**The Cooler Master Cooling Test Lab: Unveiling the Science Behind Air Coolers**

This is Windows XP, a machine worth $75,000, and we're here to show you why it's an ideal setup for testing air coolers. The computer's reliability is already established, so there's no need to change the software. Instead, we'll focus on the cooler itself.

The machine's design features a fan blowing air through a chamber, which is then guided through a hose at the front of the system. However, in this setup, we've decided to mount a fan to the front of the chamber, allowing for more control over airflow and pressure measurements. By mirroring the fan on the other side of the chamber with another blower fan, we can ensure consistent testing results without compromising the performance of the cooler.

This setup enables us to test the cooler under various conditions, including different voltages and PWM signals. The software used in this lab also allows for generating a PQ graph, which is useful for analyzing the performance of air coolers. We've seen this type of testing done before, but it's essential to understand the science behind it.

One of the challenges of cooler testing is accurately measuring temperature variations. In our tests, we've found that even small differences in measurement accuracy can lead to inaccurate results. To address this issue, we look for signs of variance in our measurements. If two coolers are only differing by a few degrees Celsius, it's likely that they're essentially the same.

The TDP (Thermal Design Power) number is another important aspect to consider when evaluating air coolers. While manufacturers often list a specific TDP rating on their products, it's essential to understand that different companies use different formulas and assumptions to calculate this value. As a result, it can be difficult to compare the performance of coolers from different manufacturers.

In our tests, we've used the Cooler Master Cooling Test Lab to evaluate various air coolers. This lab setup allows us to push the limits of airflow and pressure measurements, ensuring that we're getting an accurate picture of each cooler's performance. We'll continue to refine this process and explore new methods for testing air coolers.

**The Importance of Accurate Testing**

Accurate testing is crucial when evaluating air coolers. Inaccurate results can lead to misleading conclusions about a cooler's performance, which can be detrimental to both manufacturers and consumers. By using a well-designed test lab like the Cooler Master Cooling Test Lab, we can ensure that our measurements are precise and reliable.

We've noticed that some reviewers use inaccurate tests, which can result in wildly varying results between different coolers. However, by using a more accurate testing method, we can identify patterns and trends in cooler performance that might not be apparent otherwise.

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, the Cooler Master Cooling Test Lab is an essential tool for evaluating air coolers. By understanding the science behind air cooling, manufacturers can design better coolers that meet the needs of consumers. As researchers, we continue to refine our testing methods and explore new ways to push the limits of airflow and pressure measurements.

For consumers, accurate testing results are crucial when choosing a cooler. By knowing what to look for in a test, you can make informed decisions about which cooler to purchase and ensure that it meets your performance needs. As always, we appreciate your support, and we'll continue to bring you the latest news and research on air coolers.

