that's pretty neat
no you don't want to get don't want to get that in your eyes but the other way
to do this apparently is mercury and that's a lot worse that's true and
one two three four gotta say the little tissues i dispose
of usually don't look like this
the next bit is you just wanna give it a little polish okay a little dab of this
on some paper towel oh i thought this said flitz polish like from poland
oh yeah if you kind of look at how they did it here um
they just do a little bit of the corner uh-huh yeah
yeah don't mind me i'm just polishing my CPU
here
that's that's probably good
hi brandon how you doing i am really glad that i did an accurate job of that
taping because that ended up being quite messy to be clear i don't think the
process has to be that messy that's what she said
look at that it's gorgeous
oh balls oh it's everywhere oh it's all over my hands i guess this is a
situation where having a delrin thing would be good
that would be eating into aluminum right now okay i'm just getting more liquid metal on this by touching it because my
hands are covered in liquid metal at any rate there's a 12th gen thing here okay
go ahead we put our CPU in whoop we're gonna put this here oh god
oh god jesus christ okay
uh where'd our liquid metal go oh here it is
whoa no that's too much oh stop stop stop stop come back
i might have put on too much alex no that seems good unlike applying thermal
compound to your heat spreader here it's important to have complete coverage of
the dye because every part of it has the potential to get extremely hot and any
part of it that doesn't have thermal compound coverage is a disaster oh man
this is what a what a ride i feel like we've waited so long to unbox this now
look at that you can actually see the tooling marks on the top it's kind of
hard to catch but they kind of go this way that's not
necessarily a bad thing that doesn't mean that it's not flat it just means
that you can see the marks a little bit oh i see so it is a little bit bigger
yeah i see that wow alex i see what you mean like this yellow rectangle isn't even
it's like they didn't even try to center it why rocket cool includes a nice
little guide here to show you where to apply just a little bit of liquid metal
to the underside of the ihs not gonna lie this looks sick
okay wait we didn't put glue on oh my god that is a giant thing of ca uh how
are we applying this i have an idea ready
for rca i'm just going to make a puddle of ca
we go ahead and just drop it into place
and here we go does this feel like absolute madness or what i don't know
this seems fine like Intel making the cpus the madness in fairness it does
what is it 5.5 on two cores two course
it's fast it's really fast in my testing that i did it was doing 5.2 all core all
day pretty great okay um oh did you see
it glued to the thing no
oh there it goes what's uh liquid metal
why don't you handle the CPU from now on okay fun fact alcohol not only dries
quickly but it's a drying agent
don't do that you want to get all sandpaper wank later that's how you do
it okay that's pretty cool and the cooler
we're gonna put on it is about as good as it gets until you get into peltier or
phase change cooling it's a fully custom loop with ample radiator space for this
heat and that bit about graphene-infused coolant we did a whole video about it it
actually does drop the temps a couple of degrees so this is as good as it gets
man this is way more extreme than just buying the highest end parts and
throwing them together we are trying to shave every degree off of this CPU
moment of truth hey there we go
do you believe this will have worked 15 degrees is a bold claim for 33
i mean you could spend 33 more dollars on a cooler and it wouldn't drop your
CPU temps 15 degrees well this cooler will do that anyway i think it'll be
around 10. i've seen a lot of people comment that it's like a 10 degree drop
which is really crazy that's also really impressive and it booted which is good i
managed to not kill it really alex Windows 11. you know the
people are gonna be mad right prime95 yep small small fft blend
wait this thing hit 100 degrees in a blend test after like nine minutes or
something yeah really yeah on custom
water cooling well it's like 240 watts sustained out of the box yeah wow
actually two of the cores are at 5.5 yes like they said now before we actually
put the processor under load is a perfect time to have a look at all of
our temperature sensors and make sure that none of them are a huge outlier
which could indicate that we didn't have adequate coverage of our liquid metal
and it looks like this is all in
okay shape and we're ready to press go i mean we're going to know almost
immediately if this worked wow now to be clear it did take
eight minutes for it to thermal throttle last time but i don't think we're gonna
get that yeah we haven't hit 60 yet this is interesting for a couple of reasons
first we can see why it's best not to use prime95 blend for a stress test
that's okay but as long as we do it both times that's kind of flipping incredible
it's not 15 degrees incredible but it's a lot better than a kick in the
teeth it's in the neighborhood just shy of 10. 9 degrees while consuming 20 more
watts is really impressive remember that
extra power consumption means that our cores are boosting higher and for longer
this is great right yeah i mean i'm pretty stoked do
you know what's even more impressive when we went for lunch we forgot to stop
it yeah it's still fine under 90. it's
been running for an hour now and before
after like 10 minutes it was thermal throttling now it's what 85 degrees it's
amazing yeah 90 on the hottest peak
i can really feel the heat coming off it though oh yeah it doesn't feel like
that's just a CPU worth of heat but i mean that's what holy sh 300 watts
yeah that's crazy
how can you have a CPU pulling through ow the freaking vrm heatsink because
where's my thermal camera oh yeah i guess there's no fans pointed at that
because it's a test bed yeah well i didn't think it was gonna be pushing 300
flipping watts those poor vrms are putting like 250 amps through them right
now the pcb is at 72 degrees
what what are you oh network switch
ups a power brick i need to take this thing home and just like play with it
with my kids this thing is so cool all right do you want to run a couple
more tests i'd love to bmw is a pretty short blender render though hey yeah but
it allows us to see if it runs faster in like thermal velocity boost range
right so uh one minute 28 to beat and the maximum temp was 95 degrees it's
really fast yeah it's really fast so that is about 10 degrees better oh
yeah i guess that's a good point brandon that that actually is 10 degrees better
as advertised here it is 75 versus 82 degrees okay only 8 degrees
but that's that higher power draw so wait if
it's higher power draw was the result even any different though it was one
second better one second faster but then by the time you're spending 800
on your CPU you're probably spending a total of around three grand 3500 on the
whole machine what's another 40 bucks for one second better and you could
overclock it now like there's enough headroom that if we won do we go for 5.6
i just went on do we have xtu on here yeah of course we do xtu shows us just
how good this CPU has been i have the
same profile that's pretty much exactly the same clocks as this was stock and
that was pulling about 350 400 watts should i just push everything up 100
megahertz and see what happens yeah
current limited so we're gonna need to up our voltage of it do 0.1 that's
pretty safe it's amazing how close to the sun Intel is flying with this thing
i just want to see if it actually hits that frequency
no it's slower okay definitely going to take some
fine tuning to get this thing to run any faster than stock but it's cooler all
right you want to do a game test yeah for our tests i chose shadow of the
tomb raider and forza just because they give you what the CPU is outputting
because the CPU is so fast that everything's GPU bound pretty much that
is some killer coil wine on this 3090 ti
i mean that's what happens when we have 450 watt or it's rumored they could be
even higher for the next gen gpus this computer legitimately if you have like
bad not up to code wiring in your house it might burn down but look at these
reflections 110 FPS
that's exactly the same as before but it's GPU bound we actually got five more
FPS on the CPU it's a win if we had a
faster GPU we'd get five more FPS yeah
and a 378. uh we'll worry about CPU game and 237.
that's 7fps higher and the average FPS is exactly the same
again so there you have it if you want every last little bit of performance
you can buy one of these or if you want
almost as good you could spend way less oh and you can check out our sponsor
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if you guys enjoyed this video maybe check out this one where we did sub-zero
cooling it was fun