for years Intel has discouraged the notion that golden samples of their
processors even exist and yet
here i am in a video sponsored by Intel
holding nothing other than
a golden sample and it gets even better because Intel
sent over a second very special package
a cryogenic cooler that they claim can
be used to chill a chip like their golden sample to sub-ambient
temperatures and help it reach frequencies as high as 5.6 to 5.8
gigahertz in gaming workloads and
it gets even better again because we've got a stream coming up where you'll get
a chance to win one of these combo packs you will find
more details linked below you know i don't know what's up with like this
scrappy new attitude over at Intel but i like it let's go for a test drive
ladies and gentlemen CPU go brrrr
on the surface there's nothing unusual about the core i9 10 900k inside this
golden foil wrapper 10 cores 20 threads 3.7 gigahertz base
5.3 gigahertz max boost etc etc etc but
on the inside is a piece of silicon that
was hand picked by Intel's engineers as a shining example of the absolute best
their 14 nanometer process is capable of now these kits were
actually created for ltx this year hence the packaging
but it's just as well because a little more time in the kitchen has turned into
a far more interesting experience
let's shift our focus for a moment then to what the heck is a cryo cooler there
are two partners that Intel worked with to develop these things cooler master
created this a pre-filled aio style unit
while ek went the custom loop route the ek solution is actually what we used in
our fastest gaming pc in the world for now video and that's how we were gaming
at 5.4 gigahertz with all cores
so let's start with an unboxing of this puppy
first things first you've got a triple radiator so far nothing especially cryo
looking about that three 120 millimeter fans it's all pretty normal we've got uh
actually what looks like a pretty beefy pump especially for an aio like
it's nothing for like a custom loop but that looks fairly considerable
all right that's uh kind of non-standard connection on there
and then ah
now this this is where the magic happens
inside the CPU block is a custom
thermoelectric cooling or tech module
that draws about 200 watts of power using an 8-pin pci express power
connector for the uninitiated tech cooling takes
place when an electric current passes through a thermocouple causing heat to
be absorbed on one side and then to be output on the other side the more
powerful the peltier the more cooling you get but also the more heat you have
to deal with hence the need for a triple radiator now on a normal CPU only aio
cooler like the Corsair one that i'm pulling out of this system
a triple rad is kind of overkill on the cryo cooler
it's pretty much a necessity as we're going to see
and there are some other considerations you probably noticed that even though
the cooler master master liquid ml360 sub-zero has a separate pump the CPU
block unit is too large to account for
just adding a thermoelectric cooling module in there that's because there's a
shroud to prevent humid air from contacting the cold surface here there's
a freaking humidity sensor to help manage condensation yes my friends and
there's a power control and monitoring board that communicates with Intel's
cryo cooler software it's not the greatest mount for the pump but i did
manage to kind of screw it into the top of a fan it's more intended for
like a slit like this or an empty 120
millimeter fan mount where you could just put the thumb screws through the
mount into the like threaded bracket but hey it's on there y'all want to go sub
zero with me we've already applied the BIOS update that we're going to need for
the cryo cooler so all that's left is to
throw on our xmp profile and fire up Windows in order to avoid any potential
for bottlenecks this system is loaded up with
5100 megahertz RAM from crucial as well
as an rtx 3090 that's actually on its own completely separate water cooling
loop so Intel told me to expect temps as low as
minus 10 degrees celsius in unregulated
mode but recommended sticking with cryo
mode for daily driver operation cryo mode uses CPU telemetry data to avoid
unnecessary power draw and tells the cryo cryocooler if something's
improperly mounted or something Intel did mention that only 10th and 11th gen
and onward cpus are designed to provide that feedback although technically you
could use the cryo cooler with anything you wanted as long as you made the
necessary modifications to the condensation shroud yolo
now let's talk about another thing Intel's been cooking up called oc
thermal velocity boost regular thermal velocity boost already
existed and it's just a higher level of turbo frequency that your CPU can gear
up into when it's running cool enough it's the oc part that's new
so get this in a highly unusual move
is that competition i smell Intel is adding this feature to existing
silicon with a microcode update allowing users to adjust the factory thresholds
for thermal velocity boost using their xtu overclocking utility
all right so why don't we have a look at the software first of all there's the
cryo software which is very simple okay so there's standby cryo
and unregulated i mean should we just fool around with unregulated mode first
and see what kind of temps we see oh we're down to 60 wait 43 degree what is
it doing 10 degrees what's going on here Intel it's definitely working
these wires right here that go from the top of the unit where the power goes in
down to presumably where the tech is yeah down at the base these are warm and
our CPU temps are looking pretty interesting as well check this out we've
already dropped down to zero degrees celsius now it's not letting me go below
zero degrees which is interesting i would guess because of the climate that
we're in and the local humidity yeah dew point nine point eight and the cooler is
actually at minus ten now let's pull out the old thermal camera and have a quick
lookie boo here you can see the warm cable
everything up here is pretty cool pretty normal looking
radiator's not super toasty
oh interesting we can see the hot side of
our tech module through this grille here
and then we can actually see how chilly things are right around the CPU socket
that's actually one of the bigger concerns with running in unregulated
mode not necessarily that you're going to get condensation on the cooler itself
because you've got that little shroud on it to keep warm air away from it but
