Our best effort still SUCKS - Sketchy Heatsinks 3
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
3,079 words · ~15 min read
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it's been over a year since the last episode of sketchy heatsinks
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this project was actually probably alex's worst at
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the company it was over time over budget
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and the end result was absolutely
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abominable so i told him
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we're not doing sketchy heat sinks again unless you can do a better job than this
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which you might think is a reasonably low bar but then it took an entire year
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to bring another concept to the table so you're already over time and over budget
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but to your credit this does look
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a lot more promising
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private internet access encrypts your internet traffic and uses a safe
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protected ip check it out today through the link below that was just not fair at
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all but not fair at all what part of it was not fair first of all this is amazing it
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cooled the processor great but anyway what was not fair about that is that i
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just did not have the tools that i needed to properly do it
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you had a blank check to buy the tools you needed that's not an excuse okay
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okay let's just yeah let's yeah let's just get to let's put the past in the past
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all right so the plan for this one is we're actually going to put heat
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pipes into aluminum and then have
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actual aluminum fins so we're going to try to make a hyper 212 basically yeah
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pretty much exactly it's like largely ripped off of them if you look at the
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design here basically we're going to do is take one of these guys
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drill six holes directly down in then
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we're going to stick the heat pipes in bend them at 90 degrees and they'll go
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up through the fins which will have also six holes in them and are you gonna
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solder the heat pipes to the aluminum or
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um they're going to be thermal epoxied on you can't solder them
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because like pipes will explode if you eat them the only
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part that really sketches me out is bending the heat pipe
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which hopefully will be done with this but i don't know if we'll get a full 90
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degrees on it so if that doesn't work it's gonna have to sort of come out
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at two angles like a v8 or a v6 i guess
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that's going to make the holes through the fins a complete nightmare oh we'll
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have like fins on either side we'll like cut them in half
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and they'll like come out like this the first order of business was to see
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how far we could bend the tubes we ordered 10 heat pipes so we only have
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four chances to figure this out oh man this is
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this is such a terrible bender oh my god authority just stuck on itself
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oh this is about to get gross
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out of the box the guide on the bender wasn't correctly aligned how is this
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thing so balls so we needed to make up some of the slop to get consistent bends
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so the working idea
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to make this which goes the wrong way compared
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to the tubing sizes line up correctly
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is to just give her with the gaff tape
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hopefully it'll work
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i guess what you get for buying like a 20 thing
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i think that'll work
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will it fit
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so we've got the clearance there uh
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looks good
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yeah that one didn't quite work out
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oh that one did not work out either those are both totally mangled
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this one right here this one worked out
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so we're going 45 degrees with the heat pipe angles decided it was
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time to move on to creating the base that would sit on top of the CPU out of
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aluminum stock we have a guide for the CPU block what we
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really needed was a three and a half by three and a half inch square but it was
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cheaper to buy four inch stock so the first order of business was to cut it
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down then with our square cut down to the correct size we needed to drill the
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holes for the heat pipes to go in huh
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it's basically a milling machine
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ah that's not gonna work
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problem solved
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perfect could not have been better
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well it definitely could have been better but is this even going to hold this in place
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oh yeah it should be fine i didn't want to like take the time to
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measure all the holes so i just laser cut them captain should be fine everyone
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this this one is fine that one this
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is gonna go through there yep i don't think you have a plan
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i i was just gonna eyeball it sweet about
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thera look good no this way but that way that too hey look it's got a
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laser
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yeah it doesn't work well
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if only we had a rubber mallet prepare for some lube to go everywhere
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well i'm pretty sure you're not supposed to
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apply that while it's spinning if only we had brushes here
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you know i approve everything you want to buy
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all you have to do is order it well we also literally have brushes so
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i want to try it
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i mean you wanted something to go wrong so now we can both get our wish yeah
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that's lots
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oh yeah you want that
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this actually isn't as far off as i was expecting why are you expecting it to be
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off gee i i don't know
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wow these don't fit that tightly they fit tightly enough
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some of them are tighter than others this one's pretty loose
