The author's Experiment with Cooling: A Journey of Self-Doubt and Discovery

As I embarked on this experiment with cooling, I couldn't help but feel a sense of trepidation. Was I taking on a task that was beneath me? Had I bitten off more than I could chew? The thought of pushing my CPU to its limits, with temperatures soaring into the stratosphere, made me question my own abilities. But, as is often the case, it's in these moments of self-doubt that we discover our greatest strengths.

I decided to use a 360mm radiator and Noctua NH-U14S TR4-SP3 cooler, which exceeded the thermal capacity required for my specific setup. However, despite its superior design, I couldn't shake off the feeling that it was all being let down by the inferior thermal interface material (TIM) used in the CPU die. The TIM seemed to be a major bottleneck, trapping heat and preventing it from being effectively dissipated.

As I delved deeper into my experiment, I began to realize that the issue wasn't with the cooler itself, but rather with the thermal dynamics of the system. You see, when heat is transferred from one point to another, there are often points of inefficiency where heat gets trapped and can't be effectively dissipated. In this case, it seemed that the TIM was a major contributor to these inefficiencies.

The author's concerns were further exacerbated by the fact that they were running a 27% overclock on their CPU, with temperatures rising to alarming levels. The spikes in temperature were particularly concerning, with one reading reaching as high as 87°C. However, when looking at the overall average temperatures, things seemed somewhat better, with an average score of around 81-83°C.

Despite my initial concerns, I began to feel a sense of optimism as I realized that both coolers exceeded the thermal capacity required for my setup. The fact that they were able to keep up with the heat being generated by the CPU was a testament to their design and engineering. However, it was also clear that the TIM was still a major issue, and one that needed to be addressed if we were going to achieve truly optimal cooling.

As I reflected on my experiment, I couldn't help but feel a sense of frustration at the fact that such a significant improvement could have been achieved with better TIM. It seemed like a small change, but one that would make all the difference in achieving reliable and consistent cooling. The author's experience serves as a reminder that even the most seemingly minor details can have a profound impact on the overall performance of our systems.

Looking forward to the future of cooling, I am excited to explore new technologies and techniques that will allow us to push the boundaries of what is possible. Whether it's water cooling or air cooling, there are always ways to improve upon existing designs and achieve even better results. The author's experience serves as a reminder that even in the face of uncertainty, we can still learn and grow through experimentation and exploration.

The author has received several requests for air cooling content, and they plan to cover this topic in more depth in the coming months. With the summer months approaching, it's clear that many people will be struggling with cooling issues as temperatures rise. The author is excited to explore different solutions and techniques for addressing these challenges, and to share their findings with the community.