rather that the board itself might have air going across it that is going to
cause condensation so we can see this even more clearly around the back that
is freaking chilly
well below ambient temps now let's have a look at the interface niklas already
ran some before numbers both with the CPU running at stock speeds as well as
with his own sort of conservative attempt at using thermal
velocity boost overclocking but Intel sent me over what they call a
starting point recipe for our golden chip that they're hoping will give us
5.6 or maybe even 5.8 gigahertz in games
it's not the most user friendly thing ever 56 multiplier
dang that feels crazy to even put in 4
core 56 so then 55 and then 54 so they
want 5.4 gigahertz all core
5.6 4 core
well we applied it oh yeah any voltage things oh i need 1.45 volts adaptive
turbo boost short max power should be good
my understanding is this is a very new feature
whoopsie daisies well that's what you get for not um
changing all your voltage settings and stuff before overclocking to 5.6
gigahertz good luck everybody
apply is it running faster oh
yes it is definitely i saw it boost past 5.3 for a second there idle temps look
good right in that 12 13 degree range about 5 degrees below ambient
temperature right now all right thank you for the coil wine rtx 3090 love you
okay oops whoops oh bloody hell we're
one round in let's tab out and what did we see in
here 5.4 max okay do we want to try a
more extreme recipe might as well okay
okay everything else here is the same we're just going for 5.7 on loads up to
you know what no forget it 5.8 up to two cores 5.7 up to four see if you know
golden sample one of 200 can do it start with 1.475 volts okay
uh let's do 485 yeah we definitely have cores that are
seeing 5.5 gigahertz uh i'm pretty sure this is more performance we're seeing
anywhere from 370 to 380 i'm even touching
390 FPS from time to time it might just
be working highest clock speed seen 5.5
gigahertz throughout that run but every core touched it whoa hey now that we're
out of game we just saw 5.7 gigahertz on three of
the cores what that tells us then is that counter-strike global offensive is
more like a five to six core load at least with whatever we've got running in
the background which frankly isn't much other than our monitoring tools so what
i'm going to do now then given that that is stable
is nicholas is going to run us through all the benchmarks that he ran before
and we'll get you that comparative data the results are in and this
is fascinating guys we ended up needing about 1.5 volts to reach 5.7 gigahertz
and this is a real lesson in optimizing
your overclock because more voltage means of course more heat and especially
combined with the extra 200 watts from our tech that's a lot for even a triple
radiator to manage so in cs go for example we actually got our best result
from nicholas's lighter overclock at a lower voltage you can see that his 99th
percentile frames so that's the slowest one percent of frames that the system is
outputting we're actually about 10 faster with cryo cooling but not pushed
to the limit do maternal on the other hand shows us exactly what this kind of
cooling is capable of in a best case scenario going from a stock CPU on a
triple water cooler all the way up to 5.7 gigahertz we went from 184 to
222 FPS even if it did ultimately end up running
about 20 degrees hotter than the conservative more lightly overvolted
attempt as for shadow of the tomb raider it didn't end up being particularly CPU
limited in general so this shows us a really good mix of games that will
either benefit a little bit in certain situations benefit a ton
or potentially not benefit at all of course
a few more FPS in lightly threaded loads like games isn't going to mean much if
the whole thing falls apart when you fire up a workload that exceeds the
230ish watt limit of the cryo cooler
block so uh does it fall apart over the course of an
extended test we found that while our system performance was on par with a
regular triple aio our temps were significantly higher
which is a bit of a downer considering that a cryo cooler is expected to cost
about twice as much as a regular aio cooler with that said not everybody runs
extended all core loads and it should be noted that this is a very
first generation attempt from talking to Intel about it the cryo-cooler
initiative is actually less of a random one-off project by a handful of nerdy
engineers than i expected although it should be noted the engineers were
undoubtedly delightfully nerdy and they consider it to be more of a first step
towards helping mainstream users achieve the kind of off-the-wall frequencies
that they'd normally only see from hardcore overclockers now the timing of
Intel's interest in squeezing extra performance out of their near redline
flagship CPU is definitely a little suss
as the kids say but for my part i'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth
and in my opinion the enthusiast community should support initiatives
like this in hopes that we see more of them on the subject of support that was
one area that i told Intel i would like to see them do better the reason
traditional overclocking you know where you just set an all-core ratio and increase the
CPU voltage is still so popular is because it's simple
this kind of overclocking where you're setting individual core frequencies
under various loads and at various temperature thresholds with various
offsets is not simple and one of the biggest
challenges is validation with a normal
all core overclock it's easy to tell if the system is stable you just run a
stress test overnight and see if it errors out but if Intel wanted
this to get to the point where let's say a
puget systems or origin pc is going to ship a
pre-overclocked cryo gaming pc to a customer
they need to create the tools that will help test single dual multi-core
workloads with and without avx offsets etc etc etc and simultaneously monitor
die temps power use frequency and stability
that way everyone from a system integrator to an end user can know with
confidence that if they get a blue screen down the road it's because of a
driver update or something and not because their CPU flew too close to the
sun so bottom line i am enthused to see more dials for
enthusiasts to play with and very excited to see where the road map for
coolers based on this tech leads us pun definitely intended
if you enjoyed this video maybe check out one of our previous attempts at
sub-zero cooling i'll tell you guys this is significantly more
elegant and quieter