okay so the traditional way of building a CPU cooler you take a big old hunk of
metal you take a plastic fan and you slap it
on there in hopes that the raging inferno of a pentium d processor you've
got will stay alive long enough to become a weird curiosity for the
employees you hire 10 years down the line who were still in diapers when you
started building computers but not thermal take
no thermaltake took a metal heatsink
okay i'm with you so far slapped a metal
fan onto it because yolo in an attempt to cool down
a modern CPU in one of the smallest form
factor coolers that i've ever seen but does it work
so if you were just here to find out if a metal fan would work then you'll be
sorely disappointed because i'm also going to bore you with some science and
history the sandia cooler concept with its metal
spinning top and static metal base first
showed up on the scene in 2012
with this video gaining considerable attention among pc enthusiasts due to
its promises of vastly improved efficiency smaller size and quieter
operation compared to more traditional heat sink designs
then there was no news until cooler
master showed up at ces 2015 with a
couple kind of ugly prototypes that featured grooves between the spinning
top and the base presumably to improve heat transfer and an outer heat sink to
further improve cooling performance fast forward to today and this tech is
finally on the market the fundamental idea here is pretty
simple theoretically when the air gap
between the fixed grooved metal base and the spinning grooved metal impeller is
small enough heat transfer can still occur as though they were connected
in practice this was pretty difficult to
pull off but through a combination of patients and apparently balancing the
impeller like the wheel on a car
thermaltake was the first one to do it
to test how effective the engine 27 was we gathered up a bunch of other small
form factor coolers from reputable brands and
a stock Intel heatsink since if it doesn't offer a compelling improvement
over that you're clearly better off saving your money
we used an ASUS z170i pro gaming
motherboard thanks bros and a core i7
6700k with an nzxt grid 2.0 for fan
control for each test we used a p sized amount
of ic diamond thermal compound and we analyzed the results two different ways
first we looked at what we could expect from each cooler out of the box using
the silent mode curve in nzxt's cam
software the engine 27 was the worst performing
cooler in this test at about 10 degrees
higher than the nearest aftermarket competitor under load and all of this
while managing to be louder than the Intel box cooler as measured by our
extech 407 750 digital sound level meter
the second method of analysis was to introduce a noise ceiling
limiting the maximum RPM of each cooler
to the speed at which it reaches 45 decibels the same as the stock cooler
so performing worse than the stock cooler or thermal throttling would
result in a fail grade for this test
all of them passed but CPU cooling isn't the be-all and end-all and maintaining
enough air flow to the components nearby is of critical importance the good news
is that all of our coolers performed similarly with the c7 only pulling ahead
when we allowed it to get a little noisy
leading us finally to the reason presumably that thermaltakes engineers
thought the engine 27 deserved to exist
its size it's not the top performer in any
category but this one at a full centimeter shorter than the nearest
competitor from Noctua and less than half the height of the top performing
ar-06 from silverstone the engine 27 is
compatible with any case that's wide enough to fit a memory stick
so with form factor as a consideration i'll be giving a few awards here today
the ar06 gets my big and beautiful award
for being the best performer if a little top heavy
the Noctua nhl9i takes home the middle
child award for being so ugly only its own mother could love it but otherwise a
solid compact choice and the thermaltake
engine 27 gets my better than nothing award for working better than i expected
given its size making it a great option if you don't have anything else that
will fit so congrats to the winners thanks for watching and good night
and i've got another award this time for
one of our lucky viewers we are hooking
one of you up with the SSD to go pkt
from angel bird they set us up with these bad boys for ces 2017. you can
check them out in our gear bag video over here and they gave us an extra one
with a silk screened LTT super fan like
logo thing on it and everything it's a 256 gig portable SSD drive it's super
tiny it's usb 3.1 with either a type a
or a type c connection to your computer and it can handle up to 560 megabyte per
second transfer speeds so all you got to do to enter to win is check out the link
in the video description
so thanks again for watching guys if you disliked dislike if you liked then like
if you really liked then maybe check out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link to amazon in the video
description you can also join our community forum and i'm pretty sure
there's something else down there right cool t-shirts like the one that i am
wearing i think that's pretty much it subscribe
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