i made three critical mistakes building this computer see look
no working i didn't seat my RAM correctly and i didn't flip the switch
on my power supply but wait i said there were three errors well the last one it's
not going to prevent the system from powering on you can see it's powering on
just fine but what it is is a silent
performance killer i didn't peel the plastic on the bottom
of my cooler
but come on you might say not me i mean who could be that stupid
and i thought like you once until one fateful day even though i had years of
pc building experience i was in the middle of build i got distracted pulled
away doing something else came back carelessly put it together and pow
plastic between my CPU and my cooler but
that raises a few questions just how bad is it
is there plastic between your CPU and your cooler right now without you
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for the best possible performance every heatsink or water block is finished with
a smooth flat surface this is to ensure that there's as much
contact area as possible any small imperfection in this surface could
easily impact the cooler's performance or even cause the system to thermal
throttle so that's why many manufacturers of cooling solutions
include plastic covers or at the very least stickers to prevent this sensitive
area from being damaged in shipping or by the technician who's building your
computer so some for example will have a hard plastic shell this is particularly
common on coolers that have pre-applied thermal compound like this water cooler
from nzxt i think yes one nice thing about this approach
is that because it's so bulky it would be pretty hard to accidentally install
the cooler unless you've removed it though i'm pretty sure that has been
done most coolers use something more like this hyper 212 evo though they've
got like a thin film type sticker that
usually if the manufacturer is smart has a warning that looks a little something
like this please peel off label before you use it warning
nice little tab of course i'm not going to pull on that tab today
because what we want to know is what happens if you don't peel it our first
victa participant is going to be an Intel core i3 8100 and this is for a
couple of reasons number one is that this is a relatively inexpensive chip
and i don't know what's going to happen i don't think that it's going to be able
to fry itself but it is possible that this plastic could melt and render the
chip inoperable that way number two is that this is an entirely realistic
scenario i mean someone could easily be kind of half asleep on the assembly line
at a computer maker like acer or dell
and it's possible that it could make it all
the way past qc into the box and to your front door
where is it oh i almost forgot to put thermal paste on
it
oh my goodness this feels so wrong while we boot up is a perfect time to stay
hydrated lttstore.com
oh yeah t-shirts too we have mystery shirts now what's a mystery shirt you
might ask it's a mystery obviously
now brandon you don't give away the mystery right out of the gate i can
launch programs browse the web everything is like
perfectly responsive there is nothing to indicate that something's wrong in fact
okay this sort of spoiled the big reveal i've even got counter-strike running in
the background here at anywhere from 100 to 150 frames per second now that's not
a lot for an rtx 2080 super but that is
a lot for you know a core i3 8100 it's
the craziest thing there's nothing about this experience to
indicate that anything is the matter with this computer now sometimes you'll
have 200 FPS but you'll feel inconsistencies or stutters or hitches
that's not oh hi that's not the experience at all here we've been
playing the game for a while and blah blah blah blah blah lots of FPS etc
check this out hardware info uh casual
45 degrees celsius maximum 54 while gaming if every CPU ran
it 45 to 55 degrees celsius the world would be a cooler place of course it's a
well-known fact that games particularly older ones aren't capable of fully
utilizing a multi-core CPU so we fired up cinebench r23 and we're
gonna let this run for a while to see if we managed to overwhelm our
plastic coated cooler a few moments
later with a maximum of 68 degrees i
feel like i have to prove to you guys i'm just gonna i'm gonna turn it off
you're gonna see that this is in fact the system i'm running
i'm gonna pop this cooler off i swear to you the plastic is on it
that's a completely serviceable operating temperature
i wouldn't even i could own this computer for years and
never realized that there was any kind of problem
and the craziest part is we actually turned on multi-core enhancement in the
BIOS so this thing is turboing to the greatest possible extent that it can
even with an enthusiast class motherboard come on over here mark i
gotta prove this we're doing this as a one take
plastic baby and get this there was no effect to the chip
physically whatsoever so that means i am ready to take things to
