This AIO is ridiculous!
**Alpha Cool's New Ice Bear: A Cooling Beast to Beat Them All**
We recently had the opportunity to test out Alpha Cool's new ice bear, a pre-assembled all-in-one (AIO) liquid cooling solution designed to provide exceptional performance and cooling capabilities. Our testing revealed some impressive results, with temperatures dropping significantly compared to running stock speeds.
**The Curing Process of Thermal Paste**
One of the reasons we saw such low temperatures was due to the curing process of thermal paste. As mentioned in the original text, there is a time it takes for thermal paste to sort of "kind of not really solidify but sort of spread fill in the gaps and cure." This curing process can take some time, but our tests showed that even after 20 minutes of running overclocked at 5 gigahertz on this CPU, the temperatures were still relatively low. We attribute this to the design of the CPU cooler, specifically the IHS (Intel Heat Spreader) and the TIM (Thermal Interface Material) used in the CPU.
**AIO Cooling Performance**
When we ran Far Cry 5, a CPU-intensive game known for its demanding workload, we saw temperatures dropping into the 50s, 60s, and even 70s. The game's level loading times were also significantly reduced, with temperatures bouncing all over the place as expected with a game running at such high clock speeds. This performance is impressive, especially considering that we were testing an overclocked CPU running at 5 gigahertz.
**The Cooling Solution Itself**
So what makes Alpha Cool's ice bear so special? The answer lies in its individual components, which can be purchased independently and assembled into a custom loop. The AIO block itself is made of the same material as other aftermarket blocks on the market, with no unique features or innovations that set it apart from others. However, the pre-assembled package comes with a warranty and is designed to make installation easy and hassle-free.
**Drawbacks and Limitations**
While Alpha Cool's ice bear performed exceptionally well in our testing, there are two notable drawbacks to consider. Firstly, the price tag of approximately $280 is steep, equivalent to what these individual components would cost separately. Secondly, the size of the cooler makes it difficult to fit into smaller cases, with a width greater than 140mm and a length exceeding 200mm.
**Conclusion**
In conclusion, Alpha Cool's new ice bear is an impressive AIO cooling solution that can beat out even the best aftermarket solutions on the market. While there are some drawbacks to consider, such as the price tag and limited case compatibility, the performance benefits make it well worth considering for those looking to upgrade their cooling setup. We recommend checking out the dimensions of your case before purchasing this cooler, but overall, we're impressed with what Alpha Cool has brought to the table.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enyou know it's a beefy cooler when you can drum on the box you know what guys I got new merch it's available now crowd me calm /jc sense we got zip up hoodies we got tri-blend we got a new logo I digress since 2012 it's at the wrist logo you guys been asking for that anyway all right guys live it up we can all kinda stuff zip up hoodies beanies polos don't take my word for it cuz obviously I can't do this ad so just look in the description below and you guys will find the link Thanks all right so if we take a look inside here well okay so here's the deal there should be nothing to assemble on this here are the mounting brackets and stuff it's of course supports all of your standard sockets 2011 2060 6 a.m. 3 a.m. 4 TR 4 maybe we'll check this thing is gargantuan holy crap now this isn't a I oh it's fully assembled it is expandable this is based on a 280 millimeter radiator design from alpha cool we've got this nice honeycomb sort of a grill protection on here so you don't smash your fins you can see here we've also got in collaboration all of my finger prints or something on that holy crap what to clean that off be quiet fans are actually used in here or as they like to call them ice vind the ice bin fans in here making z-a I moved through with all of these static pressures needed to get Ozzy maximum cooling so it has these quick disconnects right here that I've never actually use how do you use these guys so yeah they're not really quick disconnects they're just disconnects and nonetheless and you lose a couple of drops of water as you just saw right there but that makes this expandable expandability is kind of key because these are off the shelf water cooling parts it is a custom loop as an AI oh now no they are not the first to do this at least the ice bear is not a new concept EK did something similar to this and i think to be fair alpha cool slash aqua tuning tuning did something quite a while ago as well but be predator 240 and 360 which we took a look look at a while back was also the same concept of off-the-shelf parts put together as an AI Oh this water pulled up in there that is expandable and allows you to add things like graphics cards or other radiators or whatever may be the case these are two very different approaches so the predator was sort of a failure and if you guys remember that I did a video about it ek had to end up warranting a lot of