CPUs run hot. So hot that they would destroy themselves if it weren't for
built-in protections that slow them down. But we don't want to slow down. We
want to go fast. And thus nerds are willing to spend hundreds of dollars to
keep their CPUs cool. But what if there's a whole other side of cooling
that no one's talking about? The backside. Why not put a cooler there as
well? So we did. Before you furiously comment saying, "Cooling a CPU from the
back doesn't work. There's too many layers of stuff between the CPU and the
cooler for it to be effective." Well, take a look at this footage. That is
heat on the back of the motherboard. And there's enough that removing it might
actually make a meaningful difference. So, does it? And if it does, is it easy
or cheap to do? Well, that depends.
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The simplest way to cool your CPU from both sides is to just point a fan at the
back of it. And that's been done before. My first PC case was the Anttech 3002,
which had a mount for a fan right behind the motherboard tray. Did I spend 30 of
my high school dollars on an Noctua fan to put it there? Yes. Did it do
anything? from what I remember kind of. So, first things first, let's see if
Antech was cooking or not. Noctua has this handy magnetic mount from uh their
desk fan that we're just going to use just as a quick little preliminary test
here. We're seeing about a degree or two
difference uh going from like 51 something to more closer to 50 49.7 kind
of area. And that lines up with the preliminary testing that we did taking
measurements from the CPU and hardware info. But we all know that proper
cooling requires contact. So, let's see how easy or hard it is to mount a cooler
on the back here. First things first, any mounting design that we make, we'll
need to make sure that the CPU cooler on the front isn't affected because,
spoiler alert, it's doing most of the work. And mounting hardware for CPUs is
made with relatively tight tolerances to ensure that you can get even contact
across the CPU's integrated heat spreader. And pretty much every part of
the mounting hardware plays an important role, including the parts that go on the
back of the motherboard, which are in our way. Let's get rid of it.
And you know what else is in our way? The Intel socket back plate that holds
the CPU retention arm on the front. And that also prevents our second cooler
from making direct contact with the back of the motherboard. So, not only can we
not get away with using out ofthe-box CPU cooling parts for this, we're going
to have to remove the back plate as well, which means that we're going to
need to make a custom back plate. Yes.
Originally, what I was thinking of doing is we could probably just modify the
original back plate to add the cooler
onto the back. However, as you can notice, there isn't really a whole lot
of material on the ends to put the bolt holes through. I'd basically be drilling
right along the edge here. So, we're going to have to make a new one out of
metal.
Well, that's one thing I noticed. Oh, is that going to be a problem? They
probably put this so there's a small thin layer
insulation layer to probably make sure just in case that
none of these traces or contacts. Oh yeah, cuz there's definitely open VAS
there.
So, we plain just won't be able to get the same degree of contact on the back
as we have on the front. First of all, uh we're on the the wrong side, but
second of all, this is not a flat surface like the cold plate on your cooler or the IHS on your CPU. There's a
bunch of tiny electrical components that are going to prevent this cold plate
from sitting flush with the back of the motherboard. What are we going to do about that? Well, we're going to need a
cushioning layer that's a lot thicker than your typical thermal paste, like
this 1 mm pad.
Sadly, it has a worse thermal conductivity than any thermal paste. But
hey, it's much better than air, which is what the fan's working with. So, I'm
just going to estimate it because like it's just got to be good enough, you
know? That's what I always say. It's just got to be good enough. We decided
to go with a mechanism that's just mounting into these corners that are already part of the Intel bracket
because it just makes our lives easier to mount in here. We had to make some
custom length screws because I don't
even actually know exactly what these holes are for on the Noctua coolers cuz
I've never used them. I'm assuming it's compatibility with much older hardware.
Uh but I've never actually had to use them. So now I do and it's a what an
exciting time for me, a new experience. Thankfully there's Robertson screws in
the precision screwdriver kit which has an adapter that lets you lose any of
those precision bits with the LTD screwdriver. Technically, the length of
these screws should mean that nothing actually will screw into the
motherboard, but there is a chance that like things can bow and bend a little
bit. So, I am going to be careful. I'm
kind of trying to stop when I feel resistance out of just sheer terror
because I am legitimately worried about this board existing. So, let's
let's boot. If this seems simple, it's because Justin did all of the hard work.
Honestly, I mean, looking at it right now, we're still looking fine. It's not
better. It's not worse. This is kind of
interesting. So, when we're looking through the thermal camera, we can see that our front CPU cooler is just much,
much warmer overall than our back CPU
cooler, which implies that it's moving away a lot more heat to be expected. But
honestly, it feels like we haven't done much because the base of our CPU cooler
is 20°. So, I don't think it's it's
doing much at all. So, why doesn't the cooler perform better? Well, the
motherboard is acting as an insulator, which slows the rate of heat transfer.
And it doesn't matter how thermally conductive our CPU cooler or our thermal pad is. It can only remove the heat that
reaches the other side of the motherboard. Think about it like this.
It doesn't matter how many lanes your highway is if everyone has to file
through the same single lane bottleneck, support public transit. This cooler can
only pull away as much heat as it's being given. But once you pull all of
the heat away, you're going to be rate limited by the motherboard. So, it
doesn't matter how much extra cooling power you put on here, unless you decide to go sub-zero. And if you're going to
go sub-zero, just put it on the front.
Don't put it on the back. I'm just going to take the fan out. I wonder if it will
even like if the cooler will even saturate. Like, that would be a good
indicator if uh if this thing is actually doing anything. 21.3.
It's going up very slowly. So, it is
actually we are transmitting some heat away. But, do you know what's going to make this heat up faster is if I just
touch it with my hand. Let's compare that to running the front without the fan. So, we're looking at it right now.
It's sitting at 27°. Now, Reese is going to hit
Cinebench and we're going to see how quickly this thing heats up. 28 26
29 30.
It's like it took us like literally minutes to go up a degree before and
this is climbing a degrees per second and eventually it will start getting to
the point where it's probably thermal throttling. This just illustrates how much more important this is than
whatever we're doing on the back. Keep watching please. We decided to use our
environmental chamber to have a perfectly controlled temperature for the
most precise of results. But when we tested in there, every permutation of
our system performed the exact same. back panel, back fan, back cooler, stock
cooler, it did not matter. Was all of our preliminary testing wrong? No, it's
the environmental chamber who was wrong. To maintain temperatures within a tenth
of a degree, the chamber needs to constantly blow conditioned air. And
that conditioned air blowing was enough to cool the motherboard on our control
system, which means that we saw no improvements on our cooled system, and
that blows. We needed a more realistic air flow scenario. So, we found a spot
in our office that was roughly equidistant from a bunch of ventilation.
We set the room temp to a tight 22ish°
and tried again. And would you look at that? With the custom back plate and a
fan, we see CPU temps drop 1 to 2°. Heck yeah. And with our cooler mounted to the
back, we see a further improvement of
1 or less degrees. It's not nothing, but
it is almost nothing. Oh, and we've kind of been neglecting to tell you about the
results that make this whole endeavor look uh even more foolish. When we
compare CPU temps with our front mounted cooler on its stock mounting hardware
instead of our custom back blade, it performs better than our back mounted
cooler setup. So, uh, all the haters at the start of the video who said this
won't work, shut up. It does work. It just works poorly. Maybe you could get
better performance out of a more precise custom mounting mechanism, but why
bother when you can just do this?
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Was there something that we missed? Something that you could have done differently? Let us know in the
comments. And if you liked this video, why don't you watch a cooling solution that did work, like our AC cooler.