In conclusion, my experiment with cooling was a journey of self-discovery and growth. Through trial and error, I learned valuable lessons about the importance of thermal interface materials and the limitations of existing cooler designs. While I may not have achieved the results I had hoped for, I am proud of what I accomplished, and I look forward to continuing to explore and push the boundaries of cooling in the future.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enokay so here's the mission if I choose to accept it but I probably will because I'm the one that wrote the mission what happens when you take somebody who's really into water-cooling like myself and even has a water cold test bench what happens when I take what is touted as the world's best water cooler I mean air cooler see I can't even say air cooling what happens when we take this and test it will it change my mind will it make me recommend air cooling probably but we're still gonna do it anyway ms:i brings ultra thin gaming to life at their new GS 65 stealth the four point nine millimeter bezel 144 Hertz 1080p panel nvidia graphics and 8th gen intel cpus make the new GS 65 self a true powerhouse with a small footprint find out more and had a pre-order by following the link in the description below now before I can determine whether or not the NHD 15 is actually worthy of that title this I mean let's just get this out of the way this is not a new cooler it's been out for quite a few years it's based on the award-winning D 14 but we're not - it asked me if I wanted to check it out I was like heck yeah I want you also send me a low profile one I'm sure I could find a small form-factor build use for that but we first have to do our base tests it's not edit editing fill baseline ba se not be a SS cheese i clarify next time but it is a d-type premium cooler because you know oh wow it says based on the award-winning HD 14 I didn't realize that she said that right there now for this test I'm using my Intel 8700 K and this is always hard for me to figure out what CP you all want to use I want to use something that's kind of like maybe in line with what the average consumer would use and I could pump more heat into these coolers to truly test them by doing something like a high core account CPU like a 70 900 X all the way up to the 70 80 79 80 XE but the problem is I don't think that many people are running that and I think an 80 700 K is more reminiscent of what people have plus it has a known cooling issue before you delete delete them delete them so it it makes the transfer of heat on what's actually making out of the IHS on the Intel's heat spreader that much more important so that is where our limitation is going to be the amount of cooling given to the CPU based on what's actually being transferred to the cooler so the cooler has a huge responsibility we're also going to be using our all stock settings for this and then maybe we'll do a little over clocking the only setting I have changed is it's set to sync all cores they now default at 2 per core because remember last year when Coffey Lake launched it was this big scandal about various motherboard manufacturers shipping with this turned on by default to sync all cores but we're doing that because that actually is an overclock which means our turbo clock is going to apply to all cores and not just the one or two threads that are being tasked with all of that work so it also means we're leaving this at stock voltage and we'll monitor that will let the watercooler run for about 15 minutes to let it get up to temp and then we will monitor our temperatures and go from there and then we'll see whether or not I'm even smart enough to install this thing hopefully it's not hard but you know I kind of make things that are easy seem hard sometimes so there's that so it's been running for 16 minutes now and the temperatures are pretty decent actually so this is the current value this is the minimum who cares about that honestly and this is the max so our averages here which I'm going to call value is sitting typically in the 60s and 70s on the very right hand side right here these are the spikes like this spike right here you'll probably see one come up here in a second because it's doing mathematical equations and what will happen here is it will like eventually come up across something that just spikes it and it has to do like a hard calculation and then the temp goes up suddenly but you could say here's one right there I just came up now that came back down so that's what these spikes are so what we care about obviously are these two columns we want to see if we stay roughly in the 60s and 70s and what if our spikes get any worse with air now remember this is stuck this is all cores running at 4.7 gigahertz stock voltage and all that stuff that one setting is all that was changed I didn't go in here and do any manual overclocking any manual turbo clock or voltage or any of that so as you can see the 8700 K definitely still can can spike pretty high but in terms of our max temperature though this is still roughly 20 degrees away from 20 degrees Celsius away from t.j.maxx no it's not just a story that stands for thermal Junction although you can get some great deals at t.j.maxx but you can see right here with the exception of these spikes this is pretty steady and that's exactly what I was thinking was going to happen one other thing worth pointing out too is the radiator fans were running at about 1200 rpm these are actually 2200 rpm fans I believe they're the EK var DARS but I'm running them at half speed because Triple R add 360 rad not that big of a the CPU can handle it or it can handle the CPU whatever yeah so let's go and put the air cooler on and compare because that's kind of the point of today's video remember it was a mission and we accepted it I decided maybe you didn't I don't know if you're still watching that means you did okay it's all installed it seems like it's working the system's booted up I haven't looked at temperatures yet the downside is I can't really see the little readout oh there it is we're idling at 24 C we