systems because they leaked there was a problem with the block or something like that and so it was sort of reborn as the Phoenix Phoenix came out in 2017 using pretty much a lot of the same parts as the predator but it was an upgraded block design and whatnot but my problem with the predator and I don't know what this persisted on the Phoenix was they used what looked like a DD C on the end of the radiator tank but it wasn't a true DD C the the pump internals were different they were lesser quality than a DD C we found that out when I built this test rig because what I did you guys can go back and watch this video you'd have to dig it up I'm not gonna put the link but you can find when I built this test rig the pump that's down here is actually out of a predator I didn't have a DD C but I had this top from alpha cool this is an alpha cool unit right here that's been running now for like three or four years in this in this setup and the pump is actually out of a predator and that's when I found like wow it didn't work in here because the housing was slightly different so that's one of the things that kind of Concerned me was they were able to cut costs when making an AI oh like that by using lesser great parts now alpha cool is using a d5 style pump which we will take a look at it's the 7 or the VPP 755 v3 not to be confused with the older 755 or VPP 755 which was actually kind of garbage this is a much better redesigned redesigned PCB everything about it is different which they say is making the reliability of it much much better so let's do this let's go ahead and open it up before we actually get it on to our test rig to see how it performs on our 8700 k oh I forgot to mention - these are G quarter threaded fittings right here so against all of my better judgment I've decided I'm just going to keep this assembly there we go so there it is this is the VPP 755 V 3 pump which is very much a d5 style pump it is a pee um you can see how these are just drop in be to be quiet fans believe these are silent wings yeah silent wings three okay so it's all hooked up here the retention system pretty straightforward it's a back plate with the pass-through and blah blah read the instructions for your particular mounting style obviously with AMD and all that it's a little bit different for each socket but we found out with the LEDs for so I've got the actual pump hooked up to a different power supply so I can turn it on independently and actually show you what the pump it sounds like because the pump can make a sound that's sometimes very intrusive like DD CS are very high-pitched very loud usually D fives are usually a lot less audible but they make a hum so this is what this one sounds like and pay attention to the window right here there's a blue LED in there that turns on member that strip that we saw that you can actually see your water level in there so that's the pump right there at full speed like I think my mic that close to for you to hear it but as you can see the blue LED lights up your reservoir that's in there so you can keep an eye on your water levels and when you're filling it though it'll make a lot easier you know to fill it like this this is kind of the orientation it wouldn't be intended to go in in a case usually at the top biggest issue you're gonna have with this though before we get into the temperature test is fitting this behemoth bo-hee myth behemoth we went through this before didn't we I feel like we've done this behemoth so obviously it's the width of a two hundred and eighty millimeter radiator so it's 140 millimeter fans wide but the extra width of the chassis built around it I want to see if it'll fit in the r6 that's kind of where I think I might end up using this but with my own fittings and reservoir or not reservoir but blocking stuff to match the gold build because I think this matches my solution of trying to get something that fits in there and looks decent and I can paint all these external pieces gold to make it match because gold you like gold around here Oh should with the gold bill but obviously we're here to do a performance test so I'm gonna go ahead and well turn on power to the system usually power is important okay so we're installed and we're gonna kind of overclock this a little bit more but I want to kind of just start with some of the basics so all cores are synced to four point seven which is the turbo clock but on the ASUS motherboards if you enable multi core enhancement and then think cores you get four point seven on all of them one point three five volts is where we are in the CPU normally I would not recommend going any higher than that for 24/7 because a lot of coolers have a problem keeping that cool now right now we're gonna do a Cinebench run first but then we're gonna overclock it till it's no longer stable I'm gonna try and get 5 gigahertz out of this and then we're gonna run a 264 for 30 minutes so right now our package is idling at 29 C and our cores are in the mid to upper-20s which is only a few degrees above ambient right now it's about 68 degrees Celsius or Celsius what it is burning hot in this room going into a little diatribe now about people asking me J why do you talk about temperatures in Fahrenheit we talk about ambient then you talk about Celsius and PC I don't speak Celsius but I understand it for computers