another level because the thing is acceptable performance doesn't equal
optimal performance and surely if it didn't make any difference whatsoever
cooler master wouldn't bother with this fancy little hey peel this thing off
warning so to take things to the next level we're gonna go with an Intel core
i9 9900k this is an eight core processor
rated at 95 watts TDP which on paper
doesn't actually sound like that much more than 65 watts but in practice
Intel's tdps are more like pirate code
guidelines and this 65 watt chip there's
no way it actually consumes 65 watts meanwhile this 95 watt chip especially
if you enable multi-core enhancement is gonna consume way more than 95 watts and
here it is absolutely disgusting
all right
let's give it a chance let's go with the CPU's default behavior let's see what
happens and once again no obvious problem we're anywhere from 350 to 250
frames per second like obviously that's easily playable
and it's smooth this is with a core i9
wow there are a lot of bullet holes in the wall behind his head
how is my aim so bad ah but while we were gaming we had a
maximum of 91 degrees and yes we did in fact thermal throttle
and this is before we even ran an intensive all core load like cinebench
let's see what happens when we do that
and start i'm expecting this to be
pretty rough oh 100 degrees instantly and check this
out this heatsink is cool to the touch so
what the heck is going on here there are actually a few factors at play here
starting with bam surprise math lesson
this is normal you've got your CPU and
you've got your heatsink you want all the heat to go from here to here where
it can be dissipated to the air around it but there are a couple of different
paths it can take it can either travel from metal to metal because remember on
a microscopic level metal is going to be textured no matter how much you try to
polish it so they might meet up kind of like this where those atoms are touching
that's where you're going to get the best possible thermal transfer for
everywhere else well of course there's thermal compound to fill in those gaps
that's going to be r2 now heat is kind of like electricity in that it wants to
take the path of least resistance so these paths can be considered to be in
parallel with as much heat as possible being transferred to our heatsink
this is where our plastic comes in now
we've got this original resistance equation except kind of there is no r1
because there is no metal to metal contact and therefore no optimal route
and then we actually have to add the thermal resistance of our plastic which
is going to be a function of how thermally conductive our plastic is hint
not very and how thick it is hint not
very but that's still really bad because the
thermal resistance of plastic is so freaking high so what that means in
practice is that with a very high thermal resistance the difference in
temperature between the CPU and the heatsink needs to be really really high
as the wattage goes up right so the more watts we're trying to
move the more heat we're trying to move between the CPU and the heatsink
the more that resistance hurts us
but i did say there was more than one factor at play didn't i you might have
noticed the computer is still running that's because any modern CPU whether
it's from AMD or Intel is going to be equipped with a thermal sensor or in
many cases a suite of them along with the ability to dynamically scale its own
frequency and working together those two features are called thermal throttling
so what they allow the chip to do is say hey if we reach this predetermined
temperature that the manufacturer has deemed unsafe you need to dynamically
scale down the frequency until we're not drawing any more power and therefore
putting out any more heat than the thermal solution can deal with so you
can see here that while the chip is absolutely running it's getting a much
lower score in cinebench than a normal core i9 9900k would
and that's because we don't have enough cooling and finally there's how you
actually use your computer we saw a significant difference in throttling
behavior between cs go and the heavily multi-threaded workload like cinebench
r23 so the answer to our original question just how bad is it is
it depends if you have a low powered CPU or if all you do is game
it's possible you've been running plastic on your CPU for years and the
worst effect you might notice is the odd stutter or hitch as your thermal
throttling kicks in and drops your CPU frequency
or if you're a heavy user it's likely you're leaving a significant amount of
performance on the table or as a worst case scenario your chip could even die a
premature death because as we all know the cooler you can keep your CPU the
longer it should last the good news though is that if you screw up and you
accidentally put the plastic on and go oh no my temperatures are bad and check
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
your rig bottleneck video we're gonna have that linked down below