are plugged into PWM so where you're gonna be using the fan curve from the motherboard to control the fans they're very quiet essentially you have two independent towers but they are shared vapor chamber cooler so you have six heat pipes running to each one of these towers that's the same heat pipe that goes across and then we have a fan that's actually bigger than the cooler and at first you'd look at that and be like why would they do that why would they do it well a couple of reasons one there's actually air flow coming off the top of this so which helps actually move air across the case two it hangs down off the bottom here so that you're actually gonna be moving air across things like vrm memory I've had beside this side of the memory on this modulus Chile because it's blowing air directly at it and so it's got a very very nice design as you would expect from Noctua the only thing that really kind of stinks about it my opinion is still the tan and brown they are so proud of that tannin Brown so proud in fact I think they actually limit their sales for no the truth I think if they just made them all black my prediction is they'd sell 35% more units in that first month you guys can send me the profit if that turns out to be true so ribs are gonna do we're gonna go and test this we're gonna run it's all the same BIOS settings we're gonna run OC CT for the same amount of time and we're gonna see if the temperatures really changed all that much now I'm pretty excited because I know the NHD 14 is the cooler that everyone was obsessed with that was the cooler that everyone was like no don't go AI o get in an HD 14 this is supposed to be the successor to that that is that much better huh we'll let this go but do I dare say this already seems slightly better than the harder cooling stuff that can't be they just want to mentor so there was a little bit of heat soaked because if we look at the spikes here we went much higher on the spikes we did on water but again a couple of degree is not too bad I mean 87 was our max score Oh 88 88 was our max score 83 81 but if you look at our averages though this is so much better than I was expecting it to be remember we are technically running a twenty seven point six percent overclock over our base running at four point seven two two gigahertz on all six cores now why these temperatures so close I can tell you why they're so close because the IHS Tim on this the thermal interface material is still crap now the water cooler is a little bit better at being able to handle those spikes because it has a more efficient transfer of heat but the true transfer of heat efficiency is lost with the terrible Intel application of thermal paste which is why everyone dee lids these CPUs and eighth gens and the seventh gen extreme like the you know obviously the seven 100x is known to be really hot as you go up it gets worse so this I need to just buckle down and actually do the deal inning on some of these CPUs if I want to be serious about the temperatures I was a little concerned though I mean I was getting really sad because I was like crap this is gonna I'm literally handing the water cooling haters the ammunition they need to tell me about how everything I do the water cooling stuff is just a waste of time but you know what else is a waste of time trying to put a man on the moon but we did it anyway the other reality here is the fact that both coolers obviously are 360 by 40 millimeter radiator and are Noctua NHD 15 exceed the amount of thermal capacity that we need to keep the chip cool based on the amount of heat making it through that crap beat their thermal interface material does that make sense you have you have this between the cooler and the CPU die this this thing so you have to get heat from here to here and then from there to there what's being handled from the top of the IHS to the cooler is doing a really good job because again both of these coolers exceed the amount of heat that is being in making it through that what sucks is again the dye and the material between the heat spreader and the dye is where a lot of heat is getting trapped and not making it through so I could put the best cooler in the world on this I could build I could take that 480 times 4 radiator that we built and stick it on this right now and it probably wouldn't be any cooler than the 360 rat is simply because of the fact that the heat isn't making it out and thermal capacity is not what's holding us back so when a really long roundabout way I'm saying if you're not comfortable with water cooling you obviously have options out there they're gonna give you great performance without being too concerned with whether or not you're gonna keep your stuff cool enough now obviously we need to address this was done in an open air testbed because we wanted the only factor in cooling to be the cooler itself there's no case I could have possibly put this in that would have basically matched everyone's use case scenario back home so as long as you have proper air flow in your case your results should be similar anyway guys we're gonna go I've had a lot of requests lately to do some air cooling stuff and as we move into the summer months except for Australia we know you guys are upside-down and you guys are in the upside down and you're dealing with winter right now so obviously you guys are having cooling issues but for the rest of us when we're dealing with temperature problems and heat and all this stuff in the summertime which obviously brings out cooling issues I like to cover a lot of cooling topics in the summer months so if you have a suggestion please put it in the comments down below or hit me up on Twitter at Jays two cents and give me your suggestions this was one of them and I reached out to Noctua asked for this cooler because it was requested and we did it anyway guys we're gonna go thanks for watching I have a couple of videos they're gonna pop up right here you might find them interesting please feel free to check those outs and as always we will see you in the next one stupid cooler doing some goods water cooling this stuff people mad Computers