this right here is the phenomic hex 2.0
CPU cooler and if you were to look at the
performance claims alone you'd be forgiven for thinking there's some kind
of magic going on here since it seems to be able to cool
much better than its relatively small size would suggest
but unfortunately for perpetual motion machine makers and this cooler alike
magic is not real
and thermodynamics is what makes this product special is of
course its use of a peltier or thermoelectric cooler which uses
electricity to move heat from one side
of the device down here or up there wherever it is to the other
pretty cool but what's even cooler
is this what alex is holding is two aquarium
coolers using a similar technology which together should be able to provide
360 watts of cooling power so we're
going to see how our two contraptions here manage against a 10 core
overclocked processor in a new crazy cooling experiment series that we're
calling bad cooling ideas
yeah
vincero watches is celebrating their five-year anniversary and everything on
the website is on sale until august 18 2019. check them out at the link in the
video description
all right so tech cooling is pretty well established at this point but that
doesn't prevent people from marketing it as basically magic check out this
desktop cooler on kickstarter so
the way apelche or tech works fundamentally is by having electrons in
the form of dc current pass through two elements in one of the elements the
electrons go from a low to a high energy state absorbing heat and in the other
they go from a high to a low energy state releasing heat so you've got the
cold side and the hot side with a maximum temperature difference of
usually around 70 degrees celsius the
cooling capabilities of a tech are directly proportional to the power
consumption of the tech module so back
to that kickstarter thing it's not magic at all and really annoyed me when i
found it in my email so basically all it's doing is using the tech cooler to
make the water in the back of it hotter so in the end instead of your room being
cooler which like it does a bit you just end up with a container full of hot
water it's branded as eco-friendly but it's
using a tech cooler which are just not efficient at all so it's using heck tons
of electricity and it costs
350 dollars and it can only cool 60
watts a similarly priced refrigerant based
cooler has literally 50 times more
cooling but it does have a bluetooth speaker
which i don't think that's enough to save that my air conditioner doesn't have that
so let's get this thing on the CPU wait a
second they did what we tell everyone to do
they just completely ripped off Noctua's mounting mechanism
it's completely identical oh yeah yeah i saw that uh it's not
quite identical it's like a bit worse yeah the back plate is like an
all-in-one instead of having separate ones for AMD and Intel
but yeah it's pretty solid yeah good for them
at least they got one thing right so now that we know tech cooling is not in
fact magic let's investigate this cooler
a little bit more closely so phononic is
not actually the first to attempt to build a peltier into a CPU heatsink
monsoon coolant and swift tech all did
it way back in 2007. and there may even
be earlier instances why didn't it catch on i don't know
maybe it just wasn't mature enough so uh
let's take a closer look at this more recent attempt here
how does this go in it just sits there uh yeah you need to put the
like that or it doesn't really go back together no that's stupid
all right and then this goes here and just kind of
really let's squeeze this together i spent a fair bit of time figuring out
how to get it back together while you were gone
yeah hey
does that screw it all the way down yeah does that mean is that mounting pressure so right oh
you put it on upside down now the good news is that our uh
contact looks great between the heatsink and CPU oh yeah so you've got
pre-testing done on an nhu 12 va right yep now to be clear this is a much
larger heat sink with almost twice as many heat pipes
but it's 50 bucks cheaper so
these things got to find a way to be competitive yeah
you've got a second power supply just for our heatsink here
yeah so if you were installing this in a regular computer you would do this
we are just using a second power supply so we can find out just how much power
this thing is drawing because of course for a tech to work you
do need a power source for the palchie module itself which in the case of this
cooler is embedded in the base between the heatsink fins and heat pipes up here
and then another piece of copper now theoretically the bottom of this thing
should be quite chilly it's hard to feel it though i don't know
right now it's only drawing four watts so
it might need some input from the fan header to really turn on
interesting i'm having fun are you guys having fun
this is probably the coolest thing hey
i love that merch product placement was that you or david
i don't know is that just andy's water bottle oh it could be
uh yeah andy just left his water bottle
we all have the same water bottle so like
so we're just doing the good old blender bmw seeing what the max
temperature is at the end of it we're idling at around 30 low
30 maybe yeah cool 30 low to 30 min so what we're
trying to beat is a maximum core temperature of 68 degrees and an overall
average across all 10 cores of 64.9
okay you think we're gonna think we're gonna do it no
oh oh wrong window active
here we go
how's our power driver over there three watts right now
14. 30 oh so it kicked in
interesting so that's fairly sophisticated it keeps the
tech idle unless there's an actual heat load which
is really good because otherwise you would actually end up with your CPU
reaching sub-ambient temperatures which could cause condensation and shorting
yeah up to 40 watts 42 is the highest that i've
seen one of my cores is at 65 already
okay that's not too bad though okay we're
almost done so our maximum core managed to reach 70
degrees we've got another one at 69 another one at 68 68 67
yeah i mean he's coming back with his trusty
calculator but i think i've already determined that we're higher science
says it's worse yep two and a half degrees worse yep bummer
this situation could only get better though right should we turn on the overclock
yes so one of the special things about techs
is that from my understanding if you overwhelm them so you have like
too much heat they actually eventually become an
insulator i'm hoping that doesn't happen but uh
what do our CPU temps look like now we're 104 right now
106. hey it's trying hard yeah i wonder
how it's looking there
um i don't know if this is accurate because i don't know
if it's just bouncing around but that looks like 50 degrees on top of the
