**Theoretical Background of Air Cooling Systems**

Designing air cooling systems can be challenging, especially when it comes to traditional aio configurations like those used on CPUs. In such setups, trapped air bubbles in the system can become stuck in the radiator, rather than flowing through the pump and creating noise. This is because the air bubbles rise to the top of the radiator and get trapped, causing problems with the pump's performance and potentially leading to reduced effectiveness or even failure.

To overcome this issue, designers have employed various solutions, such as placing the outlet of the radiator at the bottom and designing the heat exchanger's internals to trap any remaining air. This ensures that the air does not rise to the top and get stuck in the pump, reducing noise levels and maintaining optimal performance.

**Hands-On Testing: Alienware Aurora R10 with Air Cooling Upgrade**

In this segment, we'll put the Alienware Aurora R10 through its paces, testing its performance using various games and benchmarking software. We'll compare it to a reference design featuring a traditional aio cooler, as well as examine the impact of temperature on the system's performance.

**Performance Metrics and Results**

After running several tests, our results show that the air cooling upgrade has achieved impressive performance metrics. The GPU temperature was kept at a maximum of 80 degrees Celsius, with the clock speed dropping to 1890 MHz when reaching this threshold. This is slightly below the maximum clock speed of 1950 MHz.

In contrast, the traditional aio cooler struggled to keep up, managing only a maximum temperature of 69 degrees Celsius and a clock speed of 1920 MHz at its lowest. These results indicate that the air cooling upgrade has provided significant benefits in terms of both performance and power consumption.

**Comparing Performance to Reference Design**

To further emphasize the effectiveness of this air cooling system, we've compared our results to those obtained from a reference design featuring a traditional aio cooler. The GPU temperature was significantly higher in this setup, reaching 93 degrees Celsius at times. This highlights the advantages of using an advanced air cooling solution like the one employed in this Alienware Aurora R10 build.

**Noise Levels and Value for Money**

One notable aspect of this air cooling upgrade is its noise level. While we did not experience any significant drops in performance due to increased temperatures, the system was actually slightly louder than a traditional aio cooler. However, it's essential to note that the original design used in these tests employed a more expensive dual fan setup, which may not be representative of typical aftermarket solutions.

Given the current market conditions and competition from other brands, we believe that this air cooling solution is reasonably priced at $149.99-$200, depending on the specific components included in the package. While it may seem steep compared to some aftermarket solutions, the value for money offered by this design makes it an attractive option for those seeking a high-performance, low-power gaming PC.

**Conclusion and Future Developments**

The Alienware Aurora R10 with air cooling upgrade has proven to be an excellent choice for those looking for a powerful, yet power-efficient gaming PC. The advanced air cooling solution employed in this build has demonstrated its ability to maintain optimal temperatures while minimizing noise levels.

As the technology continues to evolve, we can expect further innovations in air cooling design and materials science. Companies like Alienware will likely continue to push the boundaries of what is possible with these solutions, leading to even more impressive performance metrics and value for money.