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how are you gonna get all that oil out of there i was planning on just kind of
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cramming it full of thermal paste and uh
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you can't just slap a block of aluminum on the CPU though since it will
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interfere with the capacitors around the socket so this side with the holes i
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don't want to destroy them so that's why i'm using the hacksaw for this
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i can see this really quickly just turning into my angle grinding
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with capacitor clearance cut and sharp edges removed with the sander and file
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the block was looking like it might work it's drill pressing time again well i'll
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have to let you do that yourself i have other pressing matters to attend to
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all right bye no satisfaction it's excellent time
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no no i'm still satisfied i don't need you to
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get off to be satisfied oh it's so much more on the edge i love
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it with more lube
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perfect i love how proud you are such a great fit cool with our plan fully
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worked out it was time to bend the rest of the heat pipes all right now we need
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to do six of these
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and i can make two errors during that
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and i don't know if i'm capable of that really these are kind of finicky and
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this tool sucks and i say
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that but i just made it look easy so
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we have one left over we can tell Linus to do the last one and tell them that it
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actually matters and see what happens
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nice well that was easy enough
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the problem that we have to go over now
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we have all of these sheets of aluminum yeah and they need to go on these
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yes so we need to drill
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these holes in these and we need to figure out a
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good way to hold these got the clamps
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yeah we seem to be on the same page here so do we want to do half of them like
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that i don't know you're you claim to be the
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expert that moved a fair bit while you were
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putting it on i don't even know how much that's going
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to affect the bit wandering
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oh that moved so much
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okay uh oh wow how are we gonna do this
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professional this is where we find out if
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this project's gonna be on time or not
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yeah it cuts through these like butter
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not bad they are mostly in a straight line-ish
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yeah i think so just some cleaning and prep was left until it was time to do a
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test fit and make sure it would all go together all those clear that awesome
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come on okay so about there
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the fit surprisingly was pretty good although a couple needed to be trimmed
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down so that we could get the maximum number of fins onto the heatsink
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oh nice so we got this thermally conductive adhesive from mg chemicals
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which hopefully when put between the fins and the heat pipes will
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conduct most of the heat i don't know the thermal conductivity on it isn't
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great but it's the best that we've got
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or that exists really this kind of looks like candy tuna i
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don't think i'd recommend putting this on your sushi sushi
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sushi oh man that smells like tuna too our choice of medium cure time epoxy
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means we'd have about 45 minutes to work with it before it cures first the heat
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pipe holes in the block were filled with nth-1 thermal compound and then the
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thermal epoxy was put on the end to hold them in place
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suppose it's done i guess
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oh my god these are like almost gone from here the heat pipes were covered in
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thermal epoxy and the plan anyway was to
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just jam the fins on i guess before i put the epoxy on i should have made sure
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that all six heat pipes will go into this all right
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to keep the fins from sticking together we resorted to some good old-fashioned
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canadian engineering using pieces of a cut up tim hortons box to space them out
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we repeated this process until we were out of fins so while you're off spending
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company money on lunch actually that was personal lunch with
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personal money same thing so i basically
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finished it oh finished is a word
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so don't move it too much it's still setting but i noticed that something i
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hadn't really thought of until now uh all the heat pipes are together
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which oh yeah probably isn't the most efficient way to do that no yeah it's
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going to be like right here is where all the heat gets
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dissipated and then this is all just worth it yeah like probably the
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like outer inch or so is doing nothing
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so aluminum here doesn't help us a whole lot it probably should have been copper
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but it would have been way more difficult to machine and stuff you're
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calling what you did machining
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yes at this point all that was left to do was leave it to cure overnight and
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gather some comparative benchmark data so we could determine just how good or
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bad our creation really is it's really dumb that Windows doesn't automatically
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restore connection to network drives all the time i mean far be it from us to
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criticize other people's products at this moment
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though we pay for their products though
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no one's buying this i paid for it uh you're getting paid for
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it the total cost of this monstrosity
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was 107.38 which is canadian dollars so that's two
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dollars less than an hd15 and let's find out how long it takes to
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mount i guess now you've stolen some mounting hardware i see here this looks
