thanks to AMD packing a huge number of processing cores into their recent
consumer cpus we are currently undergoing a big leap in the performance
of home computers and consequently we're also undergoing a huge leap in the
cooling requirements of the aforementioned
this CPU is sucking
over 500 watts
which is why we have this
the ice giant oh
pro syphon elite and i know okay okay it doesn't look
like much right now but stay with me here guys this
is just a prototype and i i know it's
kind of bulky but in our testing
it actually managed to beat this
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to understand why this cooler is important we first need to talk about
how CPU cooler designs have evolved as each generation has reached its
theoretical performance limits we started with simple aluminum heatsinks
on chips that output anywhere from 5 to 70 watts and they served us so well for
so many years that you might think well if some little fins are good then more
bigger fins must be better unfortunately it doesn't work that way as you get
farther away from the original heat source along a fin the temperature of
said fin will drop once that temperature gets near to the ambient temperature so
the temperature of the air around it no matter how much longer you make the fin
you will get no additional heat transfer from it
so as modern cpus stretched into the 75
to 150 watt range or even higher in some
cases thermal engineers to turn to what at the time was a much more exotic
cooling method heat pipes now a heat pipe doesn't inherently add
more cooling to a cooler what it does do
is transport heat much more efficiently than metal on its own by using both
conduction and convection this is what
allows massive heatsinks like the Noctua
nhd15 to work effectively
but we've got a problem under normal operation the fluid inside a heat pipe
boils travels through the vapor chamber to the condenser end where the heatsink
fins are attached and then is returned in liquid form to the heat source via a
wick normally a sintered metal inner layer
unfortunately if you pump too much heat into the system as you well might given
AMD threadripper and Intel's high-end desktop chips these days can easily
output 300 to 400 watts when overclocked
you get what's called heat pipe dry out where the fluid isn't just turning to
vapor in the vapor chamber but also in the wick causing it to not return to the
heat source greatly increasing the thermal resistance of the heat pipe
which brings us to thermosyphons and why
this cooler right here is dope as all
hell as the kids say instead of using a wick to transport the
fluid back to the evaporator like a heat pipe a thermosyphon simply uses gravity
and with a little bit of clever engineering this can be turned into a
loop basically using the evaporation of the fluid as the pump all of this is
nothing new though and it's actually pretty common in high heat output
industrial applications the special sauce that ice giant has patented is
some internal geometry here that allows the cooler to not just
be mounted on your computer like this where you know gravity's effects are
pretty obvious but also like this
so in typical use this plate right here
will contact your CPU the refrigerant inside will boil causing it to move up
into the condenser somewhere in here where it will turn back into liquid and
make its way back down to the evaporator
this gives you in theory two main advantages one heat pipe dry out is
avoided allowing for overclocking of super high performance chips and two
since there's no pump involved the reliability is greater than a
traditional aio like this one now ice giant couldn't say for sure what
the reliability is and they're only planning for a six to seven year
warranty but according to their simulations they figured this thing
should last around 10 lifetimes give or take
enough gibberdabber though let's give it a shot and see how it
stacks up
so as you guys can obviously tell from the current state of the mounting
hardware the ice giant pro siphon elite is currently in the prototype stage of
development but that's actually good news for a couple of reasons first and
foremost of which is that the thickness of the unit is actually going to be
decreased from 103 millimeters down to just 30 millimeters so that's less than
a third and they figure they can do this without losing any performance this
helps not just in terms of making the thing less ridiculously bulky and heavy
but also in terms of performance because uh here we go
it solves an issue where the fans would end up starved by a graphics card that's
installed in the top slot here now one thing we expected was that the
fans in the top of the case would help out the pro siphon a lot but it turns
out they actually assisted our regular air coolers more
now our prototype here is also only for thread
but the final version is expected to have compatibility with lga 115x 2066
and am4 and that's it
the install process especially compared to an aio is pretty
painless about the same as putting in a high-end air cooler so we've got three
different profiles in here stock speed which is around 250 watts a 320 watt
profile which is 3.6 gigahertz all core and
400 watts yi mode which is uh 3.8
gigahertz all cores on a 2990 wx so that is a 32 core
processor let's go straight to that shall we now
it should be noted that our fans are set to max speed on the CPU
so you know well here goes nothing
look at her go so hardware info has our package power
reported at around 385 watts i can already feel
the heat coming off the CPU just from the case fan at the back here
and impressively our CPU temp so tdy is just 65 degrees
that's gonna be tough to beat wow that is a darn impressive result we
just just about cracked 71 degrees
then again none of that is a surprise because we already ran a bunch of
numbers in a more controlled environment before turning on a camera duh what is a
surprise though is that our pro siphon prototype beat not only Noctua's thread
ripper specific single tower cooler but
even arctic's eight heat pipe dual fan
monstrosity of a heatsink here
so that's impressive but of course you guys have got to be
wondering what about water cooling
thing is unlike a heat pipe water
doesn't have a point where it dries up in the CPU block or at least if
it does you have much bigger problems to deal with so in theory our thermosyphon
should get left in the dust but it doesn't
so our Corsair h115i cooled system
managed to thermal throttle at just
320 watts though in Corsair's defense
the h159i isn't made for a chip this size and doesn't cover the entire die
as for our ek phoenix 360 well it didn't
thermal throttle but shockingly it still lost and there's
no excuse here because it's as bulky
it's heavier we put a threadripper specific block on it and it even managed
to make a comparable amount of noise if not more
a note on that by the way ice giant is currently using delta fans that are as
you guys can obviously hear far from quiet we're not sure if these
are going to make it into the final product but they did say that they're
going to be prioritizing extreme performance over acoustics so i'm not
really expecting this to be a silent solution
also guys i want to make it clear that we aren't ready to declare the ice giant
pro siphon the best cooler we've ever tested because i would consider the two
or so degrees of difference we've seen to be within the margin of error of our
test and our measurement method and also
guys we are working with a pre-production model we don't know if
when they slim it down to a third it will actually perform exactly the same
with that said i see a ton of potential here because the craziest thing about
all of this so far is that the pro siphon elite here is still made of all
aluminum for easier manufacturing at these early stages so in the future a
potential v2 made out of copper could reduce temps a further 5 to 10 degrees
though it should be noted of course that that's only applicable to these very
high heat output cpus if you're running like a 9700k at stock speed or something
you're not going to see that dramatic difference and i think they're going to
have like a passive version for you guys bottom line then should you buy one of
these well with the projected price of 130 to 150 dollars
i guess i'd give it a pretty big i guess so if you want a top-tier cooler
and don't mind this gigantic thing hanging off your socket
like it is considerably more expensive than the air coolers that we looked at
but it's cheaper and managed to
outperform our aio meaning that there's probably an
argument to be made for it so we're gonna have a link below to pre-order the
production version or if you're in europe it'll be available on case king
hopefully in the first half of 2020 although i did tell them i thought that that was pretty
optimistic big thanks to katie from ice giant by the way for lending her expertise in
heatsinks for this video big thanks to AMD and Intel of course for all these
new cpus that they just launched that need all this cooling so go check out
our video reviews for them now that you're done watching and thanks to me
for creating this beautiful segue to our sponsor
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future of cooling maybe we'll see you next time oh if you want
to check out more crazy cooling stuff then maybe have a look at this video
where we water cooled a laptop it was as dumb as it sounds