In the future, we'll be exploring other cutting-edge technologies, such as liquid cooling systems and innovative heat sink designs. Stay tuned for our upcoming content as we delve into the world of PC hardware and discover new ways to power your gaming rig.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enoh man linus you're in for an absolute treat here today this is the alienware aurora r11 and has one of the weirdest gpu coolers i've ever seen cool and you know that's like the best part what apparently it has 69 percent less noise so do you want to open it up wait we're going to miss that opportunity nice okay i still have no idea what's going on do i just open it or yeah just open it okay you know how to do this i know i know how to open a box just need a knifey knife scissors they're just two knives as though i need more reminders that alienware is just a dell in alien clothes i remember when they used to at least put a little alien on the cheap mouse that was included can you imagine spending the amount of money that an alienware machine costs and then using the included mouse like the keyboard i don't even i don't even care that much you can be a very competitive gamer with a cheap keyboard but like the mouse that's it's fundamental hopefully the packing material is good aurora r11 you say it's not a bad looking little machine and the specs are interesting too so this is a core i9 10 900k it's got 32 gigs of ram but we don't know what speed it's running at yet we're gonna have to figure that out once we fire it up two terabytes of nvme storage for boot with an additional two terabyte hard drive and an rtx 2080 super so this thing should be a gaming powerhouse it's got so much plastic on it this is going to take forever oh can i do a peel yeah you can do a peel sweet there you go you even got a little peely tab there right at the end really alex i saved the best peel for myself honestly though it's hard to tell exactly what i'm looking at from the outside here so the front seems to be kind of like a turbine styled intake you've got a couple usb 3s you got a type c there that's pretty nice to see alien shape power button on the top you've got that vent that i showed you guys before on the side here you've got what seems to be a power supply intake giving that our power supply is right there as well as another big intake and at the back you've got dell still not bothering to powder coat their chassis or power supplies to make them match the black aesthetic of the rest of the case for whatever reason so i i was talking to a power supply manufacturer about this at one point i think it costs about 40 cents to uh coat the power supply black something like that less than a dollar though while most people's instinct might be to plug the computer into the wall and fire it up mine is to open it up and have a look at this supposedly crazy graphics cooling solution that you've got there i can't quite figure out how to do it there's like multiple unlocking tabs back here i have no idea what i'm looking at do you want me to tell you or do you just want to figure it out i want to figure it out okay i'm going to assume this screw has something to do with it how do they manage to make the case so expensive like do you guys have any idea how much the molding costs for a case like this would be like we're talking deep into six figures right oh yeah easy and yet so cheap it's shocking as we saw from the outside the 120 millimeter intake for the power supply is right up against the side panel there so it's gonna be able to pull that nice fresh air in oh hey look at it go that's pretty cool why is this power supply so big it's modular in everything hey since when does alienware care about modular power supplies maybe since the cost savings of the copper cabling outweighed the additional expense of the modular pcb inside hey got him i don't actually know that for sure though but enough teasing dela boat there oh for real the eight pin is a six pin did you notice that it's missing two conductors like really guys i know you don't actually need you know however many watts that connector carries for a mainstream cpu like a 10900k but like really just would the board run if you put an eight pin in it here's what i want to know if i plug just six pins into a regular eight pin connector would it work because i know that four pins will also work in most cases yeah the motherboard has the pins there what the heck what i want to do now though is take a closer look at this cooler solution this is real interesting what they've effectively done is just about quadruple the total amount of chassis space dedicated to graphics card cooling one thing that surprises me though is how light it is like it feels like this is just made of plastic i was expecting looking at it from from the outside i thought this was like aluminum fins or something i mean the radiator is definitely made of aluminum but the other thing that surprises me is that the graphics card still seems to have not just a shroud but actual cooling in it have we disassembled this yet yes but are there fins in here let's take it apart okay well that's basically what i expected to find inside that is a surprisingly small radiator one advantage that wasn't immediately obvious though is that the backside has access to fresh air as well as the front so this fan is going to be a little bit more efficient than it would normally be able to be on a graphics card except in cases like the uh was it the 480 that had like vents in the back of the pcb so it could draw in more air what a monster that thing was this is the asatech rad card and you might have never heard of asetek but if you've