WEBVTT

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there's a point where you can't make a cooler bigger because you can't move

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heat to the outermost fins fast enough for them to be helpful

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so then how the f does this work

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i remember Noctua explaining to me that limitations of heat pipe cooling

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technology are the reason that they still have not updated the nhd15 a

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design from over six years ago so then

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does ice giant who claims that this air

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cooler is competitive with custom water cooling know something that knocked to a

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dozen actually yes but to explain we're going to need to

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have a look at the test results just like the test results i just got

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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

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insane cooling performance that we had never seen from an air cooler but it did

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leave us with a couple of questions one

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was it good because of ice giant's thermo-siphon technology or was it good

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because it had two high-speed delta fans strapped to a heat sink big enough to

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bend the motherboard compared to their proof of concept the production unit is

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much more reasonable the pro siphon elite is equipped with much quieter fans

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and well

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it's still huge but it is considerably smaller than the

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old version the best part is that true to their promises which we didn't quite

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believe at the time this new version delivers the same

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performance as the prototype actually it ended up being about half a degree

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cooler while being smaller and much quieter apparently this improvement in

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efficiency is thanks to the third condenser unit that they added which

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actually we should back up for a second and talk about the heart of the pro

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siphon the thermosyphon now we'll have more detail in our original video on the

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prototype but here's the tl dr most modern air coolers work using heat pipes

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which are super good at moving heat from one place to another like thousands of

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times more conductive than copper but heat pipes have a problem

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dry up inside every heat pipe is a fluid

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that heats up and evaporates flowing away from the heat source then condenses

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at the fins of the heat sink where the cooling is happening and returns to the

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heat source using a wick heat pipe dry out occurs when the fluid starts boiling

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inside the wick that's supposed to be returning it to the heat source this

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greatly increases the thermal resistance of the heat pipe and makes it really bad

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at its one job now for years this didn't matter since you need a lot of heat to

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cause dry out problem is nowadays AMD's

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threadripper 3000 series chips are rated

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at up to 280 watts and consume much more

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than that when you overclock them so taming these beasts has been a challenge

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unless you want to move into custom water cooling now the way a thermosyphon

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works is somewhere in between a heat pipe and water cooling like a heat pipe

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it boils a fluid at the heat source but

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unlike a heat pipe it uses some fancy engineering to turn the boiling fluid

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into a pump that circulates itself through the cooler so you can kind of

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think of this thing as a holy self-contained aio but way more reliable

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because there's no moving parts in here

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the actual thermal siphon is expected to have a lifetime of decades and that's

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backed up by a 10-year warranty and unlike an aio where the pump is expected

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to be the first thing to fail the pro siphon elite's weakest link is its fans

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the biggest quirk about thermosyphons though is that because they use gravity

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to work you can mount it like this

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or like this but if you mount it like this

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you're gonna have a really bad time we're here for a good time though so

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let's flip it around

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now normally the flow of air inside a case is pretty simple cold air comes in

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the front and then warm air is exhausted out the back but in this case pun

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intended the rear fan is probably not doing a whole lot because of the way the

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ice giant exhausts its air upward

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so in our testing with the threadripper 3970x running at four gigahertz all core

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our CPU temps dropped by four degrees by

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adding two fans to the top of the case and we also found that having no rear

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fan at all didn't really change things taking the rear case fan out and

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chucking it in the top of your case could net you as much as three degrees

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with this cooler one fun observation is that with NVIDIA founders edition cards

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also moving to a more bottom to top airflow scheme a pro

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siphon elite would probably pair well with one of those that is if you could

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find one for our tests our case fans were set to 1200 RPM and the CPU fans

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were set to maximum speed we also monitored our room temperature and

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adjusted our results to 22 degrees ambient out of the gate on our

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threadripper 3970x32 core this thing is

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shockingly good it even handled our first overclock stage easily with all 32

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cores going at 4 gigahertz the pro siphon elite reached a maximum

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temperature of 80.1 degrees and flew

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through our blender classroom render benchmark which we had to run at 10

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times the samples so that it would take 22 minutes instead of just two man isn't

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Threadripper amazing we then decided to give it all the beans

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and see just how far we could take this chip on the pro siphon elite and it

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turns out the weak link ended up being the silicon not the cooling the pro

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siphon was able to narrowly avoid thermal throttling even when we pushed

