yeah oh my god
if you want to tame the hottest gaming cpus the marketing says that you want
water cooling but i'ma let you in on a little secret that's not actually true
this is a thermosyphon and it is not
your grandma's air cooler unless your grandma's a physicist and rides a bad
ass motorcycle and reads you awesome bedtime stories
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below the problem is that Intel's top of the
line gaming CPU the core i9 12 900k runs
so hot that even the legendary nhd15 the king
of air coolers can't keep up with it i mean you could turn off performance mode
or multi-core enhancement but at that point why did you pay 600 us dollars for
a processor only to leave performance on the table oh and did i mention you'll
still be maxing out at 95 degrees on an
open-air test bench that means you're probably thermal throttling the second
you close your side panel water cooling has advanced to help us
tackle these ever hotter cpus in a number of ways stronger pumps more
efficient cold plate designs larger radiators and by mounting them to the
intake of a case we get to use the coolest air available to tackle the
hottest parts of our machines but compared to traditional heat sinks even
all-in-one water coolers like this one are more challenging to install
expensive and they have more points of failure oh rate leaks are rare these
days but a failed pump could easily put you out of commission for a while the
good news is that while water cooling has been stealing all the headlines air
cooling has been quietly improving in the background ice giant's first product
the pro siphon elite blew us away by
outperforming both this guy and 240 millimeter aio liquid coolers it
works by using heat from the CPU to boil
fluid inside the evaporator here that
vapor makes its way to the condenser this large finned heatsink array up here
where it cools liquefies and then falls
back down to the evaporator creating a cooling loop with no moving parts the
principle is actually similar to a heat pipe but almost simpler in a way because
the liquid is moved back to the heat source by gravity rather than by
capillary action thermosyphons must be
mounted in the correct orientation but the upside is that they are not nearly
as easily overwhelmed by a strong heat source enough about the old though
where'd it go oh here it is let's talk about what's new ice giant just sent
over a prototype thermosyphon elite with some really exciting upgrades the most
obvious one is right here goodbye
aluminum hello copper that was a good
idea someone suggest that to them could be anyway this was done to improve
heat conduction from the CPU into the thermosyphon but even more important are
the boiling enhancements that they've made to the evaporator they've
completely changed the layout of the fins inside here to create more surface
area and they've added tiny pieces of sintered copper there as well not only
do these also create more surface area for nucleation sites but these particles
act as a wick to help distribute condensed liquid on the return trip
sounds pretty cool but i wouldn't recommend buying one and
certainly wouldn't recommend investing in ice giant apparently is undergoing a
funding round right now until i have validated it for myself
so we grabbed this a high-end test bench our frame from
thermal grizzly more on that later and we slapped on all of our coolers testing
them at around the same noise levels of a maxed out though still very quiet and
hd15 that's roughly 47 decibels our og
aluminum pro siphon elite was unfortunately the only cooler to thermal
throttle in our 2000 sample classroom blender test disqualifying it outright
but as you can see here our copper unit comes out on top beading knocked to us
best by a whopping 5 degrees it was also
the only cooler in our test that brought our 12 900k below 90 degrees under load
admittedly this is on an open test bench where it doesn't have to contend with
heat from other components swirling around it but it's still impressive
however cranking things up a notch by enabling
performance mode on our motherboard caused our CPU to draw another 20 to 30
watts resulting in a fail result for all
three of our coolers to be fair 250
watts is a lot of power and if you want that kind of performance it's fair to
say that you might have to make some sacrifices namely noise
in an attempt to tame the beast we unlocked our ekaio and our copper
prototype allowing their fans to ramp up to around 2100 RPM and then we re-ran
our tests in both default and performance mode
it cost us about 10 decibels in both cases but at Intel's stock power limit
the copper prototype thermosyphon pulled ahead even further with a maximum
package temperature of just 85 degrees celsius
that's downright reasonable unfortunately it's still thermal
throttled in performance mode but as our friend slave pointed out to us
performance mode is a pretty ham-fisted way of optimizing your CPU
