Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “DON’T Water Cool Your PC! – IceGiant Copper Prototype”.
Yeah, oh my god, if you want to tame the hottest gaming cpus, the marketing says that you want water, cooling but i’ma. Let you in on a little secret. That’S not actually true. This is a thermosyphon and it is not your grandma’s air cooler.
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Is that intel’s top of the line? Gaming cpu, the core i9 12 900k runs so hot. That even the legendary nhd15, the king of air coolers can’t keep up with it. I mean you could turn off performance mode or multi-core enhancement, but at that point, why did you pay 600 us dollars for a processor only to leave performance on the table? Oh, and did i mention you’ll, still be maxing out at 95 degrees on an open-air test bench. That means you’re, probably thermal throttling. The second you close your side panel water cooling, has advanced to help us tackle these ever hotter cpus in a number of ways: stronger pumps, more efficient, cold plate, designs, larger radiators and by mounting them to the intake of a case. We get to use the coolest air available to tackle the hottest parts of our machines, but compared to traditional heat sinks.
Even all-in-one water coolers like this one, are more challenging to install expensive and they have more points of failure. Oh rate, leaks are rare these days, but a failed pump could easily put you out of commission for a while. The good news is that, while water cooling has been stealing all the headlines, air cooling has been quietly improving in the background ice giant’s first product.
The pro siphon elite blew us away by outperforming both this guy and 240 millimeter aio liquid coolers. It works by using heat from the cpu to boil fluid inside the evaporator here that vapor makes its way to the condenser. This large finned heatsink array up here, where it cools liquefies and then falls back down to the evaporator, creating a cooling loop with no moving parts. The principle is actually similar to a heat pipe but almost simpler in a way, because the liquid is moved back to the heat source by gravity rather than by capillary. Action.
Thermosyphons must be mounted in the correct orientation, but the upside is that they are not nearly as easily overwhelmed by a strong heat source enough about the old, though where’d it go. Oh here it is: let’s talk about: what’s new ice giant just sent over a prototype? Thermosyphon elite, with some really exciting upgrades, the most obvious. One is right here: goodbye, aluminum, hello, copper. That was a good idea. Someone suggest that to them could be anyway.
This was done to improve heat conduction from the cpu into the thermosyphon, but even more important are the boiling enhancements that they’ve made to the evaporator. They’Ve completely changed the layout of the fins inside here to create more surface area and they’ve added tiny pieces of sintered. Copper there as well.
Not only do these also create more surface area for nucleation sites, but these particles act as a wick to help distribute condensed liquid on the return trip sounds pretty cool, but i wouldn’t recommend buying one and certainly wouldn’t recommend investing in ice giant. Apparently is undergoing a funding round right now, until i have validated it for myself, so we grabbed this a high-end test bench our frame from thermal grizzly more on that later, and we slapped on all of our coolers testing them at around the same noise levels of A maxed out, though, still very quiet and hd15. That’S roughly 47 decibels. Our og aluminum pro siphon elite was unfortunately the only cooler to thermal throttle in our 2000 sample classroom blender test disqualifying it outright. But, as you can see here, our copper unit comes out. On top beading knocked to us best by a whopping 5 degrees, it was also the only cooler in our test that brought our 12 900k below 90 degrees under load. Admittedly, this is on an open test bench where it doesn’t have to contend with heat from other components swirling around it, but it’s still impressive.
However, cranking things up a notch by enabling performance mode on our motherboard caused our cpu to draw another 20 to 30 watts, resulting in a fail result for all three of our coolers. To be fair, 250 watts is a lot of power, and if you want that kind of performance, it’s fair to say that you might have to make some sacrifices, namely noise. In an attempt to tame the beast, we unlocked our ekaio and our copper prototype, allowing their fans to ramp up to around 2100 rpm, and then we re-ran our tests in both default and performance mode.
