so the conventional wisdom at least used to be that when you were shopping for a
power supply you could basically judge the quality by the weight
the heavier the power supply the better it probably was
that is until some cheapo manufacturers started literally putting hunks of metal
in them to make them seem better that got us thinking
what about hunks of metal could you literally walk down the cooling aisle
with a luggage scale and buy the heatsink with the best price to weight
ratio to cool your CPU
maybe
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more weight or mass if you want to be pedantic about it does not mean better
cooling a two kilogram block of aluminum
on top of a CPU would weigh a lot but
wouldn't do a good job of cooling it down
for long so what you're actually after
when it comes to dissipating heat is
surface area the more surface area that you have the more cooling will be
available so then if we assume that most
commercial CPU coolers are designed by mechanical engineers and not by
chimpanzees and that most companies are
interested in saving cost while optimizing performance then it would
make sense that most heat sinks out there represent the manufacturer's best
efforts to strike a balance between material cost and heat dissipation
so assuming that everyone has done their homework equally the heavier the cooler
the higher the performance should be but
as we know so very well around here not
all engineering is equal so we grabbed a
bunch of coolers off the shelf and devised a test the weight of each cooler
was recorded with the fan but without
mounting hardware we kept the room at a consistent 24 degrees celsius and set
the fan curve to full speed on our system for all of our tests the CPU we
used was a core i7 7700k with the ida 64
fpu test running for 30 minutes before the average package temp was taken for
the next five and looking at the results there are actually some very interesting
takeaways here first of all the nhd50 outperformance of
every aio liquid cooler is a great testament to how well engineered it is
and while we're praising strong products for
their efficiency Corsair's dual 140
millimeter aio outperforms the thermaltake triple 120
aio which has worse case compatibility
if i had to hazard a guess here though i'd say that this is down to the similar
surface area of these two layouts and the design of the fans the most striking
thing about these results though is that after a weight of about 400 grams the
heat transfer to weight ratio
plummets with the coolers that remove the most heat per gram being the
lightest ones why is this
well getting finally into the purpose of
making this video to let alex nerd out for a bit it's actually because of a
design concept called the infinite fin approximation basically for a fin of
similar thickness material and airflow
it can only get so long that is to say the distance from the
heat source before adding more material is basically a waste this concept is
illustrated using this graph where the y-axis represents heat flow
one would be all of it and zero would be none
so for an infinitely small fin you would dissipate zero heat that makes sense and
for a mile long fin i mean by the tip of
it practically all of the heat from the source would have been dissipated to the
air before it could possibly be conducted there
that is why in the early 2000s CPU
coolers transitioned from thin or flower
based designs to the heat pipe ones of the late 2000s and the liquid cooling
designs that are common today so newer cpus generated more heat but
they didn't get any bigger so there was no point in making the fins
longer which means that these new high conductivity fluid based mediums
heat pipes and water helped solve the challenge of moving the heat away to
length optimized fins elsewhere
is this something that we can show happening in real life
actually yes the easiest way is by using this flear
one thermal camera looking at the Noctua nhu12s
the ends of the fins come in at about 38 degrees celsius
14 degrees above the temperature of the room whereas on the massive
nhd15 the fins are only about 31 degrees
celsius and remember the lower the
difference in temperature the slower the heat transfer
so with a given heat load these longer fins
are cooler and therefore are dissipating
less heat per amount of material
bringing us then finally back to our original question
can you judge a cooler's performance by
its weight well actually it turns out you kind of
can surely there are some exceptions out
there and some did better than others but everything we tested seems to have
had some engineering thought put into it so that's good to know
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