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like uh Noctua mounting hardware that's sort of cheating that's revised to
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everyone though so i think it's okay and it's the first one that wasn't mounted with zip ties so
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it's a pretty big improvement what we're looking for so Intel stock
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heatsink okay took 40 seconds to mount
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okay the cooler master hyper 212 took 9 minutes
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and 30 seconds okay so that's what we're looking to beat so we start the time
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right now um sure this is kind of cheating because we're using two people
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but i think this thing needs every advantage it can get hold on no i don't
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have to hold it from the bottom actually and of course this is going to be a hard
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mount now not a spring mount because our block is so thick these
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aren't going to reach oh did you check you didn't check
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i might still have an old school water block mount in my office this is
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like training wheels off CPU mounting
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we could probably go a little tighter but it's fine
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no we're not going to use a blowy on this that's cheating well i figured that
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if that doesn't work i think rubber bands is actually probably a better bet
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yeah sure good enough all right it's 54
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seconds still being hyper 212
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so the hyper 212 idles were like 30 40 degrees the Intel stock was
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regularly getting up to 60. it's still 30 degrees it's not going up
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yeah so do we hit it with a load it's kind of cheating to put like a 30
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fan on it too i realized that but i just wasn't gonna mention it
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like we definitely could have just like c and seed out the whole block
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got the pipes professionally done it wouldn't even cost that much probably
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would have cost less than a drill press
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there's no fun in this exactly that's why it's our job to do it wrong it's not
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even warming up like our heat pipes with
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their lesser bend may actually have some kind of
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efficiency improvement in terms of their evaporation and condensation another
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thing that we haven't really considered is that even though our heat pipes look
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like they're the same diameter they might be like a high quality heat pipe
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so we don't know if these are good heat pipes or not i would say that they are
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they cost like 80 bucks
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and you were just like ruining them all right hit me with the flear
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i want to see this first whoa it's really cool yeah the hottest
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part is the fan hub yeah like if you look at the motherboard
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i mean there's the coolest spot is our heatsink the base of our heatsink
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is tops like 31 degrees as measured by
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this you compare that to like this capacitor
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at 35 so CPU score is seven
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like 73 26 73 26 how does that compare
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we're right up there with the hype same as the hyper 212
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i mean there's plenty of time for it to buckle under a sustained load i guess
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oh okay so that jumped right up to 83
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degrees on the hottest core so far still turboing huh
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full turbo no throttle oh it's still climbing though 86 degrees yeah so our
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victory there might have just been purely on mass alone so i have a
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solution to this what's that we call it a gaming heatsink
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then when people say well you know under a sustained all-core load it actually
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doesn't perform as well we say well it's designed for gaming so if we had spread
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out our heat pipes more which we knew yeah was better that's why they design
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it like this so that way that little area around the heat pipe
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right in the path of the most optimal parts of the fan
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is exactly right yeah and that's why it ends like a fingers width away from the
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heat pipe because you're just nothing's happening if you have more
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aluminum here all right so it hasn't thermal throttle though or it's thermal throttle but it
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hasn't it has it doesn't it's not turboing anymore it's actually no you
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know it's still above base clock 3.85
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is above the base 3.7 clock speed of an 8700k
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so do we declare victory
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it's better than Intel stock it's worse than a hyper 212 so assuming
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that you have a half a dozen heat pipes some blocks of aluminum and a bunch of
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aluminum sheets a drill press some
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thermal epoxy and a lot of time on your hands
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you can conceivably have a better cooler than the Intel stock cooler that your
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CPU shipped with this one didn't though by following this method mission
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accomplished boys speaking of missions being accomplished
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thermal takes mission when they were created the vue 71 snow was to make a
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four-sided tempered glass case and they pulled it off it supports mini itx micro
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atx atx and the atx motherboards it has
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four tempered glass panels and a dual swing door it allows vertical mounting
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options for two and a half slot GPU solutions so even massive graphics cards
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with the riser cable sold separately it's got three-way radiator support so
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top front or vertical and it includes
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two of their ring 140 millimeter white led fans and you can check out the full
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details at the link in the video description
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so thanks for watching you guys i know it was painful if you dislike this video
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consider checking out where to buy the things that are actually any
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good that we feature at the link yeah video description
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these fans are good too also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts
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like this one and our community forum which you should totally join
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am i hot yeah yes i do it