Are they launching another
series? Okay, whatever. If you don't like all the series that we have now,
then just treat this like a standalone video because it's cool either way. The
idea here was to take topof-the-line products from a particular category. We
decided on CPU water cooling for the first one, and measure just how far
we've come thanks to improvements in design and manufacturing. Welcome to
episode 1 of Through the Ages CPU
cooling
blocks. Massdrop is now featuring the
AKGM220 semi-open studio headphones.
Check them and other drops out at the link in the video description.
So, the first step in this undertaking was to gather up CPU blocks from as far
back as we possibly could. By teaming up with SwiftTech, we were able to scrape
together seven of their nine blocks going all the way back to July of 2005,
a span of over 10 years. So, time to get
started testing them, right? Nah, that would have been too easy. The intention
was to use a modern test bench to eliminate as many variables from our
test as possible. And as the astute
among you might have already realized, Intel's latest flagship X99 platform not
only didn't exist yet, but Intel wasn't
even the performance king back then. So, we needed to source modern mounting
brackets for many of the blocks. Time for some DIY metal fabrication. Step one
was to glue the hold down plate drawings that Swiftech modified for us onto a
piece of sheet steel. Then we went to work with the aviation shears, cutting
the outside edges. We drilled out the middle as much as we could with a step
drill, finishing off again with the aviation shears. And finally, we center
punched the holes and drilled through them with a titanium bit, cleaning
things up a little bit with the Dremel. This was pretty tedious, but we didn't
want to bother our friends over at Protocase to make them for us if we
didn't have to. And yeah, so the Apogee GTZ required a
specific plate thickness and a pretty precise cutout. So, they ended up
whipping one of those up for us in the shop. So, so much for that. But anyway,
thanks Proto Case. As always, you guys were lightning fast and the plate fits
perfectly. Let's introduce now then the test bench that we're using. We used an
Intel Core i7 6850K 6 core processor
with a 246 mm squared die and a 140 W
rated TDP. Though it should be noted that according to this Tom's hardware
article, it's closer to 100 watts in the real world. This might be important for
later. The rest of the components, in no particular order, are an ASUS X99 Deluxe
2, 32 gigs of Corsair Vengeance DDR4, a random GTX 980 Ti that wasn't connected
to the water loop, making it somewhat irrelevant, and our water cooling gear,
an Alphacool Nexus XP 45 triple 120 mil
rad with Noctua industrial PPC fans, a D5 pump with an EKX top, and some 3/8 in
Primoflex tubing. We used IC Diamond for our thermal compound. So each block was
mounted using M4 screws with nylon washers to achieve the desired mounting
pressure. Yeah, we were a little bit approximate here, but as I think you'll
see from the results, it likely didn't matter much. Idle temps were recorded
using IDA 64's logging tool after 10 minutes. Then load temps were recorded
using a 3minut mean average after allowing the water temps to reach
equilibrium. Room temperature was maintained by our zone controlled HVAC
system at 23° C. Wow, that was boring. All right,
let's meet our first contestant. This is the legendary Swifttec Storm. Designed
by Cathar himself and sold to Swift for
mass production back in ' 05. It features an impingement design with a
midplate sporting 35 microjets that
blasted turbulent water into 35
corresponding divots in its thick copper base. It was a nightmare to manufacture,
making it very expensive. And its performance, while superior on bare
small die single core processors, fell quickly behind as dual core and quad
core CPUs with integrated heat spreaders became the norm. The story behind 2006's
Appleo G was less about raw performance
with 1°ree Celsius being optimistic and
more about optimizing for enthusiast CPU
design trends and ease of manufacturing.
Thanks to the relatively simple uniform
diamond pin matrix in its copper base, it was less restrictive, contributing to
better liquid flow rates for multiblock loops. It handled and continues to
handle large CPU dyes with heat spreaders better than the Storm. And
thanks to its cheap injection molded acetal top, it was one of, if not the
first legitimately mass-roduced CPU water coolers. This right here, this
exact one, was my first block when I got into water cooling about 10 years ago.
The followup, the Appleo GT, looks outwardly identical to the Apoge, but
thanks to manufacturing improvements and an enthusiast inspired tweak to bow out
the base with a thicker O-ring to compensate for Intel's less than stellar
IHS flatness. It boasts slightly better
performance, not Swift 1 to3° C from our
measurement, but I'll comment more on that in a moment. The Apoge GTX,
released shortly afterward, was basically a hot rod version of the Apple
GT with the same copper base plate and
then marketing that was focused more on the cool looking aluminum top
that Oho ho. I guess that's probably why
I couldn't find a working one for this video. Don't mix your metals, kids.
Moving on, the Apple GT Z brought about
significant improvements in manufacturing that allowed the small
diamond pins of the Apple GT to be shrunk to only 250 microns for a claimed
performance gain of 2 1/2°. Holy crap.
Too bad on our 6850K, it really didn't
amount to much. But back to my earlier comment about these disparities that are
starting to pop up. The GTZ design was
as much about optimizing for the die orientation of Intel's then flagship
QX6700 quad core as about anything else.
A trend that we're likely to see continue. The Apogee X-T from 2009 was,
from what we can measure, the last big
step forward in CPU water block performance. Sure, it was kind of
restrictive, but it looked amazing. And
thanks to its redesigned upper housing with the inlet centered over a much
larger 250 micron pin matrix, it crushed
its predecessor with our numbers nearly
backing Swift claim of a 3°ree improvement. as long as you had a
whopping $80 to spare. Apogee HD, which
followed two full years later, rocked tweak 225 micron pins, 30% lower flow
restriction to improve GPU block performance, and according to Swift, 2°
better temps. Though, I suspect we'd have to pull a 3960X or something out of
our hats to observe the specific optimizations that were done to achieve
that result. I'm actually still happily running a limited edition gold-plated
Apogee HD in my personal rig. Which leads us then finally, sorry we got lazy
and skipped the Apogee XL to the Apogee XL 2, the current flagship block that is
only available as part of Swift's H220 and H320 X2 kits. It features the same
225 micron fin/pin base plate as the XL,
but tweaks the inlet and outlet design of the top cover for improved flow
characteristics. SwiftTech claims about a degree and a half of performance over
the HD, but we saw a mere half a degree
improvement in spite of the five-year-old design of the HD on a
modern processor, leading me to believe that most of the performance to be
gained with future water blocks will come from compensating for the weird
idiosyncrasies that Intel introduces with each processor generation rather
than pure thermal transfer improvements. Though, I will be interested to see if
the prototype SKF block that Swift Tech showed me at CES will change my mind.
The fins on that sucker are so small that they can only be produced by
shaving copper and bending it up into little tiny fins. Maybe there will be
another leap forward after all. I'll be sure to update you in another 10 years
or so. So, thanks for watching, guys. If you liked this video, hit that like
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