because I know the ranges thing should be in but I don't know what like our ambient temp is because I'm sorry that our thermostats in America want to be different anyway with that said about 68 Fahrenheit you can do your own conversion and our system is running like I said in these high 20s when it comes to Celsius now if we run Cinebench which is a navy X instruction set boom spikes up to 66 on the package low to mid-60s on the core all the different cores and it's just solid look at that they're not even fluctuating that much okay so we found our theoretical max right here just in terms of temperatures and voltage and all of that okay so here's what we got we got five point two forty five point two gigahertz right now as you can see right there using Hardware monitor and the voltage to achieve that is more than I would ever recommend on any a i/o or help even a custom loop one point four on the V chord I hit rhymes I'm a rapper now but the question is is it gonna survive a Cinebench run let's see cores right here net packages in the mid-90s 94 93 95 the fact is we passed at 5.2 by just moving voltage slider to 1.4 we were crashing at one point three eight so I don't think we can get away with any less but here's the thing 95 97 we're still not at t.j.maxx this chip is designed to be able to run all day technically at 104 C at 105 it starts the throttle I don't think a 264 is going to I think I think it's gonna crash to be honest so what I'm gonna do right now is I'm going to back it back down to five gigahertz put the voltage back down to something reasonable that you would use on day to day and see how this cooler does okay so five gigahertz at one point to eight volts is what we settled on temperature-wise as you can see freaking amazing 74 on the package high 60s mid 70s on the cores alright 8a sixty-four incoming alright so here's what it looks like after nineteen minutes interestingly we got you know the curve if you draw a medium line through there it kind of goes up a little right there and then sort of comes back down the lows got lower and the highs you can see right here on this line didn't really go any higher than the highest so what we think might have been happening here as this curve is sort of trending downwards slightly if you think the thermal pace might have been setting in better because we just installed it and went and it takes time for thermal paste to sort of kind of not really solidify but sort of spread fill in the gaps and cure there is a curing process that happens with thermal paste and we think that it's curing and that's why we're seeing the lows go down right there but if we go over here and we stop the test you can see we did hit ninety eighty nine ninety 89 89 83 but our averages later averages 81-71 7377 one this is the average is more important than the maximum here because this could have been those momentary spikes where when you're testing cache and you're testing FPU like we literally were asking extreme here or eight extreme to do an extreme cooling test we asked it to just stress the CPU as high as you possibly could but we passed nearly 20 minutes at 5 gigahertz at one point to eight volts with a temperature that is more than reasonable I mean the averages were absolutely phenomenal if you back this down to stock speeds then it stays in the 50s and the 60s we want to see how it does in games though obviously because a iOS and gaming computers are very commonplace now so if we look we're using far cry 5 which is known to be pretty CPU intensive and what the level loading we're seeing 70 to 60 to 57 so inside the actual rendered game we're on the helicopter ride right now into wherever this cult country is and you can see we are still sitting in the 60s 40s 30s it's bouncing all over the place as you would expect with a game now running over clocked at 5 gigahertz on this on just an AI oh yeah obviously you could get away with this running overclocked while gaming and and the funny thing is even when we had this test running for 20 minutes the air that was coming through the radiator and yes we're sitting in an open environment because we want the radio to be the only thing controlling temps not some sort of case flow is the fact that the air coming through here was always cold it was always ambient feeling so that means that the temperatures we were seeing were straight-up package limited in terms of the IHS design and the Tim used in the CPU on the 8700 K is what was keeping us from getting any cooler whereas there was very little saturation so yeah the ice bear it's got a funny name but it is definitely the beefiest AI oh I've taken a look at yet and again it's not truly an AI oh it is off the shelf water cooling parts that you could go and buy independently and make a custom loop out of that they've just already all assembled it for you there's nothing different about this xpx block there's nothing different about the radiator that's in here or the silent wings fans are in here or the the 7pp or whatever the VPP 755 v3 pump that's in it you could buy all these independently and make your own custom loop they just did it for you and it's preassembled comes with a warranty and you don't have to worry about screwing anything up in your system expandable and obviously performs really well so I still think I might try and see if