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i made three critical mistakes building this computer see look

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no working i didn't seat my RAM correctly and i didn't flip the switch

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on my power supply but wait i said there were three errors well the last one it's

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not going to prevent the system from powering on you can see it's powering on

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just fine but what it is is a silent

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performance killer i didn't peel the plastic on the bottom

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of my cooler

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but come on you might say not me i mean who could be that stupid

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and i thought like you once until one fateful day even though i had years of

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pc building experience i was in the middle of build i got distracted pulled

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away doing something else came back carelessly put it together and pow

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plastic between my CPU and my cooler but

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that raises a few questions just how bad is it

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is there plastic between your CPU and your cooler right now without you

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percent off

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for the best possible performance every heatsink or water block is finished with

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a smooth flat surface this is to ensure that there's as much

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contact area as possible any small imperfection in this surface could

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easily impact the cooler's performance or even cause the system to thermal

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throttle so that's why many manufacturers of cooling solutions

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include plastic covers or at the very least stickers to prevent this sensitive

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area from being damaged in shipping or by the technician who's building your

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computer so some for example will have a hard plastic shell this is particularly

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common on coolers that have pre-applied thermal compound like this water cooler

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from nzxt i think yes one nice thing about this approach

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is that because it's so bulky it would be pretty hard to accidentally install

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the cooler unless you've removed it though i'm pretty sure that has been

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done most coolers use something more like this hyper 212 evo though they've

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got like a thin film type sticker that

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usually if the manufacturer is smart has a warning that looks a little something

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like this please peel off label before you use it warning

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nice little tab of course i'm not going to pull on that tab today

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because what we want to know is what happens if you don't peel it our first

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victa participant is going to be an Intel core i3 8100 and this is for a

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couple of reasons number one is that this is a relatively inexpensive chip

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and i don't know what's going to happen i don't think that it's going to be able

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to fry itself but it is possible that this plastic could melt and render the

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chip inoperable that way number two is that this is an entirely realistic

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scenario i mean someone could easily be kind of half asleep on the assembly line

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at a computer maker like acer or dell

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and it's possible that it could make it all

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the way past qc into the box and to your front door

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where is it oh i almost forgot to put thermal paste on

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it

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oh my goodness this feels so wrong while we boot up is a perfect time to stay

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hydrated lttstore.com

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oh yeah t-shirts too we have mystery shirts now what's a mystery shirt you

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might ask it's a mystery obviously

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now brandon you don't give away the mystery right out of the gate i can

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launch programs browse the web everything is like

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perfectly responsive there is nothing to indicate that something's wrong in fact

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okay this sort of spoiled the big reveal i've even got counter-strike running in

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the background here at anywhere from 100 to 150 frames per second now that's not

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a lot for an rtx 2080 super but that is

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a lot for you know a core i3 8100 it's

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the craziest thing there's nothing about this experience to

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indicate that anything is the matter with this computer now sometimes you'll

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have 200 FPS but you'll feel inconsistencies or stutters or hitches

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that's not oh hi that's not the experience at all here we've been

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playing the game for a while and blah blah blah blah blah lots of FPS etc

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check this out hardware info uh casual

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45 degrees celsius maximum 54 while gaming if every CPU ran

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it 45 to 55 degrees celsius the world would be a cooler place of course it's a

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well-known fact that games particularly older ones aren't capable of fully

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utilizing a multi-core CPU so we fired up cinebench r23 and we're

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gonna let this run for a while to see if we managed to overwhelm our

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plastic coated cooler a few moments

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later with a maximum of 68 degrees i

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feel like i have to prove to you guys i'm just gonna i'm gonna turn it off

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you're gonna see that this is in fact the system i'm running

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i'm gonna pop this cooler off i swear to you the plastic is on it

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that's a completely serviceable operating temperature

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i wouldn't even i could own this computer for years and

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never realized that there was any kind of problem

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and the craziest part is we actually turned on multi-core enhancement in the

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BIOS so this thing is turboing to the greatest possible extent that it can

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even with an enthusiast class motherboard come on over here mark i

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gotta prove this we're doing this as a one take

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plastic baby and get this there was no effect to the chip

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physically whatsoever so that means i am ready to take things to