by tuning the 12900k operating voltage
load line calibration and turbo ratios
he managed to use the extra thermal headroom of the copper prototype to
squeeze out even better performance than performance mode and without any thermal
throttling now full disclosure splave is
invested as a partner with ice giant but that also kind of speaks volumes
doesn't it if it's good enough for him it's probably good enough for me and so
is our new ShortCircuit hoodie check it out at lttstore.com
conversation here though copper thermal siphon very legal and very cool
hopefully it makes it to market without costing too much more than the old aluminum one but i feel like there's an
elephant in the room what is going on with computer chips right now AMD is
jacking up their power targets for am5 NVIDIA is rumored to be hitting 600 to
800 watts on their upcoming 4000 series
and Intel is already shipping consumer
products that are basically uncoolable
unless you resort to this but you just cooled it Linus with that
you might say well yeah but i used a prototype cooler
on an open test bench and i did a bunch
of other stuff that's not reasonable for the average consumer okay first up i'm
using top of the line thermal grizzly thermal paste and second i have likely
voided the warranty on both my motherboard and my CPU by installing
thermal grizzly's CPU contact frame that thing i alluded to before
in a nutshell it's a modification to the lga 1700 socket that ensures even
retention pressure on the CPU for better thermal contact we'd like to do a
dedicated video on it at some point but the short version is that without it
we'd likely be running five or so degrees hotter during all of our tests
that means thermal throttling on the 12900k right out of the box
but hold on Linus you might say there are better water coolers out there that
surely would handle the 12 900k without any of this nonsense everyone knows that
240 millimeter rads like this one are
weak sauce now well to that i would respond a no one says weak sauce anymore
come on and b we actually pulled out an ek aio elite 360 for our comparison as
well and found that it performed no better than our thermal siphon a little
worse actually i've never seen that before i tried to
pull it off the thing but instead of unplugging it ripped right out of the
fan do you need to run any more tests with this i don't think so but
yeah we can fix it i
now all of this modification nonsense might be a price that you're willing to
pay but frankly i'm getting kind of sick of
hardware manufacturers redlining their gear out of the box to the point where
we're forced to buy and install exotic modifications just to get the
performance that we saw in a review i mean Intel can hide behind their default
turbo behavior which does consume a lot less power but the
truth is that all performance mode is doing is allowing these unlocked 12
series chips to turbo at around 240 watts forever which is a behavior that
Intel enables one behavior i'm okay with by the way is signing up at
Floatplane.com for exclusive videos and behind the scenes like the extended cut
of our call me chris collab back to until 12th gen though you
shouldn't have to spend an extra several hundred dollars just to keep your 600
CPU at a reasonable temperature under load but since you do it's still too
early to say how much the copper thermosyphon will cost but the original
was around 170 so expecting a small
increase from there it's actually looking like a pretty darn good solution
but it's not perfect RAM clearance is pretty good but it's
going to cover up any RGB modules you might have and you can forget about
installing this over top of Corsair dominator style dimms we've also
complained to their team about their smooth standoffs and they're considering
adding some knurling or striping to help install or remove stuck bits now that
motherboards are getting so crowded around the CPU socket area another
annoyance we really had to screw this thing down tight to ensure good contact
that's even with the updated bracket and with the frame though it's a pretty easy
to use mounting solution otherwise and finally we're hoping that the teammate
ice giant can sneak i don't know what to call it but a bit more tolerance for
user error into the design before it starts shipping worldwide it can be a
little bit finicky to get a perfect mount on that subject i would strongly
recommend against shipping your system with one of these already installed in
it that is a key benefit of aio liquid coolers that can't be ignored
not nearly as much weight on the socket you know what else you can't ignore our
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signing up if you guys enjoyed this video make sure to check out the 6.9 gigahertz CPU video
that splave helped us out with that was a lot of fun
hopefully it makes it to market without costing too much more than the old illuminate
i'm gonna just snap one day