making things compute computers are cool they bring things in your home today wait to ways at 575 write a haiku by J's two cents computers are really cool they briefing watch my videos they help me pay for the things that I do in hereokay so here's the mission if I choose to accept it but I probably will because I'm the one that wrote the mission what happens when you take somebody who's really into water-cooling like myself and even has a water cold test bench what happens when I take what is touted as the world's best water cooler I mean air cooler see I can't even say air cooling what happens when we take this and test it will it change my mind will it make me recommend air cooling probably but we're still gonna do it anyway ms:i brings ultra thin gaming to life at their new GS 65 stealth the four point nine millimeter bezel 144 Hertz 1080p panel nvidia graphics and 8th gen intel cpus make the new GS 65 self a true powerhouse with a small footprint find out more and had a pre-order by following the link in the description below now before I can determine whether or not the NHD 15 is actually worthy of that title this I mean let's just get this out of the way this is not a new cooler it's been out for quite a few years it's based on the award-winning D 14 but we're not - it asked me if I wanted to check it out I was like heck yeah I want you also send me a low profile one I'm sure I could find a small form-factor build use for that but we first have to do our base tests it's not edit editing fill baseline ba se not be a SS cheese i clarify next time but it is a d-type premium cooler because you know oh wow it says based on the award-winning HD 14 I didn't realize that she said that right there now for this test I'm using my Intel 8700 K and this is always hard for me to figure out what CP you all want to use I want to use something that's kind of like maybe in line with what the average consumer would use and I could pump more heat into these coolers to truly test them by doing something like a high core account CPU like a 70 900 X all the way up to the 70 80 79 80 XE but the problem is I don't think that many people are running that and I think an 80 700 K is more reminiscent of what people have plus it has a known cooling issue before you delete delete them delete them so it it makes the transfer of heat on what's actually making out of the IHS on the Intel's heat spreader that much more important so that is where our limitation is going to be the amount of cooling given to the CPU based on what's actually being transferred to the cooler so the cooler has a huge responsibility we're also going to be using our all stock settings for this and then maybe we'll do a little over clocking the only setting I have changed is it's set to sync all cores they now default at 2 per core because remember last year when Coffey Lake launched it was this big scandal about various motherboard manufacturers shipping with this turned on by default to sync all cores but we're doing that because that actually is an overclock which means our turbo clock is going to apply to all cores and not just the one or two threads that are being tasked with all of that work so it also means we're leaving this at stock voltage and we'll monitor that will let the watercooler run for about 15 minutes to let it get up to temp and then we will monitor our temperatures and go from there and then we'll see whether or not I'm even smart enough to install this thing hopefully it's not hard but you know I kind of make things that are easy seem hard sometimes so there's that so it's been running for 16 minutes now and the temperatures are pretty decent actually so this is the current value this is the minimum who cares about that honestly and this is the max so our averages here which I'm going to call value is sitting typically in the 60s and 70s on the very right hand side right here these are the spikes like this spike right here you'll probably see one come up here in a second because it's doing mathematical equations and what will happen here is it will like eventually come up across something that just spikes it and it has to do like a hard calculation and then the temp goes up suddenly but you could say here's one right there I just came up now that came back down so that's what these spikes are so what we care about obviously are these two columns we want to see if we stay roughly in the 60s and 70s and what if our spikes get any worse with air now remember this is stuck this is all cores running at 4.7 gigahertz stock voltage and all that stuff that one setting is all that was changed I didn't go in here and do any manual overclocking any manual turbo clock or voltage or any of that so as you can see the 8700 K definitely still can can spike pretty high but in terms of our max temperature though this is still roughly 20 degrees away from 20 degrees Celsius away from t.j.maxx no it's not just a story that stands for thermal Junction although you can get some great deals at t.j.maxx but you can see right here with the exception of these spikes this is pretty steady and that's exactly what I was thinking was going to happen one other thing worth pointing out too is the radiator fans were running at about 1200 rpm these are actually 2200 rpm fans I believe they're the EK var DARS but I'm running them at half speed because Triple R add 360 rad not that big of a the CPU can handle it or it can handle the CPU whatever yeah so let's go and put the air cooler on and compare because that's kind of the point of today's video remember it was a mission and we accepted it I decided maybe you didn't I don't know if you're still watching that means you did okay it's all installed it seems like it's working the system's booted up I haven't looked at temperatures yet the downside is I can't really see the little readout oh there it is we're idling at 24 C we are plugged into PWM so where you're gonna be using the fan curve from the motherboard to control the fans they're very quiet essentially you have two independent towers but they are shared vapor chamber cooler so you have six heat pipes running