The SKETCHIEST CPU Cooler
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2017-05-06
·
1,654 words · ~8 min read
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so you got this computer that you got to cool this looks like a fairly simple
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problem to solve right I mean Intel doesn't even include copper slugs in the
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middle of their hunk of aluminum heat sinks anymore so why is it then that we
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pay actual money to cool our processors
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I mean in the case of the stock one I guess you don't really pay for it it
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comes in the Box for nothing but maybe you broke it or something so today's
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mission is to build our own cooling heat
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sink I by power and MSI's new lineup of
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gaming laptops feature Intel's 7th generation core i7 processors check them
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out at the link below so with the
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mission of creating our very own lonus Tech tips heatsink I set off for a disc
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discussion with the lonus Media Group engineering and stuffed animal Taxidermy
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division they went away for a couple of days and then returned proudly producing
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a hacksaw a block of aluminum and a
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stack of papers full of pictures of Elon Musk
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over which in crayon it said just raw
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Dogg it at which point I really began to wonder what exactly it is that I paid
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these people for and got to work I
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guess so the basic principle of an aluminum heat sink is actually pretty
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straightforward you've got this little heat generating doodad right here and
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you need to take that heat and you've got to spread it out then you've got to
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dissipate it to the air so what you need is a thermally conductive material so
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the engineering department did manage to get that far we've got a hunk of
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aluminum which has excellent thermal conductivity and then what you need is
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you have to increase its surface area so if all we did was take this and stick it
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on top of a CPU what we'd effectively do is we would
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spread the heat but we would spread it throughout this block without actually
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achieving any of our cooling goals so
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once we've got this spreading the heat we've got to increase the surface area
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and the way that apparently they intend for me to do that I mean at least they
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have the decency to get a fresh blade for the hacksaw is to throw the Block in the
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Vie and just start sawing out fins I've
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been informed that this is the good one whatever that means so we're going to do
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a practice cut on this other hunk of aluminum see just how accurate we can
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get here the more fins and the thinner
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the
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better okay unless we have all the time
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in the world and we assign absolutely zero value to
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it that's clearly not a way to go about it so back to the engineering
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department they brainstormed and came up with a new solution let's ARM lonus with
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power tools so I've never used a reciprocating
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saw boom and it's plugged in but it
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looks really fun so
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uh Safety First kids exciting WD40 on here
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wow we made as much progress in like 4
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seconds as we did
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before okay that's not so hard let's do
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the real thing see here's my like 10 minutes of hack sawing there's my like
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10 seconds of uh reciprocal sawing okay
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screw it yeah
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okay how many blades did you say we
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have unplugged to change the
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blade have a lot more respect for what Cooler Master
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does I think that what we really need is like a constant flow of WD40
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almost we are definitely making faster
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progress now so not having not trying to cut the entire thing at once keeps the
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blade from uh getting so gunked up with
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metal got to be really careful we only have one blade
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left almost there just got to finish up one last one so we found that this stuff
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uh fluid film actually does a better job
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of lubricating the blade which would have been great to know cuz it's just
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generally a lot less nasty than
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WD40 that's the stuff that smells by the way
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almost
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there holy crap I think the only thing
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more epic than the DIY heat sink we've
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created is the mess that we've created I
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mean this is like I don't know if it's
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like a pound of aluminum but boy howdy is it ever a lot of aluminum I guess we
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better clean this up look at this oh there's WD40 all over it this stuff is
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hard to pick up okay we are actually getting pretty
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close to being ready to try out mounting
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this baby after a little bit of washing
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and a little bit of filing just to take some of the really rough edges off of it
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so we don't hurt ourselves while we're working on it we are going to devise
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some kind of mounting system now that's the kind of of thing that you're
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probably thinking to yourself ginus surely you guys thought of that before
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you started to which I would
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reply it can't be that bad right yes my
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friends it's zip tie time again so we're
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going to throw on our usual icy Diamond thermal
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compound we are going to plunk that bad boy down on there and we are going to
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figure out how to zip tie it on you know
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what let's get some hot glue going on here too a Linus Tech tips project is
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truly not complete without hot
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glue so in terms of mounting for this
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puppy we're just going to kind of just going to kind of YOLO it I mean were you
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really expecting anything
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else there we go
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okay so the hot glue fan is on if we ran
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through the holes on the fan it was Albert Einstein who said that there's a
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fine line between idiot and
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genius comments are going to be full of he said no such
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thing what the
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crap what kind of cheap ass zip tie
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breaks just like that where do we get these oh they're generic so this is it
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Moment of Truth time well posts that's a
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good sign CPU temperature sitting at 25
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degrees we've got idol loaded up let's get our sensors going here idle
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temperature not bad and it's not like
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the fan is working really hard either check this out check this
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out it's just barely spinning see that
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so let's go ahead and hit it with a
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stress test CPU package is sitting at 74°
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but I think we've leveled off
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success for $3 worth of
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aluminum and a fan that we found some
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old 80mm Silverstone fan we were able
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to okay hold on a minute so it's been running for about 8 minutes now and the
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Victory is less complete than we at
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first thought so there's some good stuff to take away here we're still running
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above the base speed of the i76700 K but
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we are not turbo boosting to the max anymore so you can see we're actually
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getting some CPU throttling and overheating detected here our CPU
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package is up around 98° C and uh if you
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put your hands on the heat sink it is pretty toasty but the
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computer doesn't turn off it does
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run so there you we have it we did what we set out to do we made our own heat
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sink is it as good as the one that Intel puts in the Box no but Intel doesn't put
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a heat sink in the Box for their unlocked K series processors anymore so
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this if you have an unlimited amount of time and enough money to buy literally a
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power tool just to make it but for some reason not enough money to just buy a
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heat sink okay we don't know what the point of it was but it was fun wasn't it
9:31
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unlimited account you can save 10% woo
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so thanks for watching guys if you dislike this video hit the dislike button but if you liked it hit the like
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button get subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured or something else at the link
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in the video description also down there is our merch store with test shirts like
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this one and our community Forum which you should totally join now that you're
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done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so check out our uh recent video maybe it's
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recent I don't know YouTube kind of picks one to suggest to you so the odds
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of you liking it are actually pretty good