**Support Our Work**

If you'd like to support our work, consider visiting our Patreon page or checking out Nexus, a leading retailer of computer hardware components. We also have a store where you can purchase merchandise, including this shirt – although, I won't be wearing it today due to excessive sweating!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everyone we're in Hawaii Joe and China looking at one of cooler masters testing facilities so we've already seen some other stuff I don't have it on the channel yet but we're looking at today they're the two aspects I really want to address here one of them is basically all cooler reviews are flawed and this is something that we talk about in our cooler reviews they're flawed to an extent we'll go over why here this this equipment more or less demonstrates it and then also TDP what we're talking a bit about both of those subjects before that this video is brought to you by the gigabyte r-tx 2070 gaming OC now available in a matte white model to match the emergence of white PC cases the RT X 2070 gaming OC is a three fan cooling solution and four composite heat pipes on Nvidia's newest Orion GPU and ships with a pre overclock of 1740 megahertz in OC mode or 1725 in gaming mode RGB fusion is also available for the LED enthusiast learn more at the link in the description below I guess we'll start with this right now there's a hyper 212 hooked up behind me here so this is set up and what this chamber is doing is pulling an air through the bottom so there's actually a giant blower fan here and the goal of this test I'll walk through more of the specifics in a second is to look at the thermal performance so it's not a obviously perfectly real world scenario so you're not getting the real-world performance that would be affected by for example the Tim between the IHS and the die so that's not accounted for here but the point of doing something like this which is the same reason we do sort of really controlled tests in our own lab is so that you can get consistent numbers where you can compare one device to the next so if coolermaster works on another products may be following the 212 then they have some data they can compare to you from previously so that there's there's ups and downs to it there's some real-world tests and we'll show it to but the way this works is looking at some of the thermal numbers that are on the screen here from a previous test run you can see that ambient temperatures here it's hooked up to a k-type thermocouple will show momentarily so ambient temperature you have the operating temperature of the hot plate there's a thermocouple sandwiched between the hot plate and the the cold plate of the cooler and there's actually a milled out hole for that thermocouple to go into which another thing we've talked on the past Intel's T TVs do similar things to this but it allows you to get some more direct temperature readings so there's no CPU required here which is actually really good because and this is why cooler reviews are often pretty flawed because once you introduce a motherboard and a CPU you're introducing potentially dozens of different voltages most of them on auto because people don't really control properly and that changes the performance every time so every time you boot cycle if there's a reset somewhere in BIOS then it could change the the voltages to really small points your fractions of a volt which will impact the results but also there's impact from things like for example past application or whatever but anyway so this machine we have the readout is fifty one point three five for the current test the hyper 212 and all the different readings here and we can show this more in b-roll but all the readings here give things like the temperature of I think we have ambient I think we have water temperature or something like that so there's actually a tank here that's used for controlling humidity levels and this is a water tank and it's hooked up so that the humidity inside of the chamber can be more or less simulated to the humidity inside of a room that might be under target testing depending on what kind of humidity Coolermaster wants to test for but so that can be controlled and also another reason that cooler reviews can be flawed because we really we don't have any control over this without a thermal chamber so it's only so much you can do in a review to where you get down to maybe a three degree difference and at the end of the day a three degree difference could be past application it could be torque on the socket it could be humidity it could be ambient temperature so all these things are why if you're really making the products you need real testing equipment like this and the way this works is like I said there's a blower fan the bottom it pulls the air in and the air enters in on this side of this particular chamber comes through goes through some flow straighteners which are just big mesh wire is sort of in the middle of the chamber we have some of this at home too for our own airflow testing so it goes through flow straighteners which make sure that the air doesn't diffuse and just go all over the chamber and as it goes through the flow is straight it eventually gets through all the way over here and as you can see there are a couple of pressure sensors hooked up and these are tracked via software as well so pressure sensors give us the air pressure you could get CFM if you're testing a fan for example there's another test setup with that so you get cubic feet per minute airflow and that's calculated because you have a known volume so you need to know in volume of the chamber to get that and the air comes out here and we can do the thermal test or on the other side of if we show it you can do the air flow testing with the fans then moving on to this side so this is where the air is actually coming out and it's it's a bit warm here because it's going through like I said there's a hot plate on the bottom and this is ultimately if we really