ever used an aio water cooler the internals were probably designed by asatech their designs are used by the likes of intel asus corsair nzxt evga thermaltake hp lenovo msi and many more the rad card was created when alienware came to asatech and was like hey guys we need a gpu cooler that's super quiet really cool oh and by the way you've got to make it fit easily into a tiny case and what they came up with is this it's got six tiny heat exchangers in series in here and this does run into a similar problem as our stacking radiators video which you guys can check out over here where as the air goes through this series of heat exchangers it actually heats up and its cooling effectiveness goes down but the good news is that acetec did set this up in the correct way as we also found in that video so that the hottest air and the hottest water meet here at the back of the case and the coolest air and the coolest water meet right here so in terms of raw performance this is not expected to actually even perform as well as a traditional radiator where the coolest air is going to be hitting all of the water but the main benefit is that in a small chassis where it's hard to get fresh air to a traditional radiator anyway the performance hit here shouldn't be that big surprisingly one of the biggest issues with designing this was air in a traditional aio like on the cpu here if there are any air bubbles trapped in the system they just rise to the top and get stuck in the radiator rather than running through the pump and making a bunch of noise so it's no big deal in this configuration however if the air is allowed to just rise to the top it will get trapped in the pump not the radiator which can not only add noise but can actually reduce the effectiveness of the pump or in a worst case scenario kill it so to overcome this the outlet of the radiator is placed at the bottom and the internals of the heat exchanger by the outlet is designed to trap the air oh that's pretty cool okay enough theory though let's close this puppy back up and see if it actually performs okay david you're a playstation fanboy this versus ps5 i can't tell the difference it's supposed to be kind of like a theremin kind of sounding thing don't worry about it g-sync display connected all right everything's working all dandy so what like fire up some do maternal sure that's running pretty good oh get the stats up there oh yeah right who has the best stats hold on i'm playing i'm playing the game right now okay all right there's our performance metrics you happy yeah doing actual work now all right so how we doing we're getting 90 fps running freaking do maternal at 4k that's a pretty good pretty good gaming experience i would say we got no gpu temps in here though that's fine though because i'm let you guys in on a little secret movie magic we already ran all the performance benchmarks against uh more typically cooled rtx 2080 super anyway and the results are pretty impressive for our air cooler we reached a maximum temperature of 80 degrees at which point the gpu clock speed dropped to 1890 megahertz which is slightly below the maximum clock speed it reached of 1950. so on its own that's very impressive but the pci express radiator is the gift that kept on giving managing to keep our gpu at a maximum temperature of 69 degrees nice with the clock speed dropping to just 1920 at its lowest so this means the actual gaming performance of these two cards is very similar but the pci express rad has way more headroom before it's going to start throttling these tests were done with the ac set to 22 degrees celsius and the air cooler was just on the edge of thermal throttling but it's summer now and chances are you have a hard time keeping your computer room at 22 degrees so as the temperature of your room increases so too will the performance impact of having this pci express radiator design you shouldn't see a significant drop until your room is a sweltering 33 degrees at which point you might as well just go outside but temps aren't the whole story here unfortunately the pci express rad was actually slightly louder something that you guys can probably actually hear through my microphone if i get too close to this machine so chances are the 69 reduction in noise that asatech was talking about was compared to a blower style cooler on a gpu with well a blower cooler but given that reference designs now use a more expensive dual fan setup i don't really see the value in comparing to that with all of that said it's not like under normal circumstances you would be choosing between a cooler like this and one like this because either you're buying a gpu from a website like memory express or newegg or microcenter or you're buying a pre-done computer from a company like delalianware actually with that said oh it is possible that they would be using a blower style cooler in a case like this because it's so small and there's so little room to dissipate all the air that this would just be recirculating they probably would be using a blower styler so that does make sense they're 69 so it's 69 quieter compared to their low end solution that they would normally use but if you're an aftermarket buyer i don't think you should be too choked that you can't get your hands on one of these a linus yes sir how much do you think that the pci rad costs like the whole thing including the the block and everything like as an add-on to this computer i would say that's going to cost you about 149.99 200 bucks not a bad guess 200 that's too much i guess they got to make back those molding costs somehow if you guys enjoyed this video where we uh you know experimented with alienware's products