It cost us about 10 decibels in both cases, but at intel’s stock power limit the copper prototype, thermosyphon pulled ahead even further with a maximum package temperature of just 85 degrees celsius, that’s downright reasonable. Unfortunately, it’s still thermal throttled in performance mode, but, as our friend slave pointed out to us performance mode is a pretty ham-fisted way of optimizing. Your cpu by tuning the 12900k operating voltage load line calibration and turbo ratios. He managed to use the extra thermal headroom of the copper prototype to squeeze out even better performance than performance mode and without any thermal throttling. Now full disclosure splave is invested as a partner with ice giant, but that also kind of speaks volumes. Doesn’T it if it’s good enough for him, it’s probably good enough for me, and so is our new short circuit hoodie check it out at lttstore.com conversation here, though, copper thermal siphon, very legal and very cool.
Hopefully, it makes it to market without costing too much more than the old aluminum one, but i feel like there’s an elephant in the room. What is going on with computer chips right now amd is jacking up their power targets for am5 nvidia is rumored to be hitting 600 to 800 watts on their upcoming 4000 series, and intel is already shipping consumer products that are basically uncoolable unless you resort to this. But you just cooled it linus with that you might say well yeah, but i used a prototype cooler on an open test bench and i did a bunch of other stuff: that’s not reasonable for the average consumer. Okay.
First up i’m using top of the line thermal grizzly thermal paste and second, i have likely voided the warranty on both my motherboard and my cpu by installing thermal grizzly’s cpu contact frame. That thing i alluded to before. In a nutshell, it’s a modification to the lga 1700 socket that ensures even retention pressure on the cpu for better thermal contact, we’d like to do a dedicated video on it at some point. But the short version is that without it, we’d likely be running five or so degrees hotter during all of our tests.
That means thermal throttling on the 12900k right out of the box, but hold on linus. You might say there are better water coolers out there. That surely would handle the 12 900k without any of this nonsense. Everyone knows that 240 millimeter rads like this one, are weak sauce now.
Well to that i would respond. A no one says weak sauce anymore, come on and b. We actually pulled out an ek, aio elite 360 for our comparison as well and found that it performed no better than our thermal siphon a little worse. Actually, i’ve never seen that before i tried to pull it off the thing, but instead of unplugging it ripped right out of the fan.
Do you need to run any more tests with this? I don’t think so, but yeah we can fix it. I now all of this modification nonsense might be a price that you’re willing to pay. But frankly, i’m getting kind of sick of hardware manufacturers redlining their gear out of the box to the point where we’re forced to buy and install exotic modifications just to get the performance that we saw in a review i mean intel can hide behind their default turbo. Behavior, which does consume a lot less power, but the truth is that all performance mode is doing is allowing these unlocked 12 series chips to turbo at around 240 watts forever, which is a behavior that intel enables one behavior, i’m okay with by the way, is signing Up at floatplane.com for exclusive videos and behind the scenes, like the extended cut of our call me chris collab back to until 12th. Gen, though you shouldn’t, have to spend an extra several hundred dollars just to keep your 600 cpu at a reasonable temperature under load. But since you do, it’s still too early to say how much the copper thermosyphon will cost, but the original was around 170 so expecting a small increase from there. It’S actually looking like a pretty darn good solution, but it’s not perfect. Ram clearance is pretty good, but it’s going to cover up any rgb modules you might have, and you can forget about installing this over top of corsair dominator style dimms.
We’Ve also complained to their team about their smooth standoffs and they’re, considering adding some knurling or striping to help install or remove stuck bits. Now that motherboards are getting so crowded around the cpu socket area, another annoyance we really had to screw this thing down tight to ensure good contact, that’s even with the updated bracket and with the frame, though it’s a pretty easy to use, mounting solution. Otherwise and finally, we’re hoping that the teammate ice giant can sneak, i don’t know what to call it, but a bit more tolerance for user error into the design before it starts shipping worldwide. It can be a little bit finicky to get a perfect mount on that.
Subject, i would strongly recommend against shipping your system with one of these already installed in it. That is a key benefit of aio liquid coolers that can’t be ignored not nearly as much weight on the socket. You know what else you can’t ignore our sponsor war thunder war thunder is a free to play online military vehicle, combat game available on windows, mac linux, ps4, ps5, xbox, one xbox series x, all with crossplay.
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