in-house wanted to do as perfect thermal testing on colores as we could you'd have to do something like this the problem is that for us we start deviating so much from real-world that in in a review for a consumer it's not quite as useful because as a consumer you're dealing with again things like the the IHS or the thermal interface between the IHS and the dye and so even though this cooler might be doing 51 degrees here the hyper 212 this is 200 watts in the hot plate for the earlier testing even though it's doing 51 degrees for the K type that's sandwiched between the cold plate and the hot plate in reality with a CPU vac number could be much higher and it's it's going to vary depending on the CPU as well and how well the dye contacts IHS contacts the thermal interface contacts the cold plate so it gets really complicated and that's why the real-world tests that we do are of course to some degree flawed as all review tests are but as long as you know the flaws and you of course talk about them and educate the audience it's fine it's just that we wanted to show this side of things where it's a more perfectly controlled scenario so that you can get some really good comparative numbers and data and then you just extrapolate to real-world as best you can or you do real-world tests and we'll look at that in a moment so then finally over here there's two K types hooked up and ones where I already said it is there the second ones over here for ambient temperature so you get the temperature going into the cooler and then the temperature of the hot plate and figure out how how well it cools so moving on we talked about real world a bit and this set up over here is representative of that so it doesn't look like much but as I said you want to eliminate motherboards where possible and Intel for years now we've talked about their ttv or their thermal test vehicle we showed one of these in Corsairs lab previously as well so it's a it's it's it's a thermal test vehicle that Intel provides and you can use it for cooler testing it's extremely controlled they also have some some custom software they build for other types of testing this is AM these so quick note the thrown paste around the CPU is just because it's been used a lot but it's not it that's not how it's actually supposed to be but that's how ours looks to you so it's fine so this is the AMD thermal test vehicle there's a thermal probe up here probably just for ambient you can move it around if you need to change for the height of the cooler and you can see that there's just adjustment here so if you wanted to change the height of that screw holding the probe in place and that could be done k types are hooked up back there so that's more thermal probes you could take I think actually there's a thermal probe directly mounted to the top of the and the rise in CPU there or the the fake rise and see if you enter via the thermal test CPU and then up here is the benchtop power supplies these are used to control the the wattage so if you wanted to set a specific amount of power going through the CPU you can figure that out through just doing volts times amps gives you watts so that's that's the more real-world stuff this would be used for sort of validating performance for customers that people buying the coolers it's no secret coolermaster makes the AMD coolers so that's why you see this here and then there's another test vehicle over here so this one this is pretty cool as well this is similar in some ways to the one that we showed first where it is pushing air through a cooler and testing the cooler so you can test for things like low impedance caused by the fins that's a really important point where as fins get denser on a cooler you potentially encounter the issue of the air flow getting impeded to a point where there's diminishing returns so ideally you have you have the density you have the service area without creating impedance which could create things like turbulence noise and actually worsen performance so this is able to test for that there's a cooler in there will show in b-roll and air is just pushed through it and this is more or less to accommodate different size cooler so you could work with lower profile stuff if you're working with like a longer cooler as this one is or something with where the height isn't as much of a concern as it is with the other test chamber so this is the last part of the lab we'll be talking out this is the same machine just mirrored from over there but it's set up for different testing so instead of a cooler mount into it it's got a fan mounted to it and I guess I'll note a few things here number one this is Windows XP number two this machine is $75,000 so you can put those two together yourself so Windows XP obviously very reliable if you've already got your software set up why change it and so this this machine setup instead of using a blower fan to push the air through and funnel it through a cooler on the other side like was being done over there where the air is getting pushed through generated by a fan within the system and then piped in through a hose at the front instead of that they're mounting a fan to the front so it can be tested and if you're kind of looking at the fan going well that's sort of small compared to the volume of the chamber the way the air is guided through is there's actually another blower fan down here which we have shots of too and that one is working an inverse from the fan of the front so this fan at the front might be set to something like fifty seven point three fifty two point seven whatever it is on the box for the CFM and then the fan down here will mirror that and be set to the same fan so that it doesn't impact the result and but it does guide the air through the system so that you can get the pressure measurements as needed or the flow measurements and then the voltage can be varied so they can test across different points of the curve voltage curve or PWM curve to get the performance that's a 30% dar pia