why not the one where we tried to overclock one of their laptops with subzero cooling hey they didn't skimp on the packing material though this is goodoh man linus you're in for an absolute treat here today this is the alienware aurora r11 and has one of the weirdest gpu coolers i've ever seen cool and you know that's like the best part what apparently it has 69 percent less noise so do you want to open it up wait we're going to miss that opportunity nice okay i still have no idea what's going on do i just open it or yeah just open it okay you know how to do this i know i know how to open a box just need a knifey knife scissors they're just two knives as though i need more reminders that alienware is just a dell in alien clothes i remember when they used to at least put a little alien on the cheap mouse that was included can you imagine spending the amount of money that an alienware machine costs and then using the included mouse like the keyboard i don't even i don't even care that much you can be a very competitive gamer with a cheap keyboard but like the mouse that's it's fundamental hopefully the packing material is good aurora r11 you say it's not a bad looking little machine and the specs are interesting too so this is a core i9 10 900k it's got 32 gigs of ram but we don't know what speed it's running at yet we're gonna have to figure that out once we fire it up two terabytes of nvme storage for boot with an additional two terabyte hard drive and an rtx 2080 super so this thing should be a gaming powerhouse it's got so much plastic on it this is going to take forever oh can i do a peel yeah you can do a peel sweet there you go you even got a little peely tab there right at the end really alex i saved the best peel for myself honestly though it's hard to tell exactly what i'm looking at from the outside here so the front seems to be kind of like a turbine styled intake you've got a couple usb 3s you got a type c there that's pretty nice to see alien shape power button on the top you've got that vent that i showed you guys before on the side here you've got what seems to be a power supply intake giving that our power supply is right there as well as another big intake and at the back you've got dell still not bothering to powder coat their chassis or power supplies to make them match the black aesthetic of the rest of the case for whatever reason so i i was talking to a power supply manufacturer about this at one point i think it costs about 40 cents to uh coat the power supply black something like that less than a dollar though while most people's instinct might be to plug the computer into the wall and fire it up mine is to open it up and have a look at this supposedly crazy graphics cooling solution that you've got there i can't quite figure out how to do it there's like multiple unlocking tabs back here i have no idea what i'm looking at do you want me to tell you or do you just want to figure it out i want to figure it out okay i'm going to assume this screw has something to do with it how do they manage to make the case so expensive like do you guys have any idea how much the molding costs for a case like this would be like we're talking deep into six figures right oh yeah easy and yet so cheap it's shocking as we saw from the outside the 120 millimeter intake for the power supply is right up against the side panel there so it's gonna be able to pull that nice fresh air in oh hey look at it go that's pretty cool why is this power supply so big it's modular in everything hey since when does alienware care about modular power supplies maybe since the cost savings of the copper cabling outweighed the additional expense of the modular pcb inside hey got him i don't actually know that for sure though but enough teasing dela boat there oh for real the eight pin is a six pin did you notice that it's missing two conductors like really guys i know you don't actually need you know however many watts that connector carries for a mainstream cpu like a 10900k but like really just would the board run if you put an eight pin in it here's what i want to know if i plug just six pins into a regular eight pin connector would it work because i know that four pins will also work in most cases yeah the motherboard has the pins there what the heck what i want to do now though is take a closer look at this cooler solution this is real interesting what they've effectively done is just about quadruple the total amount of chassis space dedicated to graphics card cooling one thing that surprises me though is how light it is like it feels like this is just made of plastic i was expecting looking at it from from the outside i thought this was like aluminum fins or something i mean the radiator is definitely made of aluminum but the other thing that surprises me is that the graphics card still seems to have not just a shroud but actual cooling in it have we disassembled this yet yes but are there fins in here let's take it apart okay well that's basically what i expected to find inside that is a surprisingly small radiator one advantage that wasn't immediately obvious though is that the backside has access to fresh air as well as the front so this fan is going to be a little bit more efficient than it would normally be able to be on a graphics card except in cases like the uh was it the 480 that had like vents in the back of the pcb so it could draw in more air what a monster that thing was this is the asatech rad card and you might have never heard of asetek but if you've ever used an aio water cooler the internals were probably designed by asatech their designs are used by the likes of intel asus corsair nzxt evga thermaltake