CPU there oh we're at a hunt oh
it's it's hit the thermal max i'm guessing
that it's down clock now oh it hasn't yet yeah it's down clocking now
everything's at like 110 degrees um fortunately
we always had a backup plan
just shutting it down
okay so while we were removing this this is
absolutely fascinating now what i was expecting
was for all of our heat sinks and heat pipes over here to be cooling the hot
side of the tech but alex pointed out that it actually works a little bit
differently than that yeah it looks like this entire side
is just working like a regular air cooler and whatever's left over
after those heat pipes is then being cooled
by the tech which is putting all that heat into the other
side right so our tech is actually sitting in between
two quad heat pipe single tower coolers
so effectively this one is cooling the hot side of our tech and this one is
just cooling the CPU directly with the cold side of the tech also cooling this
plate from right here in the middle yeah i feel like they were just concerned
that your average CPU would overwhelm the tech which makes sense because it's
only 40 watts right and
that would explain why it didn't just completely blow up yeah
and movie magic everything is different
so we have a whole water cooling loop just on the table here 360 rad costs
about the same as our two peltier units it's already been pre-tested we have a
new overclock that pushes this to its limits nice and it's all tested uh so
that's the same price as this which means that these two have to keep up
with that correct and like the RGB is included in the price so yeah the first
thing i notice about these is that while they are fairly pre-done as a solution
for the user um they don't have connectors on them
beautiful okay snip me like my doctor did it
okay we need we need to rethink this everyone's just shocked that
doing things the correct way is easier i'm shocked
yeah this is you know after the crap you gave me about my soldering that is really not a lot better
yeah it's not heating up the way that i would like it to want some electrical
tape yep i mean once you wrap it in enough electrical tape no one can tell
you're soldering job okay in all seriousness though guys yes
this is really jank and no neither alex nor i would ever
deploy something like this in like a 24 7 application but this will run for
quite literally five to ten minutes and we have a fire extinguisher right there
okay wow that immediately got really cold
wow eighteen fifteen thirteen eleven that's absolutely
that's really cold we're gonna be below zero very soon
uh yep we're below zero degrees
so this could be a bad idea to keep my finger on here yeah what's it like on
the bottom uh 60 60 70 something like that not bad it
feels fine so guys what we're looking at here is a much more powerful peltier
module you can see it has just larger gauge wires going into it it does seem
to be a bit bigger than the one that was built into the heatsink and what it's
doing is it's got its hot side over here which is being cooled by this double
tower cooler with 392 millimeter fans and then it's got its cold side over
here with just this rudimentary water block that is really quite frosty you
can actually see there's frost forming on it and i'm leaving fingerprints
behind so that's going to chill our water and this is going to dissipate the
heat of our peltier module and our CPU to the surrounding air also it's
currently drawing 301 watts not bad yeah
instead of necessarily trying to have it at the highest point and like minimize
water loss that way what if we just
cut the tube and then i just jam this on there
um this is a quick connection sure okay so actually oh pinch it pinch it
wait wait wait wait don't don't lift that up not too high this is not half
inch tubing okay
okay let's keep that oh wow
that is not coming off so here's an idea
yeah should we just get this out of here um
what's attached okay now that looked really jank but
that's how much water we lost
yeah we're basically pros
but that was intentional so how proud are we right now we
basically invented a cool it boreous
not very now our idle temps are looking pretty
fine 26 27 27. so actually it is lower now it's 23. oh
wow actually it's dropping really fast yeah
our lowest core is at 22 already all right f12
yep here it goes
so we're looking at a maximum temperature of 84 to beat
80.7 is our average on all cores remember there's two chillers in series
here so we want this one versus this one so this one's like
26. and this guy
come on it's like
it's like 26 also
well it's trying they're trying there bud oh our render's
done oh so our maximum on the hottest core was 80. however
that doesn't tell the whole story because
we actually started with our water chilled to sub-ambient
and we could see as the test ran that it was definitely heating up so we need to
do a longer test yeah so how'd we do
oh yeah we had to beat 84 degrees
and we hit what
94 that's so that's not great so all that's
left after of course zipping up my stealth hoodie and telling you guys it's
available on lttstore.com is to walk through
why this is a bad idea so there's a couple of things number one
it actually isn't any more compact even though the peltier module itself is
quite small because you've got to cool all that extra heat number two is the
extra heat and therefore noise number
three is the cost for the same price we were able to get this radiator along
with like RGB fans and stuff and number four is of course the power consumption
this at full blast consumes about 10 watts while this consumes about
300 watts so the thing with tex is that yeah it's
cool that you can reach sub-ambient temperatures as long as there's not much
heat load but if as soon as you fire up something intensive like a render your
temperatures go higher than just with a traditional water cooling radiator then
that's kind of a bummer but guys make sure you're subscribed so you
don't miss this video because that doesn't mean that peltiers are
necessarily a bad idea the way that they
were in this video now the way we used to do it in the old days was we'd take a
peltier and put it directly between the CPU block and the CPU taking the cooling
right where it's needed now the problem was that cpus outpaced peltiers in terms
of how much heat they were outputting and what kind of peltiers you could get
so it became just impractical but alex
found oh yeah we found one that's 545 watts
and draws 32 amps so that's on its way from ebay that's
going to be a future video subscribe hit that bell so you don't miss it and we
will see you there in maybe bad cooling ideas episode two
yeah that might be a good idea and maybe soon and maybe not because ebay shipping
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