or yeah 30% RPM or 50% pwm signal whatever it may be and additionally the software can aid in generating a PQ graph if you wanted something like that so this is more or less the cooler master cooling test lab we wanted to show off for air coolers you can use it for liquid coolers but mostly for fans here we have an air cooler mounted back there and then the real-world testing as well if you hadn't seen the tea TVs before from AMD and Intel then you've seen them now so this this is exactly why it's so difficult to do accurate cooler testing and this is why we never say that our tests are perfectly accurate what you really want just to have a to address how testing looks from reviewers standpoint what you really want is a reviewer is to have perfectly inaccurate tests so as long as your measurements are imprecise precisely then you're good by which I mean if you're always off by plus or minus two degrees that's fine it's when you have extreme variance that it's totally useless as a result and so we we have some plus or minus numbers on the bottom of our charts if you're ever curious what the variance is and if it difference is significant you can look at that plus or minus so it says plus or minus one degrees Celsius and you see two coolers that are two degrees apart they're basically the same statistically we can't we don't have the test resolution to see a difference now something like this you might be able to start seeing a difference of course but I think that that addresses the cooler test inside on the TDP side these machines could also be used for determining TDP so the test equipment if you wanted to put a TDP number on the side of your box just like this is used to put a CFM number on the side of the box you could do that through here just like we showed the hot plate over there with the cooler you could theoretically produce a TDP number but everyone uses TDP in different ways so intel's TDP is different from how AMD calculates theirs and i forget exactly what AMD's is but it's based on like an optimal processor temperature of sixty point eight degrees celsius and based on some ambient conditions and there's a lot of stuff involved to create this formula to make TDP so it's not necessarily comparable from one to the next and then you also have issues where if a company making coolers puts on their box that it runs that it can support 150 watt TDP and you have a processor that says it's 150 watt TDP those might not be the same thing so that's that's important to note as well so these could be used to produce a TDP number but I believe for the assist the fans we were looking at the coolers we were looking at there's actually not a TDP number on the boxer's potentially the better way to go just because otherwise everyone gets can use that no one really knows what TDP means so that's it for this one thank you for watching as always subscribe for more you go to patreon.com/scishow gamers Nexus to support our tours and our lab visits like this one or store documents next stop net if you want to pick my shirt like the one I'm wearing but not literally this one I've been sweating it all day so thank you're watching I'll see you all next timehey everyone we're in Hawaii Joe and China looking at one of cooler masters testing facilities so we've already seen some other stuff I don't have it on the channel yet but we're looking at today they're the two aspects I really want to address here one of them is basically all cooler reviews are flawed and this is something that we talk about in our cooler reviews they're flawed to an extent we'll go over why here this this equipment more or less demonstrates it and then also TDP what we're talking a bit about both of those subjects before that this video is brought to you by the gigabyte r-tx 2070 gaming OC now available in a matte white model to match the emergence of white PC cases the RT X 2070 gaming OC is a three fan cooling solution and four composite heat pipes on Nvidia's newest Orion GPU and ships with a pre overclock of 1740 megahertz in OC mode or 1725 in gaming mode RGB fusion is also available for the LED enthusiast learn more at the link in the description below I guess we'll start with this right now there's a hyper 212 hooked up behind me here so this is set up and what this chamber is doing is pulling an air through the bottom so there's actually a giant blower fan here and the goal of this test I'll walk through more of the specifics in a second is to look at the thermal performance so it's not a obviously perfectly real world scenario so you're not getting the real-world performance that would be affected by for example the Tim between the IHS and the die so that's not accounted for here but the point of doing something like this which is the same reason we do sort of really controlled tests in our own lab is so that you can get consistent numbers where you can compare one device to the next so if coolermaster works on another products may be following the 212 then they have some data they can compare to you from previously so that there's there's ups and downs to it there's some real-world tests and we'll show it to but the way this works is looking at some of the thermal numbers that are on the screen here from a previous test run you can see that ambient temperatures here it's hooked up to a k-type thermocouple will show momentarily so ambient temperature you have the operating temperature of the hot plate there's a thermocouple sandwiched between the hot plate and the the cold plate of the cooler and there's actually a milled out hole for that thermocouple to go into which another thing we've talked on the past Intel's T TVs do similar things to this but it allows you to get some more direct temperature readings so there's no CPU required here which is actually really good because and this is why cooler reviews are often pretty flawed because once you introduce a motherboard and a CPU you're introducing potentially dozens of different voltages most of them on auto