this fits in my r5 or our six case and use this instead of trying to piece something together because I could paint this gold and or even leave the plastic part like this and paint the shrouds gold and it would match and it would definitely make my life easier and give you that all figured out all right guys we're gonna go tell us what you think about this I think the only drawback to it quite honestly is well there's two things the price it's about 280 US dollars equivalent to approximately what these particular parts independently would cost you for the fittings the pump the reservoir the radiator block 2 being and all that the fans it's pretty much the sum of its parts but the other thing is going to be its size it is definitely large it is wider than 140 fans and is certainly longer than a two hundred eighty millimeter radiator because you have the pump and the reservoir up in this section so there's not a whole lot of cases they're gonna be able to fit this up top some might be able to fit it up front but you're definitely gonna want to look at the dimensions of your case to figure out whether or not it can fit the dimensions of this cooler so sign up in the comments below what you think about alpha cools new ice bear and yeah like I said this is an a IO that can beat up your a IO you know you have this bumper stickers that says my student beat up your honor student my cooler can beat up your cooler so you can I bite cut they aint bet bet a helmet a helmetyou know it's a beefy cooler when you can drum on the box you know what guys I got new merch it's available now crowd me calm /jc sense we got zip up hoodies we got tri-blend we got a new logo I digress since 2012 it's at the wrist logo you guys been asking for that anyway all right guys live it up we can all kinda stuff zip up hoodies beanies polos don't take my word for it cuz obviously I can't do this ad so just look in the description below and you guys will find the link Thanks all right so if we take a look inside here well okay so here's the deal there should be nothing to assemble on this here are the mounting brackets and stuff it's of course supports all of your standard sockets 2011 2060 6 a.m. 3 a.m. 4 TR 4 maybe we'll check this thing is gargantuan holy crap now this isn't a I oh it's fully assembled it is expandable this is based on a 280 millimeter radiator design from alpha cool we've got this nice honeycomb sort of a grill protection on here so you don't smash your fins you can see here we've also got in collaboration all of my finger prints or something on that holy crap what to clean that off be quiet fans are actually used in here or as they like to call them ice vind the ice bin fans in here making z-a I moved through with all of these static pressures needed to get Ozzy maximum cooling so it has these quick disconnects right here that I've never actually use how do you use these guys so yeah they're not really quick disconnects they're just disconnects and nonetheless and you lose a couple of drops of water as you just saw right there but that makes this expandable expandability is kind of key because these are off the shelf water cooling parts it is a custom loop as an AI oh now no they are not the first to do this at least the ice bear is not a new concept EK did something similar to this and i think to be fair alpha cool slash aqua tuning tuning did something quite a while ago as well but be predator 240 and 360 which we took a look look at a while back was also the same concept of off-the-shelf parts put together as an AI Oh this water pulled up in there that is expandable and allows you to add things like graphics cards or other radiators or whatever may be the case these are two very different approaches so the predator was sort of a failure and if you guys remember that I did a video about it ek had to end up warranting a lot of systems because they leaked there was a problem with the block or something like that and so it was sort of reborn as the Phoenix Phoenix came out in 2017 using pretty much a lot of the same parts as the predator but it was an upgraded block design and whatnot but my problem with the predator and I don't know what this persisted on the Phoenix was they used what looked like a DD C on the end of the radiator tank but it wasn't a true DD C the the pump internals were different they were lesser quality than a DD C we found that out when I built this test rig because what I did you guys can go back and watch this video you'd have to dig it up I'm not gonna put the link but you can find when I built this test rig the pump that's down here is actually out of a predator I didn't have a DD C but I had this top from alpha cool this is an alpha cool unit right here that's been running now for like three or four years in this in this setup and the pump is actually out of a predator and that's when I found like wow it didn't work in here because the housing was slightly different so that's one of the things that kind of Concerned me was they were able to cut costs when making an AI oh like that by using lesser great parts now alpha cool is using a d5 style pump which we will take a look at it's the 7 or the VPP 755 v3 not to be confused with the older 755 or VPP 755 which was actually kind of garbage this is a much better redesigned redesigned PCB everything about it is different