**The Arctic Passive Aim-4: A Silent and Efficient Cooling Solution?**

Personally, I have always found it challenging to find a useful application for truly passive cooling systems, as I believe that quietest cooling solutions often come with compromises on performance. For example, even the best passive air coolers can't match the effectiveness of active cooling systems like the Noctua NH-D15, which spins at just 700 rpm and is capable of cooling components much more efficiently.

**Testing the Arctic Passive Aim-4**

In this article, I will be testing the Arctic Passive Aim-4, a heatsink designed for passive operation without an active fan. The test system was installed inside three calm data centers with no case ventilation to ensure that we were going for a completely passive setup. Although there is plenty of case ventilation at the bottom and top to permit natural convection, we wanted to see how the Arctic Passive Aim-4 would perform in a highly controlled environment.

**Idle Temperatures**

Looking at thermals first, I observed that the idle temperatures zigzagged between 78°C and 86°C. When we put the system through a run of Cinebench, the temperature quickly rose to 95°C almost immediately and maintained that throughout the duration of the benchmark. This was not as severe as I had anticipated, but it did show me the immense difference between passive and actively cooled heatsink designs.

**Comparison with Active Cooling**

To further illustrate this point, I compared the Arctic Passive Aim-4 with an active fan running at 1,700 rpm. Even with the active fan, the CPU temperature was still unable to reach the desired level of thermal performance. The R5 3600 processor exceeded 90°C, and even then, it was not enough to prevent the system from throttling its own voltage and clock speeds in an effort to maintain stability.

**CPU Throttling**

Looking at the CPU package power as recorded from Hardware Info, we see that the R5 3600 dropped from around 50 watts to just 41 watts. Although this is a significant reduction, it's still far from ideal, especially considering that the system was running a highly demanding benchmark. The CPU voltage also dropped from 1.05V to around 0.9V.

**The Limitations of Passive Cooling**

To further illustrate the limitations of passive cooling, I tested the R5 3400G processor, which produces less heat than the R5 3600 and should have a much better chance at being passively cooled. Unfortunately, even with this more thermally efficient processor, the system struggled to maintain temperatures below 95°C in a gaming application with the Vega graphics pushing even more heat.

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, while the Arctic Passive Aim-4 does show some merit as a cooling solution for low-power systems or home office budget systems that don't require extreme performance, it is not suitable for most gaming PCs. If you want to run a truly silent system, I would recommend using an overkill cooling solution and limiting fan speeds to around 500 rpm. Additionally, no real gaming PC can be truly silent due to the inherent noise from the GPU, power supplies, and other components.

**Additional Notes**

If you guys have any useful applications for the Arctic Passive Aim-4, please let me know in the comments section below. Perhaps there's a home office system that needs to run absurdly quiet and doesn't require extreme performance. I would love to hear about it.