to each one of these towers that's the same heat pipe that goes across and then we have a fan that's actually bigger than the cooler and at first you'd look at that and be like why would they do that why would they do it well a couple of reasons one there's actually air flow coming off the top of this so which helps actually move air across the case two it hangs down off the bottom here so that you're actually gonna be moving air across things like vrm memory I've had beside this side of the memory on this modulus Chile because it's blowing air directly at it and so it's got a very very nice design as you would expect from Noctua the only thing that really kind of stinks about it my opinion is still the tan and brown they are so proud of that tannin Brown so proud in fact I think they actually limit their sales for no the truth I think if they just made them all black my prediction is they'd sell 35% more units in that first month you guys can send me the profit if that turns out to be true so ribs are gonna do we're gonna go and test this we're gonna run it's all the same BIOS settings we're gonna run OC CT for the same amount of time and we're gonna see if the temperatures really changed all that much now I'm pretty excited because I know the NHD 14 is the cooler that everyone was obsessed with that was the cooler that everyone was like no don't go AI o get in an HD 14 this is supposed to be the successor to that that is that much better huh we'll let this go but do I dare say this already seems slightly better than the harder cooling stuff that can't be they just want to mentor so there was a little bit of heat soaked because if we look at the spikes here we went much higher on the spikes we did on water but again a couple of degree is not too bad I mean 87 was our max score Oh 88 88 was our max score 83 81 but if you look at our averages though this is so much better than I was expecting it to be remember we are technically running a twenty seven point six percent overclock over our base running at four point seven two two gigahertz on all six cores now why these temperatures so close I can tell you why they're so close because the IHS Tim on this the thermal interface material is still crap now the water cooler is a little bit better at being able to handle those spikes because it has a more efficient transfer of heat but the true transfer of heat efficiency is lost with the terrible Intel application of thermal paste which is why everyone dee lids these CPUs and eighth gens and the seventh gen extreme like the you know obviously the seven 100x is known to be really hot as you go up it gets worse so this I need to just buckle down and actually do the deal inning on some of these CPUs if I want to be serious about the temperatures I was a little concerned though I mean I was getting really sad because I was like crap this is gonna I'm literally handing the water cooling haters the ammunition they need to tell me about how everything I do the water cooling stuff is just a waste of time but you know what else is a waste of time trying to put a man on the moon but we did it anyway the other reality here is the fact that both coolers obviously are 360 by 40 millimeter radiator and are Noctua NHD 15 exceed the amount of thermal capacity that we need to keep the chip cool based on the amount of heat making it through that crap beat their thermal interface material does that make sense you have you have this between the cooler and the CPU die this this thing so you have to get heat from here to here and then from there to there what's being handled from the top of the IHS to the cooler is doing a really good job because again both of these coolers exceed the amount of heat that is being in making it through that what sucks is again the dye and the material between the heat spreader and the dye is where a lot of heat is getting trapped and not making it through so I could put the best cooler in the world on this I could build I could take that 480 times 4 radiator that we built and stick it on this right now and it probably wouldn't be any cooler than the 360 rat is simply because of the fact that the heat isn't making it out and thermal capacity is not what's holding us back so when a really long roundabout way I'm saying if you're not comfortable with water cooling you obviously have options out there they're gonna give you great performance without being too concerned with whether or not you're gonna keep your stuff cool enough now obviously we need to address this was done in an open air testbed because we wanted the only factor in cooling to be the cooler itself there's no case I could have possibly put this in that would have basically matched everyone's use case scenario back home so as long as you have proper air flow in your case your results should be similar anyway guys we're gonna go I've had a lot of requests lately to do some air cooling stuff and as we move into the summer months except for Australia we know you guys are upside-down and you guys are in the upside down and you're dealing with winter right now so obviously you guys are having cooling issues but for the rest of us when we're dealing with temperature problems and heat and all this stuff in the summertime which obviously brings out cooling issues I like to cover a lot of cooling topics in the summer months so if you have a suggestion please put it in the comments down below or hit me up on Twitter at Jays two cents and give me your suggestions this was one of them and I reached out to Noctua asked for this cooler because it was requested and we did it anyway guys we're gonna go thanks for watching I have a couple of videos they're gonna pop up right here you might find them interesting please feel free to check those outs and as always we will see you in the next one stupid cooler doing some goods water cooling this stuff people mad Computers making things compute computers are cool they bring things in your home today wait to ways at 575 write a haiku by J's two cents computers are really cool they briefing watch my videos they help me pay for the things that I do in here\n"