Intel Stock Cooler on STEROIDS?
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,229 words · ~6 min read
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every non-k or x processor from Intel
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comes packed with this little guy right here and i mean little
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whether it's been by removing thin area
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or eliminating performance enhancing copper slugs
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Intel has been costing down their box cooler for years
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years i mean to be clear it is adequate
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for default operation but it would
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easily be overwhelmed by an overclocked processor
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but what if Intel made a stock heatsink specifically
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for k series and x series overclockable chips
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well it turns out they do
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and it looks pretty much like what you'd expect if Intel's cooling engineers the
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same ones what brought you this we're terminally unimaginative
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and we're told well make
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something like that but that performs a bit better
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so it looks about like the stock cooler
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on roids but did the treatment give it better
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performance or just mood swings fatigue and a deflated sex
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drive let's find out
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the be quiet! dark bass pro 900's modular design supports a variety of different
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layouts and configurations click on the link in the video description to learn
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more okay silly intro aside taking the Intel
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thermal solution ts15a
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out of the box it looks pretty much like
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somebody took three or so regular Intel
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stock heatsinks and glued them together
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the push mounting pins remain for
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that easy installation and the fan clips
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on to the top exactly the same way it normally would
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looking more closely at it though reveals some differences
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so the regular heatsink uses an aluminum
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extrusion process to create the required profile
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that's great for keeping costs down but
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not so great for having thin higher performance fins so for the ts15a which
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we'll be calling roydee from now on
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each fin here is actually its own bent
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piece of metal that meets at the center
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so you can kind of see it here around a copper slug
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this increases performance but also
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increases manufacturing costs but how much additional performance
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does it actually get you and can you slap a decent overclock on
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your processor using it and then perhaps more importantly
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at this price does it make any sense to actually go
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and buy this product compared to
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larger and probably better coolers like the cooler
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master hyper 212 evo that are available
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for as little as only two dollars more
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to test this we first ran a couple of
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other heatsinks on an Intel core i7
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7700k at both the stock speed of 4.5
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gigahertz turbo and a modest 4.8
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gigahertz over clock that was mostly there to increase its heat output the
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stock fan curve was used for these tests
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and we also used the thermal compound that comes pre-applied to these things
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out of the box
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and
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yeah it couldn't quite do it
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at the stock speed the reuted cooler was
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able to pull off a warm 81 degrees celsius but with our
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fairly reasonable overclock it throttled hard
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reaching 100 degrees celsius in about 30
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seconds the only thing in our test table here
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that performed worse than the
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roidy cooler was actually the regular
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Intel stock cooler which immediately throttled so badly that we just canceled
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the test out of pity for both our board and our chip
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you know what it's not all terrible news though i mean it was able to maintain
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4.7 gigahertz in the 0.1 volt offset
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test which wasn't really fair because that makes
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this chip more like a space heater than a roomy heater get it cause like outer
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space anyway and with a bit of tweaking we
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were actually able to get this processor up to a stable 4.9 gigahertz without it
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thermal throttling that is to say upstairs where the
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temperatures are about 5 degrees cooler here it is
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definitely thermal throttling but it's still managing about 4.8 gigahertz
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sustained at uh 100 degrees
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okay then so it performs a bit worse
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than a hyper 212 evo um
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dumb product video over right
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wrong if i'm investing
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33 of my hard-earned dollars plus shipping
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we're gonna dig deep what about a comparison to AMD's cooler
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that's sort of a stock cooler but you
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also have to buy it separately wow
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now the easiest way to see how these
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stack up would be to use the same heat
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load or the same CPU but unfortunately that isn't possible
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given that there aren't currently any am4 to lga 1151 mounting adapters or
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vice versa so we devised
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a completely over engineered and clever
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plan to use an intermediary reference cooler
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that was compatible with both or
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because we're thorough like that we actually used a total of three
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references
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and looking at the results
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AMD is the winner for non-stock stock cooler
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performance although only by a slim five
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percent over roidy and at twelve percent more expensive it
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looks like it's pretty much coming down to whether it's worth it to you to pay
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seven percent for that RGB lighting
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although there is one other thing that really differentiates them as well
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the noise level once the Intel fan kicks in it reaches
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about 40 decibels which isn't overly
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loud but the AMD wraith cooler comes in at 38 decibels
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so you'd think okay that's pretty similar uh-uh the AMD cooler is at a low
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frequency so tuning it out is easy kind of like a clothes dryer in the other
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room the Intel cooler on the other hand is high pitched and very distracting
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kind of like your boss which hey
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anyway at this point you might assume that we
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aren't big fans of paying after market dollars for oem design and that we think
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buying the Intel thermal solution ts15a
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would be super dumb and that would be correct great work
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for 30 bucks like unbelievable so go
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check them out at the link below
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so thanks for watching if you guys dislike this video you can hit that dislike button but if you liked it hit
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the like button get subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy the
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other stuff we featured like the hyper 212 evo or really any cooler from Noctua
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at the link in the video description also down there is a link to our merch
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store where you can get cool shirts like this one as well as our community forum
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which you should totally join
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now i've got to go have a word with our writer alex