Thanks for watching, and I'll see you all in the next video.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso on Amazon this CPU cooler has over 750 reviews two-thirds of them giving it a five-star rating it's not your typical CPU cooler the heatsink design is optimized for passive cooling and so it doesn't come with a fan so today's objective is to find out how effective this thing actually is just having a bit of fun and we're gonna see if this thing can cool a current gen six core CPU like the horizon 530 600 now spoiler alert even if you're not interested in passive cooling and that's fine this video is sort of explores also what happens when CPUs reach their thermal limit of around 100 degrees see what happens in terms of frequency voltage and also power so again even if you're not interested in passive cooling this video is a bit of fun all right so this is the Alpine Am for passive from Arctic it's a completely passive CPU cooler for AMD's rise in CPUs the TDP rating for this cooler is just 47 watts so not looking too strong on paper if I'm honest even when compared to something like the stock Wraith stealth cooler but judging by some of the user reviews online the results are very mixed for this cooler some say that it can barely call a quad core APU while others claim it can keep an 8 quart 1700 X under control now one thing I will mention straight away is that the packaging for this cooler is literally the bare minimum that you can get away with it's just thin cardboard no foam no interior padding or anything like that in my case the cooler actually suffered some serious damage upon arrival this is what it looks like after I actually bent the outer fin back into shape I doubt that it'll affect our results in any significant way but if you are shipping this cooler internationally it is definitely something to keep in mind now the actual design of a passive CPU cooler is a lot different compared to one that's actively cooled by a fan with high performance CPU coolers from Noctua for example the heatsink design is optimized through a very dense thin array a cold play usually made of copper and as many heat pipes as you can fit with passive CPU coolers natural convection and ambient air flow inside the case is what's going to dissipate the heat this means no high pressure fans driving air through a dense fin stack instead there is ample room between the fins for air to pass through now personally I really struggled to find a useful application for truly passive cooling and silent operation as I've always found the quietest cooling solutions to also be the strongest ones for example a Noctua NHD 15 with fan spinning at just 700 rpm is going to be miles more effective than even the best passive air coolers but noise levels aren't going to be that much louder especially with normal ambient and noise alright so let's start by looking at how the Arctic passive aim-4 handles the r5 at 3,600 I installed the test system inside these three calm da - without any case vent so we are going for a completely passive setup here I will mention though that there is plenty of case ventilation at the bottom and top to permit the natural convection looking at thermals to begin with the idle temperatures zigzag between 78 and 86 degrees C and when we put it through a run of Cinebench the are 536 hundred hits 95 C almost immediately and maintains that throughout the duration of the benchmark I did anticipate that the caller would eventually hit 95 C although I did think that it would soak it up a little bit more instead though it is pretty much instant now proving the immense difference between a passive and actively called heatsink design when we try and call the Arctic aim for passive with an active fan even running at 1,700 rpm it's just not that effective at all the CPU still exceeds 90 degrees C so here's a look at what CPU throttling looks like in full force in an effort to not crash the entire system and destroy the user's critical work the CPU throttles its own voltage and clock speeds to produce less heat and maintain stability of the system over the course of the benchmark we see the r5 3600 drop from around 3.5 gigahertz or call to about 3.3 looking at the CPU package power as recorded from hardware info we do see it dropped from around 50 watts to just 41 watts and do note that it is still declining although it does seem to be leveling off gradually if we ran a longer benchmark let's say a 15 minute blender render for example we'd probably see the drop close to 30 watts or maybe the system would even crash for the safety of the CPU though we're going to avoid running at that hot for so long and lastly for the r5 3600 a look at CPU voltage dropping from 1.0 5 volts to around 0.9 5 volts and again we do see it start to level off there next let's take a look at the r5 3400 G a processor that produces less heat than the r5 3600 and should have a much better chance at being passively called unfortunately the reduced reach that 95 degrees ceiling in a gaming application with the Vega graphics pushing even some more heat there'd be even a lower chance of this process of being called passively the clock speeds here aren't much better than the 3600 the 3400 G can hold 3.9 gigahertz stable for a few seconds but then eventually stabilizes to around 3.2 running CPUs north of 90 degrees C consistently is not something that you want to do if you care about the longevity of your system but as we can see here the hardware can cope the actual cooling potential of the Arctic Am for passive is likely a lot closer to something like the 3200 G so if you want to run a completely passive and silent APU gaming system on that then it's probably possible there potentially for a low-power home office budget system it could also be useful there too beyond that if you really want a silent gaming system you're much better off with an overkill cooling solution and just limiting a fan speeds to say 500 to a thousand rpm you also have to consider that no real gaming PC can actually be truly silent there is going to be audible noise from the GPU contributed by power and co1 and that's going to be a lot more annoying than a couple of fans at 500 rpm so why people buying this passive CPU cooler after the testing in this video I'm not any closer to understanding why I guess people are using it in really low power systems and to their I guess it does have some merit if you don't really care about the film was too much and you just really want a truly silent CPU cooler operation I guess if you guys can find a useful application for the CPU call up perhaps you have a home office system that needs to run absurdly quiet and doesn't have that much power requirements then I will leave it linked down below as always guys a huge