because people don't really control properly and that changes the performance every time so every time you boot cycle if there's a reset somewhere in BIOS then it could change the the voltages to really small points your fractions of a volt which will impact the results but also there's impact from things like for example past application or whatever but anyway so this machine we have the readout is fifty one point three five for the current test the hyper 212 and all the different readings here and we can show this more in b-roll but all the readings here give things like the temperature of I think we have ambient I think we have water temperature or something like that so there's actually a tank here that's used for controlling humidity levels and this is a water tank and it's hooked up so that the humidity inside of the chamber can be more or less simulated to the humidity inside of a room that might be under target testing depending on what kind of humidity Coolermaster wants to test for but so that can be controlled and also another reason that cooler reviews can be flawed because we really we don't have any control over this without a thermal chamber so it's only so much you can do in a review to where you get down to maybe a three degree difference and at the end of the day a three degree difference could be past application it could be torque on the socket it could be humidity it could be ambient temperature so all these things are why if you're really making the products you need real testing equipment like this and the way this works is like I said there's a blower fan the bottom it pulls the air in and the air enters in on this side of this particular chamber comes through goes through some flow straighteners which are just big mesh wire is sort of in the middle of the chamber we have some of this at home too for our own airflow testing so it goes through flow straighteners which make sure that the air doesn't diffuse and just go all over the chamber and as it goes through the flow is straight it eventually gets through all the way over here and as you can see there are a couple of pressure sensors hooked up and these are tracked via software as well so pressure sensors give us the air pressure you could get CFM if you're testing a fan for example there's another test setup with that so you get cubic feet per minute airflow and that's calculated because you have a known volume so you need to know in volume of the chamber to get that and the air comes out here and we can do the thermal test or on the other side of if we show it you can do the air flow testing with the fans then moving on to this side so this is where the air is actually coming out and it's it's a bit warm here because it's going through like I said there's a hot plate on the bottom and this is ultimately if we really in-house wanted to do as perfect thermal testing on colores as we could you'd have to do something like this the problem is that for us we start deviating so much from real-world that in in a review for a consumer it's not quite as useful because as a consumer you're dealing with again things like the the IHS or the thermal interface between the IHS and the dye and so even though this cooler might be doing 51 degrees here the hyper 212 this is 200 watts in the hot plate for the earlier testing even though it's doing 51 degrees for the K type that's sandwiched between the cold plate and the hot plate in reality with a CPU vac number could be much higher and it's it's going to vary depending on the CPU as well and how well the dye contacts IHS contacts the thermal interface contacts the cold plate so it gets really complicated and that's why the real-world tests that we do are of course to some degree flawed as all review tests are but as long as you know the flaws and you of course talk about them and educate the audience it's fine it's just that we wanted to show this side of things where it's a more perfectly controlled scenario so that you can get some really good comparative numbers and data and then you just extrapolate to real-world as best you can or you do real-world tests and we'll look at that in a moment so then finally over here there's two K types hooked up and ones where I already said it is there the second ones over here for ambient temperature so you get the temperature going into the cooler and then the temperature of the hot plate and figure out how how well it cools so moving on we talked about real world a bit and this set up over here is representative of that so it doesn't look like much but as I said you want to eliminate motherboards where possible and Intel for years now we've talked about their ttv or their thermal test vehicle we showed one of these in Corsairs lab previously as well so it's a it's it's it's a thermal test vehicle that Intel provides and you can use it for cooler testing it's extremely controlled they also have some some custom software they build for other types of testing this is AM these so quick note the thrown paste around the CPU is just because it's been used a lot but it's not it that's not how it's actually supposed to be but that's how ours looks to you so it's fine so this is the AMD thermal test vehicle there's a thermal probe up here probably just for ambient you can move it around if you need to change for the height of the cooler and you can see that there's just adjustment here so if you wanted to change the height of that screw holding the probe in place and that could be done k types are hooked up back there so that's more thermal probes you could take I think actually there's a thermal probe directly mounted to the top of the and the rise in CPU there or the the fake rise and see if you enter via the thermal test CPU and then up here is the benchtop power supplies these are used to control the the wattage so if you wanted to set a specific amount of power going through the CPU you can figure that out through just doing volts times amps gives you watts so that's that's the more real-world