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all 32 cores to 4.3 gigahertz at 1.37

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volts and for those of you who don't speak turbo nerd these are the kinds of

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speeds that i would expect to need sub ambient cooling to achieve not some

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roided out air cooler this seems to be a limit of either our

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CPU or our motherboard and i doubt additional cooling would make much of a

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difference unless we went really exotic i mean the poor motherboard vrms were

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delivering over 250 amps during our 4.3

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gigahertz run what we don't know yet though is if this

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great result is due to ice giant's engineering or

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AMD's so how do other threadripper coolers

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stack up to find out we dusted off our trusty Noctua nhu14s tr4 there are other

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options notably the cooler master wraith ripper and the thermal bright silver

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arrow tr4 but other reviews have shown the u14s to be both cooler and quieter

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there's also the arctic freezer 50tr which does slightly outperform the u14s

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but RAM compatibility on that thing is atrocious so

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it's off the table nhu 14s then well all i can say is it might need some sexy

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sweatbands lttstore.com because this thing got hot 13 degrees hotter to be

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exact dang we also tested out the nzxt kraken z73

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which predictably wasn't able to keep up but really any cooler that's not

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specifically designed for threadripper isn't going to be able to compete with

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one that is properly able to cover the entire ihs and the reason is that the

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dies underneath are so spread out now we did have the intermax lictech tr4 but

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the pump died in our unit which is apparently a common issue with these so

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probably just avoid them leaving us with only one other option

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full custom water cooling now

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it's not exactly a fair fight when you consider the cost a hundred and seventy

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dollars for a pro siphon elite that is really expensive for a cooler but it's

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still less than half of this 440 dollars

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of raw pc cooling goodness and get this the pro siphon only lost by

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2 degrees what

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one thing we haven't talked about yet though is noise and with four fans you

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might expect it to be pretty bad in practice though it's not

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even at full blast they were barely able to crack the 42 decibel noise floor of

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our office and there's no high pitched winding so it's pretty easy to tune out

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even though it is louder than Noctua's solution which i would still recommend

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for stock operation bottom line then if you've got a

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threadripper computer buy this

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just buy it now something you can find anywhere to buy it who's carrying it

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okay then but wait minus there's like four minutes left in

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this video ah let's talk about the problem for ice

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giant most of you aren't made of fat stacks of cash and you don't have a threadripper

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system and on any other platform the u14s isn't Noctua's biggest baddest

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cooler the nhd15 is so for our Intel

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cooling comparison this is the only cooler we're going to

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test against because frankly if you want performance without going full custom

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liquid cooling this is what you're buying if you still need something convincing that it's better than an aio

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go watch this video installation on lga 1200 is actually a little bit easier

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than threadripper ice giant appears to have taken our advice and basically just

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ripped off knock to a secufer mounting system now since the point of this

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cooler is its ability to handle big heavy loads we overclocked our core i7

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10875k to 4.9 gigahertz all core so that

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it would consume a tasty 230 watts which

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the nhd15 was able to handle without much issue

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as for the pro siphon elite well it handled it but worse

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five degrees worse to be exact now it's

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still a solid result the pro siphon was able to take all 10 cores to the

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reasonable limit of our silicon but there are a few things holding it back

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here first and foremost the pro siphon elite was optimized for multi-die

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designs like Threadripper and am4 where the heat generation is spread out across

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the ihs Intel consumer chips instead have a

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small heat generating dye right in the center

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and conventional heat pipe coolers and aios for that matter are designed to

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deal with this specific scenario in the future ice giant thinks they'll be able

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to take on other coolers on more conventional chips maybe by switching to

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a copper cold plate but honestly i doubt it would make a ton of

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sense to buy anyway most consumer chips are generating much less than 200 watts

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under normal circumstances and that's where heat pipe coolers like the nhu 14

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or d15 are still very efficient at scooting away heat if you're using an

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Intel xtreme edition ah sure the pro siphon elite Intel edition could be a

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good buy can certainly generate enough heat for it but we didn't bother testing

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that because frankly no one should be buying an Intel extreme edition right now

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just get a 5900x or if you really need the threads a

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threadripper with one of these thank you to tingmobile for sponsoring today's

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25 credit if you guys enjoyed this video

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maybe check out you know what go check out the video on the prototype because it gets into a little bit more of the

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sciency stuff and it's worth a watch