thanks for watching and I'll see you all in the next oneso on Amazon this CPU cooler has over 750 reviews two-thirds of them giving it a five-star rating it's not your typical CPU cooler the heatsink design is optimized for passive cooling and so it doesn't come with a fan so today's objective is to find out how effective this thing actually is just having a bit of fun and we're gonna see if this thing can cool a current gen six core CPU like the horizon 530 600 now spoiler alert even if you're not interested in passive cooling and that's fine this video is sort of explores also what happens when CPUs reach their thermal limit of around 100 degrees see what happens in terms of frequency voltage and also power so again even if you're not interested in passive cooling this video is a bit of fun all right so this is the Alpine Am for passive from Arctic it's a completely passive CPU cooler for AMD's rise in CPUs the TDP rating for this cooler is just 47 watts so not looking too strong on paper if I'm honest even when compared to something like the stock Wraith stealth cooler but judging by some of the user reviews online the results are very mixed for this cooler some say that it can barely call a quad core APU while others claim it can keep an 8 quart 1700 X under control now one thing I will mention straight away is that the packaging for this cooler is literally the bare minimum that you can get away with it's just thin cardboard no foam no interior padding or anything like that in my case the cooler actually suffered some serious damage upon arrival this is what it looks like after I actually bent the outer fin back into shape I doubt that it'll affect our results in any significant way but if you are shipping this cooler internationally it is definitely something to keep in mind now the actual design of a passive CPU cooler is a lot different compared to one that's actively cooled by a fan with high performance CPU coolers from Noctua for example the heatsink design is optimized through a very dense thin array a cold play usually made of copper and as many heat pipes as you can fit with passive CPU coolers natural convection and ambient air flow inside the case is what's going to dissipate the heat this means no high pressure fans driving air through a dense fin stack instead there is ample room between the fins for air to pass through now personally I really struggled to find a useful application for truly passive cooling and silent operation as I've always found the quietest cooling solutions to also be the strongest ones for example a Noctua NHD 15 with fan spinning at just 700 rpm is going to be miles more effective than even the best passive air coolers but noise levels aren't going to be that much louder especially with normal ambient and noise alright so let's start by looking at how the Arctic passive aim-4 handles the r5 at 3,600 I installed the test system inside these three calm da - without any case vent so we are going for a completely passive setup here I will mention though that there is plenty of case ventilation at the bottom and top to permit the natural convection looking at thermals to begin with the idle temperatures zigzag between 78 and 86 degrees C and when we put it through a run of Cinebench the are 536 hundred hits 95 C almost immediately and maintains that throughout the duration of the benchmark I did anticipate that the caller would eventually hit 95 C although I did think that it would soak it up a little bit more instead though it is pretty much instant now proving the immense difference between a passive and actively called heatsink design when we try and call the Arctic aim for passive with an active fan even running at 1,700 rpm it's just not that effective at all the CPU still exceeds 90 degrees C so here's a look at what CPU throttling looks like in full force in an effort to not crash the entire system and destroy the user's critical work the CPU throttles its own voltage and clock speeds to produce less heat and maintain stability of the system over the course of the benchmark we see the r5 3600 drop from around 3.5 gigahertz or call to about 3.3 looking at the CPU package power as recorded from hardware info we do see it dropped from around 50 watts to just 41 watts and do note that it is still declining although it does seem to be leveling off gradually if we ran a longer benchmark let's say a 15 minute blender render for example we'd probably see the drop close to 30 watts or maybe the system would even crash for the safety of the CPU though we're going to avoid running at that hot for so long and lastly for the r5 3600 a look at CPU voltage dropping from 1.0 5 volts to around 0.9 5 volts and again we do see it start to level off there next let's take a look at the r5 3400 G a processor that produces less heat than the r5 3600 and should have a much better chance at being passively called unfortunately the reduced reach that 95 degrees ceiling in a gaming application with the Vega graphics pushing even some more heat there'd be even a lower chance of this process of being called passively the clock speeds here aren't much better than the 3600 the 3400 G can hold 3.9 gigahertz stable for a few seconds but then eventually stabilizes to around 3.2 running CPUs north of 90 degrees C consistently is not something that you want to do if you care about the longevity of your system but as we can see here the hardware can cope the actual cooling potential of the Arctic Am for passive is likely a lot closer to something like the 3200 G so if you want to run a completely passive and silent APU gaming system on that then it's probably possible there potentially for a low-power home office budget system it could also be useful there too beyond that if you really want a silent gaming system you're much better off with an overkill cooling solution and just limiting a fan speeds to say 500 to a thousand rpm you also have to consider that no real gaming PC can actually be truly silent there is going to be audible noise from the GPU contributed by power and co1 and that's going to be a lot more annoying than a couple of fans at 500 rpm so why people buying this passive CPU cooler after the testing in this video I'm not any closer to understanding why I guess people are using it in really low power systems and to their I guess it does have some merit if you don't really care about the film was too much and you just really want a truly silent CPU cooler operation I guess if you guys can find a useful application for the CPU call up perhaps you have a home office system that needs to run absurdly quiet and doesn't have that much power requirements then I will leave it linked down below as always guys a huge thanks for watching and I'll see you all in the next one\n"