hp lenovo msi and many more the rad card was created when alienware came to asatech and was like hey guys we need a gpu cooler that's super quiet really cool oh and by the way you've got to make it fit easily into a tiny case and what they came up with is this it's got six tiny heat exchangers in series in here and this does run into a similar problem as our stacking radiators video which you guys can check out over here where as the air goes through this series of heat exchangers it actually heats up and its cooling effectiveness goes down but the good news is that acetec did set this up in the correct way as we also found in that video so that the hottest air and the hottest water meet here at the back of the case and the coolest air and the coolest water meet right here so in terms of raw performance this is not expected to actually even perform as well as a traditional radiator where the coolest air is going to be hitting all of the water but the main benefit is that in a small chassis where it's hard to get fresh air to a traditional radiator anyway the performance hit here shouldn't be that big surprisingly one of the biggest issues with designing this was air in a traditional aio like on the cpu here if there are any air bubbles trapped in the system they just rise to the top and get stuck in the radiator rather than running through the pump and making a bunch of noise so it's no big deal in this configuration however if the air is allowed to just rise to the top it will get trapped in the pump not the radiator which can not only add noise but can actually reduce the effectiveness of the pump or in a worst case scenario kill it so to overcome this the outlet of the radiator is placed at the bottom and the internals of the heat exchanger by the outlet is designed to trap the air oh that's pretty cool okay enough theory though let's close this puppy back up and see if it actually performs okay david you're a playstation fanboy this versus ps5 i can't tell the difference it's supposed to be kind of like a theremin kind of sounding thing don't worry about it g-sync display connected all right everything's working all dandy so what like fire up some do maternal sure that's running pretty good oh get the stats up there oh yeah right who has the best stats hold on i'm playing i'm playing the game right now okay all right there's our performance metrics you happy yeah doing actual work now all right so how we doing we're getting 90 fps running freaking do maternal at 4k that's a pretty good pretty good gaming experience i would say we got no gpu temps in here though that's fine though because i'm let you guys in on a little secret movie magic we already ran all the performance benchmarks against uh more typically cooled rtx 2080 super anyway and the results are pretty impressive for our air cooler we reached a maximum temperature of 80 degrees at which point the gpu clock speed dropped to 1890 megahertz which is slightly below the maximum clock speed it reached of 1950. so on its own that's very impressive but the pci express radiator is the gift that kept on giving managing to keep our gpu at a maximum temperature of 69 degrees nice with the clock speed dropping to just 1920 at its lowest so this means the actual gaming performance of these two cards is very similar but the pci express rad has way more headroom before it's going to start throttling these tests were done with the ac set to 22 degrees celsius and the air cooler was just on the edge of thermal throttling but it's summer now and chances are you have a hard time keeping your computer room at 22 degrees so as the temperature of your room increases so too will the performance impact of having this pci express radiator design you shouldn't see a significant drop until your room is a sweltering 33 degrees at which point you might as well just go outside but temps aren't the whole story here unfortunately the pci express rad was actually slightly louder something that you guys can probably actually hear through my microphone if i get too close to this machine so chances are the 69 reduction in noise that asatech was talking about was compared to a blower style cooler on a gpu with well a blower cooler but given that reference designs now use a more expensive dual fan setup i don't really see the value in comparing to that with all of that said it's not like under normal circumstances you would be choosing between a cooler like this and one like this because either you're buying a gpu from a website like memory express or newegg or microcenter or you're buying a pre-done computer from a company like delalianware actually with that said oh it is possible that they would be using a blower style cooler in a case like this because it's so small and there's so little room to dissipate all the air that this would just be recirculating they probably would be using a blower styler so that does make sense they're 69 so it's 69 quieter compared to their low end solution that they would normally use but if you're an aftermarket buyer i don't think you should be too choked that you can't get your hands on one of these a linus yes sir how much do you think that the pci rad costs like the whole thing including the the block and everything like as an add-on to this computer i would say that's going to cost you about 149.99 200 bucks not a bad guess 200 that's too much i guess they got to make back those molding costs somehow if you guys enjoyed this video where we uh you know experimented with alienware's products why not the one where we tried to overclock one of their laptops with subzero cooling hey they didn't skimp on the packing material though this is good\n"