which they say is making the reliability of it much much better so let's do this let's go ahead and open it up before we actually get it on to our test rig to see how it performs on our 8700 k oh I forgot to mention - these are G quarter threaded fittings right here so against all of my better judgment I've decided I'm just going to keep this assembly there we go so there it is this is the VPP 755 V 3 pump which is very much a d5 style pump it is a pee um you can see how these are just drop in be to be quiet fans believe these are silent wings yeah silent wings three okay so it's all hooked up here the retention system pretty straightforward it's a back plate with the pass-through and blah blah read the instructions for your particular mounting style obviously with AMD and all that it's a little bit different for each socket but we found out with the LEDs for so I've got the actual pump hooked up to a different power supply so I can turn it on independently and actually show you what the pump it sounds like because the pump can make a sound that's sometimes very intrusive like DD CS are very high-pitched very loud usually D fives are usually a lot less audible but they make a hum so this is what this one sounds like and pay attention to the window right here there's a blue LED in there that turns on member that strip that we saw that you can actually see your water level in there so that's the pump right there at full speed like I think my mic that close to for you to hear it but as you can see the blue LED lights up your reservoir that's in there so you can keep an eye on your water levels and when you're filling it though it'll make a lot easier you know to fill it like this this is kind of the orientation it wouldn't be intended to go in in a case usually at the top biggest issue you're gonna have with this though before we get into the temperature test is fitting this behemoth bo-hee myth behemoth we went through this before didn't we I feel like we've done this behemoth so obviously it's the width of a two hundred and eighty millimeter radiator so it's 140 millimeter fans wide but the extra width of the chassis built around it I want to see if it'll fit in the r6 that's kind of where I think I might end up using this but with my own fittings and reservoir or not reservoir but blocking stuff to match the gold build because I think this matches my solution of trying to get something that fits in there and looks decent and I can paint all these external pieces gold to make it match because gold you like gold around here Oh should with the gold bill but obviously we're here to do a performance test so I'm gonna go ahead and well turn on power to the system usually power is important okay so we're installed and we're gonna kind of overclock this a little bit more but I want to kind of just start with some of the basics so all cores are synced to four point seven which is the turbo clock but on the ASUS motherboards if you enable multi core enhancement and then think cores you get four point seven on all of them one point three five volts is where we are in the CPU normally I would not recommend going any higher than that for 24/7 because a lot of coolers have a problem keeping that cool now right now we're gonna do a Cinebench run first but then we're gonna overclock it till it's no longer stable I'm gonna try and get 5 gigahertz out of this and then we're gonna run a 264 for 30 minutes so right now our package is idling at 29 C and our cores are in the mid to upper-20s which is only a few degrees above ambient right now it's about 68 degrees Celsius or Celsius what it is burning hot in this room going into a little diatribe now about people asking me J why do you talk about temperatures in Fahrenheit we talk about ambient then you talk about Celsius and PC I don't speak Celsius but I understand it for computers because I know the ranges thing should be in but I don't know what like our ambient temp is because I'm sorry that our thermostats in America want to be different anyway with that said about 68 Fahrenheit you can do your own conversion and our system is running like I said in these high 20s when it comes to Celsius now if we run Cinebench which is a navy X instruction set boom spikes up to 66 on the package low to mid-60s on the core all the different cores and it's just solid look at that they're not even fluctuating that much okay so we found our theoretical max right here just in terms of temperatures and voltage and all of that okay so here's what we got we got five point two forty five point two gigahertz right now as you can see right there using Hardware monitor and the voltage to achieve that is more than I would ever recommend on any a i/o or help even a custom loop one point four on the V chord I hit rhymes I'm a rapper now but the question is is it gonna survive a Cinebench run let's see cores right here net packages in the mid-90s 94 93 95 the fact is we passed at 5.2 by just moving voltage slider to 1.4 we were crashing at one point three eight so I don't think we can get away with any less but here's the thing 95 97 we're still not at t.j.maxx this chip is designed to be able to run all day technically at 104 C at 105 it starts the throttle I don't think a 264 is going to I think I think it's gonna crash to be honest so what I'm gonna do right now