I Do Naughty Things With Noctua's New Passive CPU Cooler...

**The Great Cooler Conundrum: A Tale of Thermal Triumph**

As we delve into the world of PC building and cooling, I find myself facing a peculiar problem - my cooler is lopsided, making it difficult to rely on gravity alone for decent thermal contact. While it's quite heavy, which may help with weight, I still need to secure it down somehow. The age-old question arises: is there really any other way to do this than zip ties?

As I examine the video memory and VRM, I'm surprised to find less cooling than I expected. I thought there would be little heatsinks and stuff, but alas, it's not quite that simple. I'll have a fan blowing on the PCB, which may help, and I might just thermal pad stick this GT City cooler to it like that - that'll make me feel better, even if it won't actually do anything.

My ingenious solution is to use a microphone stand to hold up the cooler, allowing me to see that it's leaning nicely against it. However, when looking at it down here, I don't think we have the best thermal contact going on. But, I've got quite a lot of thermal paste under there, and back there we have what is definitely the most important part - a GT 1030 heatsink just thermal padded to the VRAM.

So, let's power it up and see if anything interesting happens. Ah, look at that! We've got a video out, and it's slowly starting to put bits of load on the GPU, with temperatures climbing quite rapidly. I have a feeling the moment it loads into the game, it'll just be... sod.

Straight to 90 degrees Celsius, and immediately throttled down to 300 megahertz - uh, yeah, I don't think this is going very well. Yo, if I push it down, look at how quickly the temperatures drop! There's definitely a thermal contact issue here. Uh, I'm gonna have to rethink the mounting.

What I've done now is just kind of wedged a box between the motherboard and the heatsink, and that actually seems to make better contact. So, yeah, hopefully that works - let's try that again with the very high-tech box wedge fix! We've already dropped 20 degrees Celsius from this point last time, which is a good sign.

Oh look at that - it's actually running! It's quickly climbing to 90 degrees Celsius, but it's working again. I feel like our core frequency is slowly creeping down, but we're still getting a very similar frame rate. Like it's not really slowing the gaming performance down much.

I actually kind of want to push down on it again and see how much the temperatures drop. Yo, look at how the temperature drops when you push down on it! Oh, if I can mount this properly, it'll work so well!

Because the moment I let it go, it shoots back up into the 80s. Okay, so I've wedged the box in better and now I'm not touching it, and it's sitting at around 50 degrees Celsius. Ah-ha! That is the result I was looking for.

Hell yeah! Because now it's at the point where the cooler is going to start thermally saturating and then heat up from there because it's actually got proper contact now. Now after ages of driving around, we are still not over 70 degrees Celsius on the GPU, which is pretty crazy!

I didn't expect it to work this well, especially with the like the main fix being just wedging a box under it like that - that was all I needed for proper thermal contact! With that, it brings me to the end of another video. If you liked it, please do like and subscribe to the channel for more videos like this one. And until the next video... bye!