there's a point where you can't make a cooler bigger because you can't move
heat to the outermost fins fast enough for them to be helpful
so then how the f does this work
i remember Noctua explaining to me that limitations of heat pipe cooling
technology are the reason that they still have not updated the nhd15 a
design from over six years ago so then
does ice giant who claims that this air
cooler is competitive with custom water cooling know something that knocked to a
dozen actually yes but to explain we're going to need to
have a look at the test results just like the test results i just got
from my doctor looks like i've got a bad case of segwayitis
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when we showed off the ice giant pro siphon prototype it reached a level of
insane cooling performance that we had never seen from an air cooler but it did
leave us with a couple of questions one
was it good because of ice giant's thermo-siphon technology or was it good
because it had two high-speed delta fans strapped to a heat sink big enough to
bend the motherboard compared to their proof of concept the production unit is
much more reasonable the pro siphon elite is equipped with much quieter fans
and well
it's still huge but it is considerably smaller than the
old version the best part is that true to their promises which we didn't quite
believe at the time this new version delivers the same
performance as the prototype actually it ended up being about half a degree
cooler while being smaller and much quieter apparently this improvement in
efficiency is thanks to the third condenser unit that they added which
actually we should back up for a second and talk about the heart of the pro
siphon the thermosyphon now we'll have more detail in our original video on the
prototype but here's the tl dr most modern air coolers work using heat pipes
which are super good at moving heat from one place to another like thousands of
times more conductive than copper but heat pipes have a problem
dry up inside every heat pipe is a fluid
that heats up and evaporates flowing away from the heat source then condenses
at the fins of the heat sink where the cooling is happening and returns to the
heat source using a wick heat pipe dry out occurs when the fluid starts boiling
inside the wick that's supposed to be returning it to the heat source this
greatly increases the thermal resistance of the heat pipe and makes it really bad
at its one job now for years this didn't matter since you need a lot of heat to
cause dry out problem is nowadays AMD's
threadripper 3000 series chips are rated
at up to 280 watts and consume much more
than that when you overclock them so taming these beasts has been a challenge
unless you want to move into custom water cooling now the way a thermosyphon
works is somewhere in between a heat pipe and water cooling like a heat pipe
it boils a fluid at the heat source but
unlike a heat pipe it uses some fancy engineering to turn the boiling fluid
into a pump that circulates itself through the cooler so you can kind of
think of this thing as a holy self-contained aio but way more reliable
because there's no moving parts in here
the actual thermal siphon is expected to have a lifetime of decades and that's
backed up by a 10-year warranty and unlike an aio where the pump is expected
to be the first thing to fail the pro siphon elite's weakest link is its fans
the biggest quirk about thermosyphons though is that because they use gravity
to work you can mount it like this
or like this but if you mount it like this
you're gonna have a really bad time we're here for a good time though so
let's flip it around
now normally the flow of air inside a case is pretty simple cold air comes in
the front and then warm air is exhausted out the back but in this case pun
intended the rear fan is probably not doing a whole lot because of the way the
ice giant exhausts its air upward
so in our testing with the threadripper 3970x running at four gigahertz all core
our CPU temps dropped by four degrees by
adding two fans to the top of the case and we also found that having no rear
fan at all didn't really change things taking the rear case fan out and
chucking it in the top of your case could net you as much as three degrees
with this cooler one fun observation is that with NVIDIA founders edition cards
also moving to a more bottom to top airflow scheme a pro
siphon elite would probably pair well with one of those that is if you could
find one for our tests our case fans were set to 1200 RPM and the CPU fans
were set to maximum speed we also monitored our room temperature and
adjusted our results to 22 degrees ambient out of the gate on our
threadripper 3970x32 core this thing is
shockingly good it even handled our first overclock stage easily with all 32
cores going at 4 gigahertz the pro siphon elite reached a maximum
temperature of 80.1 degrees and flew
through our blender classroom render benchmark which we had to run at 10
times the samples so that it would take 22 minutes instead of just two man isn't
Threadripper amazing we then decided to give it all the beans