is I'm going to back it back down to five gigahertz put the voltage back down to something reasonable that you would use on day to day and see how this cooler does okay so five gigahertz at one point to eight volts is what we settled on temperature-wise as you can see freaking amazing 74 on the package high 60s mid 70s on the cores alright 8a sixty-four incoming alright so here's what it looks like after nineteen minutes interestingly we got you know the curve if you draw a medium line through there it kind of goes up a little right there and then sort of comes back down the lows got lower and the highs you can see right here on this line didn't really go any higher than the highest so what we think might have been happening here as this curve is sort of trending downwards slightly if you think the thermal pace might have been setting in better because we just installed it and went and it takes time for thermal paste to sort of kind of not really solidify but sort of spread fill in the gaps and cure there is a curing process that happens with thermal paste and we think that it's curing and that's why we're seeing the lows go down right there but if we go over here and we stop the test you can see we did hit ninety eighty nine ninety 89 89 83 but our averages later averages 81-71 7377 one this is the average is more important than the maximum here because this could have been those momentary spikes where when you're testing cache and you're testing FPU like we literally were asking extreme here or eight extreme to do an extreme cooling test we asked it to just stress the CPU as high as you possibly could but we passed nearly 20 minutes at 5 gigahertz at one point to eight volts with a temperature that is more than reasonable I mean the averages were absolutely phenomenal if you back this down to stock speeds then it stays in the 50s and the 60s we want to see how it does in games though obviously because a iOS and gaming computers are very commonplace now so if we look we're using far cry 5 which is known to be pretty CPU intensive and what the level loading we're seeing 70 to 60 to 57 so inside the actual rendered game we're on the helicopter ride right now into wherever this cult country is and you can see we are still sitting in the 60s 40s 30s it's bouncing all over the place as you would expect with a game now running over clocked at 5 gigahertz on this on just an AI oh yeah obviously you could get away with this running overclocked while gaming and and the funny thing is even when we had this test running for 20 minutes the air that was coming through the radiator and yes we're sitting in an open environment because we want the radio to be the only thing controlling temps not some sort of case flow is the fact that the air coming through here was always cold it was always ambient feeling so that means that the temperatures we were seeing were straight-up package limited in terms of the IHS design and the Tim used in the CPU on the 8700 K is what was keeping us from getting any cooler whereas there was very little saturation so yeah the ice bear it's got a funny name but it is definitely the beefiest AI oh I've taken a look at yet and again it's not truly an AI oh it is off the shelf water cooling parts that you could go and buy independently and make a custom loop out of that they've just already all assembled it for you there's nothing different about this xpx block there's nothing different about the radiator that's in here or the silent wings fans are in here or the the 7pp or whatever the VPP 755 v3 pump that's in it you could buy all these independently and make your own custom loop they just did it for you and it's preassembled comes with a warranty and you don't have to worry about screwing anything up in your system expandable and obviously performs really well so I still think I might try and see if this fits in my r5 or our six case and use this instead of trying to piece something together because I could paint this gold and or even leave the plastic part like this and paint the shrouds gold and it would match and it would definitely make my life easier and give you that all figured out all right guys we're gonna go tell us what you think about this I think the only drawback to it quite honestly is well there's two things the price it's about 280 US dollars equivalent to approximately what these particular parts independently would cost you for the fittings the pump the reservoir the radiator block 2 being and all that the fans it's pretty much the sum of its parts but the other thing is going to be its size it is definitely large it is wider than 140 fans and is certainly longer than a two hundred eighty millimeter radiator because you have the pump and the reservoir up in this section so there's not a whole lot of cases they're gonna be able to fit this up top some might be able to fit it up front but you're definitely gonna want to look at the dimensions of your case to figure out whether or not it can fit the dimensions of this cooler so sign up in the comments below what you think about alpha cools new ice bear and yeah like I said this is an a IO that can beat up your a IO you know you have this bumper stickers that says my student beat up your honor student my cooler can beat up your cooler so you can I bite cut they aint bet bet a helmet a helmet\n"