stuff this would be used for sort of validating performance for customers that people buying the coolers it's no secret coolermaster makes the AMD coolers so that's why you see this here and then there's another test vehicle over here so this one this is pretty cool as well this is similar in some ways to the one that we showed first where it is pushing air through a cooler and testing the cooler so you can test for things like low impedance caused by the fins that's a really important point where as fins get denser on a cooler you potentially encounter the issue of the air flow getting impeded to a point where there's diminishing returns so ideally you have you have the density you have the service area without creating impedance which could create things like turbulence noise and actually worsen performance so this is able to test for that there's a cooler in there will show in b-roll and air is just pushed through it and this is more or less to accommodate different size cooler so you could work with lower profile stuff if you're working with like a longer cooler as this one is or something with where the height isn't as much of a concern as it is with the other test chamber so this is the last part of the lab we'll be talking out this is the same machine just mirrored from over there but it's set up for different testing so instead of a cooler mount into it it's got a fan mounted to it and I guess I'll note a few things here number one this is Windows XP number two this machine is $75,000 so you can put those two together yourself so Windows XP obviously very reliable if you've already got your software set up why change it and so this this machine setup instead of using a blower fan to push the air through and funnel it through a cooler on the other side like was being done over there where the air is getting pushed through generated by a fan within the system and then piped in through a hose at the front instead of that they're mounting a fan to the front so it can be tested and if you're kind of looking at the fan going well that's sort of small compared to the volume of the chamber the way the air is guided through is there's actually another blower fan down here which we have shots of too and that one is working an inverse from the fan of the front so this fan at the front might be set to something like fifty seven point three fifty two point seven whatever it is on the box for the CFM and then the fan down here will mirror that and be set to the same fan so that it doesn't impact the result and but it does guide the air through the system so that you can get the pressure measurements as needed or the flow measurements and then the voltage can be varied so they can test across different points of the curve voltage curve or PWM curve to get the performance that's a 30% dar pia or yeah 30% RPM or 50% pwm signal whatever it may be and additionally the software can aid in generating a PQ graph if you wanted something like that so this is more or less the cooler master cooling test lab we wanted to show off for air coolers you can use it for liquid coolers but mostly for fans here we have an air cooler mounted back there and then the real-world testing as well if you hadn't seen the tea TVs before from AMD and Intel then you've seen them now so this this is exactly why it's so difficult to do accurate cooler testing and this is why we never say that our tests are perfectly accurate what you really want just to have a to address how testing looks from reviewers standpoint what you really want is a reviewer is to have perfectly inaccurate tests so as long as your measurements are imprecise precisely then you're good by which I mean if you're always off by plus or minus two degrees that's fine it's when you have extreme variance that it's totally useless as a result and so we we have some plus or minus numbers on the bottom of our charts if you're ever curious what the variance is and if it difference is significant you can look at that plus or minus so it says plus or minus one degrees Celsius and you see two coolers that are two degrees apart they're basically the same statistically we can't we don't have the test resolution to see a difference now something like this you might be able to start seeing a difference of course but I think that that addresses the cooler test inside on the TDP side these machines could also be used for determining TDP so the test equipment if you wanted to put a TDP number on the side of your box just like this is used to put a CFM number on the side of the box you could do that through here just like we showed the hot plate over there with the cooler you could theoretically produce a TDP number but everyone uses TDP in different ways so intel's TDP is different from how AMD calculates theirs and i forget exactly what AMD's is but it's based on like an optimal processor temperature of sixty point eight degrees celsius and based on some ambient conditions and there's a lot of stuff involved to create this formula to make TDP so it's not necessarily comparable from one to the next and then you also have issues where if a company making coolers puts on their box that it runs that it can support 150 watt TDP and you have a processor that says it's 150 watt TDP those might not be the same thing so that's that's important to note as well so these could be used to produce a TDP number but I believe for the assist the fans we were looking at the coolers we were looking at there's actually not a TDP number on the boxer's potentially the better way to go just because otherwise everyone gets can use that no one really knows what TDP means so that's it for this one thank you for watching as always subscribe for more you go to patreon.com/scishow gamers Nexus to support our tours and our lab visits like this one or store documents next stop net if you want to pick my shirt like the one I'm wearing but not literally this one I've been sweating it all day so thank you're watching I'll see you all next time\n"