An All-metal FAN??
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2017-05-06
·
1,010 words · ~5 min read
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okay so the traditional way of building a CPU cooler you take a big old hunk of
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metal you take a plastic fan and you slap it
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on there in hopes that the raging inferno of a pentium d processor you've
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got will stay alive long enough to become a weird curiosity for the
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employees you hire 10 years down the line who were still in diapers when you
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started building computers but not thermal take
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no thermaltake took a metal heatsink
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okay i'm with you so far slapped a metal
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fan onto it because yolo in an attempt to cool down
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a modern CPU in one of the smallest form
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factor coolers that i've ever seen but does it work
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so if you were just here to find out if a metal fan would work then you'll be
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sorely disappointed because i'm also going to bore you with some science and
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history the sandia cooler concept with its metal
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spinning top and static metal base first
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showed up on the scene in 2012
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with this video gaining considerable attention among pc enthusiasts due to
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its promises of vastly improved efficiency smaller size and quieter
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operation compared to more traditional heat sink designs
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then there was no news until cooler
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master showed up at ces 2015 with a
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couple kind of ugly prototypes that featured grooves between the spinning
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top and the base presumably to improve heat transfer and an outer heat sink to
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further improve cooling performance fast forward to today and this tech is
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finally on the market the fundamental idea here is pretty
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simple theoretically when the air gap
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between the fixed grooved metal base and the spinning grooved metal impeller is
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small enough heat transfer can still occur as though they were connected
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in practice this was pretty difficult to
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pull off but through a combination of patients and apparently balancing the
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impeller like the wheel on a car
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thermaltake was the first one to do it
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to test how effective the engine 27 was we gathered up a bunch of other small
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form factor coolers from reputable brands and
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a stock Intel heatsink since if it doesn't offer a compelling improvement
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over that you're clearly better off saving your money
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we used an ASUS z170i pro gaming
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motherboard thanks bros and a core i7
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6700k with an nzxt grid 2.0 for fan
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control for each test we used a p sized amount
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of ic diamond thermal compound and we analyzed the results two different ways
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first we looked at what we could expect from each cooler out of the box using
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the silent mode curve in nzxt's cam
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software the engine 27 was the worst performing
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cooler in this test at about 10 degrees
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higher than the nearest aftermarket competitor under load and all of this
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while managing to be louder than the Intel box cooler as measured by our
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extech 407 750 digital sound level meter
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the second method of analysis was to introduce a noise ceiling
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limiting the maximum RPM of each cooler
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to the speed at which it reaches 45 decibels the same as the stock cooler
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so performing worse than the stock cooler or thermal throttling would
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result in a fail grade for this test
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all of them passed but CPU cooling isn't the be-all and end-all and maintaining
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enough air flow to the components nearby is of critical importance the good news
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is that all of our coolers performed similarly with the c7 only pulling ahead
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when we allowed it to get a little noisy
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leading us finally to the reason presumably that thermaltakes engineers
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thought the engine 27 deserved to exist
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its size it's not the top performer in any
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category but this one at a full centimeter shorter than the nearest
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competitor from Noctua and less than half the height of the top performing
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ar-06 from silverstone the engine 27 is
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compatible with any case that's wide enough to fit a memory stick
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so with form factor as a consideration i'll be giving a few awards here today
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the ar06 gets my big and beautiful award
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for being the best performer if a little top heavy
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the Noctua nhl9i takes home the middle
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child award for being so ugly only its own mother could love it but otherwise a
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solid compact choice and the thermaltake
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engine 27 gets my better than nothing award for working better than i expected
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given its size making it a great option if you don't have anything else that
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will fit so congrats to the winners thanks for watching and good night
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and i've got another award this time for
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one of our lucky viewers we are hooking
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one of you up with the SSD to go pkt
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from angel bird they set us up with these bad boys for ces 2017. you can
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check them out in our gear bag video over here and they gave us an extra one
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with a silk screened LTT super fan like
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logo thing on it and everything it's a 256 gig portable SSD drive it's super
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tiny it's usb 3.1 with either a type a
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or a type c connection to your computer and it can handle up to 560 megabyte per
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second transfer speeds so all you got to do to enter to win is check out the link
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in the video description
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so thanks again for watching guys if you disliked dislike if you liked then like
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if you really liked then maybe check out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link to amazon in the video
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description you can also join our community forum and i'm pretty sure
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there's something else down there right cool t-shirts like the one that i am
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wearing i think that's pretty much it subscribe
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blah blah blah blah right check out our other videos like that one