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another level because the thing is acceptable performance doesn't equal

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optimal performance and surely if it didn't make any difference whatsoever

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cooler master wouldn't bother with this fancy little hey peel this thing off

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warning so to take things to the next level we're gonna go with an Intel core

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i9 9900k this is an eight core processor

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rated at 95 watts TDP which on paper

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doesn't actually sound like that much more than 65 watts but in practice

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Intel's tdps are more like pirate code

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guidelines and this 65 watt chip there's

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no way it actually consumes 65 watts meanwhile this 95 watt chip especially

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if you enable multi-core enhancement is gonna consume way more than 95 watts and

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here it is absolutely disgusting

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all right

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let's give it a chance let's go with the CPU's default behavior let's see what

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happens and once again no obvious problem we're anywhere from 350 to 250

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frames per second like obviously that's easily playable

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and it's smooth this is with a core i9

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wow there are a lot of bullet holes in the wall behind his head

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how is my aim so bad ah but while we were gaming we had a

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maximum of 91 degrees and yes we did in fact thermal throttle

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and this is before we even ran an intensive all core load like cinebench

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let's see what happens when we do that

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and start i'm expecting this to be

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pretty rough oh 100 degrees instantly and check this

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out this heatsink is cool to the touch so

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what the heck is going on here there are actually a few factors at play here

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starting with bam surprise math lesson

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this is normal you've got your CPU and

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you've got your heatsink you want all the heat to go from here to here where

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it can be dissipated to the air around it but there are a couple of different

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paths it can take it can either travel from metal to metal because remember on

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a microscopic level metal is going to be textured no matter how much you try to

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polish it so they might meet up kind of like this where those atoms are touching

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that's where you're going to get the best possible thermal transfer for

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everywhere else well of course there's thermal compound to fill in those gaps

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that's going to be r2 now heat is kind of like electricity in that it wants to

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take the path of least resistance so these paths can be considered to be in

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parallel with as much heat as possible being transferred to our heatsink

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this is where our plastic comes in now

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we've got this original resistance equation except kind of there is no r1

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because there is no metal to metal contact and therefore no optimal route

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and then we actually have to add the thermal resistance of our plastic which

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is going to be a function of how thermally conductive our plastic is hint

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not very and how thick it is hint not

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very but that's still really bad because the

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thermal resistance of plastic is so freaking high so what that means in

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practice is that with a very high thermal resistance the difference in

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temperature between the CPU and the heatsink needs to be really really high

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as the wattage goes up right so the more watts we're trying to

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move the more heat we're trying to move between the CPU and the heatsink

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the more that resistance hurts us

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but i did say there was more than one factor at play didn't i you might have

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noticed the computer is still running that's because any modern CPU whether

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it's from AMD or Intel is going to be equipped with a thermal sensor or in

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many cases a suite of them along with the ability to dynamically scale its own

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frequency and working together those two features are called thermal throttling

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so what they allow the chip to do is say hey if we reach this predetermined

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temperature that the manufacturer has deemed unsafe you need to dynamically

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scale down the frequency until we're not drawing any more power and therefore

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putting out any more heat than the thermal solution can deal with so you

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can see here that while the chip is absolutely running it's getting a much

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lower score in cinebench than a normal core i9 9900k would

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and that's because we don't have enough cooling and finally there's how you

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actually use your computer we saw a significant difference in throttling

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behavior between cs go and the heavily multi-threaded workload like cinebench

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r23 so the answer to our original question just how bad is it is

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it depends if you have a low powered CPU or if all you do is game

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it's possible you've been running plastic on your CPU for years and the

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worst effect you might notice is the odd stutter or hitch as your thermal

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throttling kicks in and drops your CPU frequency

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or if you're a heavy user it's likely you're leaving a significant amount of

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performance on the table or as a worst case scenario your chip could even die a

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premature death because as we all know the cooler you can keep your CPU the

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longer it should last the good news though is that if you screw up and you

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accidentally put the plastic on and go oh no my temperatures are bad and check

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it and fix it the odds are that it's not going to kill

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video you might enjoy another kind of investigation into screwing up in our is

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your rig bottleneck video we're gonna have that linked down below