and see just how far we could take this chip on the pro siphon elite and it
turns out the weak link ended up being the silicon not the cooling the pro
siphon was able to narrowly avoid thermal throttling even when we pushed
all 32 cores to 4.3 gigahertz at 1.37
volts and for those of you who don't speak turbo nerd these are the kinds of
speeds that i would expect to need sub ambient cooling to achieve not some
roided out air cooler this seems to be a limit of either our
CPU or our motherboard and i doubt additional cooling would make much of a
difference unless we went really exotic i mean the poor motherboard vrms were
delivering over 250 amps during our 4.3
gigahertz run what we don't know yet though is if this
great result is due to ice giant's engineering or
AMD's so how do other threadripper coolers
stack up to find out we dusted off our trusty Noctua nhu14s tr4 there are other
options notably the cooler master wraith ripper and the thermal bright silver
arrow tr4 but other reviews have shown the u14s to be both cooler and quieter
there's also the arctic freezer 50tr which does slightly outperform the u14s
but RAM compatibility on that thing is atrocious so
it's off the table nhu 14s then well all i can say is it might need some sexy
sweatbands lttstore.com because this thing got hot 13 degrees hotter to be
exact dang we also tested out the nzxt kraken z73
which predictably wasn't able to keep up but really any cooler that's not
specifically designed for threadripper isn't going to be able to compete with
one that is properly able to cover the entire ihs and the reason is that the
dies underneath are so spread out now we did have the intermax lictech tr4 but
the pump died in our unit which is apparently a common issue with these so
probably just avoid them leaving us with only one other option
full custom water cooling now
it's not exactly a fair fight when you consider the cost a hundred and seventy
dollars for a pro siphon elite that is really expensive for a cooler but it's
still less than half of this 440 dollars
of raw pc cooling goodness and get this the pro siphon only lost by
2 degrees what
one thing we haven't talked about yet though is noise and with four fans you
might expect it to be pretty bad in practice though it's not
even at full blast they were barely able to crack the 42 decibel noise floor of
our office and there's no high pitched winding so it's pretty easy to tune out
even though it is louder than Noctua's solution which i would still recommend
for stock operation bottom line then if you've got a
threadripper computer buy this
just buy it now something you can find anywhere to buy it who's carrying it
okay then but wait minus there's like four minutes left in
this video ah let's talk about the problem for ice
giant most of you aren't made of fat stacks of cash and you don't have a threadripper
system and on any other platform the u14s isn't Noctua's biggest baddest
cooler the nhd15 is so for our Intel
cooling comparison this is the only cooler we're going to
test against because frankly if you want performance without going full custom
liquid cooling this is what you're buying if you still need something convincing that it's better than an aio
go watch this video installation on lga 1200 is actually a little bit easier
than threadripper ice giant appears to have taken our advice and basically just
ripped off knock to a secufer mounting system now since the point of this
cooler is its ability to handle big heavy loads we overclocked our core i7
10875k to 4.9 gigahertz all core so that
it would consume a tasty 230 watts which
the nhd15 was able to handle without much issue
as for the pro siphon elite well it handled it but worse
five degrees worse to be exact now it's
still a solid result the pro siphon was able to take all 10 cores to the
reasonable limit of our silicon but there are a few things holding it back
here first and foremost the pro siphon elite was optimized for multi-die
designs like Threadripper and am4 where the heat generation is spread out across
the ihs Intel consumer chips instead have a
small heat generating dye right in the center
and conventional heat pipe coolers and aios for that matter are designed to
deal with this specific scenario in the future ice giant thinks they'll be able
to take on other coolers on more conventional chips maybe by switching to
a copper cold plate but honestly i doubt it would make a ton of
sense to buy anyway most consumer chips are generating much less than 200 watts
under normal circumstances and that's where heat pipe coolers like the nhu 14
or d15 are still very efficient at scooting away heat if you're using an
Intel xtreme edition ah sure the pro siphon elite Intel edition could be a
good buy can certainly generate enough heat for it but we didn't bother testing
that because frankly no one should be buying an Intel extreme edition right now
just get a 5900x or if you really need the threads a
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25 credit if you guys enjoyed this video
maybe check out you know what go check out the video on the prototype because it gets into a little bit more of the
sciency stuff and it's worth a watch