in our review of the core i9 10 900k we were impressed by the performance of
Intel's 10 core beast i mean this thing turbos just shy of 5 gigahertz across
all cores and if you set your motherboard to allow it to ignore the
time limits on its turboing it'll actually do that basically indefinitely
crazy right well crazy hot the one thing we didn't tell
you guys because we accidentally left that in the slide out of the slide
it the one thing we didn't tell you guys because we accidentally left that out of
the slide is what kind of cooling it takes to get that sort of performance so
to rectify that error and take things a little bit deeper we are going to try it
out with everything from Intel's pin or old stock cooler to a more sensible air
cooler to a high-end air cooler to a top-tier air cooler and see just what
kind of performance we can get out of this chip depending
on the cooling solution and this video is brought to you by
glasswire glasswire is the tool that tells you when a strange new app
accesses your network in real time and lets you block it use offer code Linus
to get 25 off at the link in the video description
Anthony do we want to replicate our initial test from the review with a
Corsair 280 millimeter aio this is standard for our CPU reviews or do we
want to go straight to the pain train
let's do the pain drink let's do the pain training all right we'll shut it down we're shutting we're shutting the
thing down okay hey well we're turboing to 4.9 4.95 of
course we're not doing anything yet first order of business is to establish
a baseline we've got all of Intel's thermal and power limits in place we're
going to go ahead and run a blender classroom benchmark and we're going to
monitor our CPU clock speeds to see where we end up now i suspect it won't
be an issue for this cooler but with the bigger ones and particularly the water
cooler we're gonna do two runs of classroom one just to
heat up the heat sink and then a second one to actually take our values from
we're at that uh got that 98 degrees you know good band
let's check them out very uh popular with the kids today i'm
always in sync with the youth that's why uh you know on friday nights i hang out
in the back street you know with the boys
no no you don't want to hang out with the new kids on the block or chris hanson might show up and
give you trouble unsurprisingly we experienced
significant thermal throttling with 100 degree temperatures and our lowest core
managing a sustained 3.6 gigahertz i'm
not expecting much here but let's see
if unlocking the power limit changes anything about that situation here we go
ladies and gentlemen we are removing all limits and going
auto s vid behavior
i really wasn't expecting this we're running at the same 100 degrees
you know 97 to 99 degrees
but curiously our clock speeds are actually higher
how about that do you have an explanation for that that's bizarre our
lowest core sustained clock speed is now 3.9 gigahertz in spite of the fact that
we didn't change out our cooling solution now that's still not impressive
with power limits fully removed we would expect this ship to maintain 4.9
gigahertz not 3.9 gigahertz over an
extended period of time so now then it's time for us to swap out for something
a little bit better i don't know how it is the cooler
i don't know how it is that cooler master has been making heat sinks this
long and yet they have such obtuse mounting mechanisms still
i've been saying it for years and i'll say it again everyone else
just copy Noctua thanks for coming to my ted talk you
know well i can't say much positive about the finishing on the fins or about
the mounting mechanism you can't fault the hyper 212 family when it comes to
price to performance it did spike up to
around 100 degrees during the turbo window under stock operation but it
managed an average of just under 69 degrees during the rest of it netting it
a 400 megahertz improvement over the stock cooler
now we're running our second round with the limits removed and yes we are seeing
anywhere from 93 to 99 degrees
but our sustained turbo speeds are 4.7
gigahertz that's just 200 megahertz shy of what we're expecting with water
cooling of course most people don't spend 500 bucks on a CPU to leave any of
its performance on the table so we're gonna splurge we're gonna spend
another twenty dollars and we're gonna move up to a Noctua nhu 12
s mostly the differences in performance
that i'm expecting here are going to be down to Noctua's superior fan design
also they have a much better mounting mechanism strongly recommended and there
it is how much cooling do you need to get the
most out of your 10900k assuming that you are not manually overclocking the
answer is somewhere between a hyper 212
assuming you're using a high quality thermal paste rather than one of our
graphite thermal pads and an nhu 12s
with that said even with the 5 to 10 degrees of improvement that we would
expect here going to a thermal paste i would say that our load temperatures in
our fully unfettered mode are higher than i would be comfortable with so
i would still consider an upgrade if you
plan to do things like render out scenes like this in blender
on the regular so let's see how much improvement we get here every time i go
a while without mounting one of these i forget how utterly
chunk-tastic the nht15 is like look at
this the performance may actually be better than water cooling but it sure
does clutter up your CPU socket like even just getting at your memory is a
chore oh that's better those are under
control thermals all right for your convenience i'm going to talk through
the h115i so that's the 280 millimeter aio water cooler and the nhd15 air
cooler at the same time because their performance profiles were somewhat
similar under stock operation both of them actually didn't manage to
outperform the nhu 12s by a significant
margin which i was a little bit surprised to see especially that
equivalency in the hottest core while the system was turboing but when
it came time to unlock the power limits with multi-core enhancement
both these solutions clearly separated themselves from everything that we've
seen so far not just managing 4.9 gigahertz across the board but doing it
with core temperatures that i would consider to be maybe not
the most comfortable we are still up in the 80 high 90 low degree range but once
you sub out our thermal pad for a high quality thermal grease
definitely acceptable and around that 80 degrees that we talked about in our
original review what all of that means is that if i was looking for additional
overclocking headroom i would absolutely recommend spending the hundred plus
dollars on a thermal solution like this but if all i wanted was to get the most
out of my CPU and i knew that i wasn't going to be hitting it this hard all the
time around 50 to 60 dollars for a good
single tower aftermarket air cooler is going to do the trick just nicely
just like our sponsor does the trick just nicely micro center is open for all
of your work from home or learn from home technology needs and they want you
to check out the lienlee landcool 205
mid tower tempered glass case it supports atx m80x and mini itx
motherboards with extra space behind the motherboard tray for cable management
it's got side ventilation for improved airflow with easy access to the power
supply and hard drive bay from the side it's got rear removable SSD mounting
brackets and high performance magnetic dust filters at the top and front with a
dust filter tray at the bottom you can check out it and other micro center
specials at the link in the video description if you guys enjoyed this
video and you like crazy cooling experiments maybe check out our water
cooling the macbook air 2020 video we use an ice bath to explore whether it's
actually a thermal limit or maybe a power limit holding back its performance