$4.35 Fix for Intel Thermal Problems | Thermalright 12th Gen Contact Frame

[Music] this piece of metal is four dollars and 35 cents right now on aliexpress and we are going to trust it to bend our 800 intel i9 12 900 ks this is the highly requested for review thermal write lga 1700 contact frame or as thermal write calls it it is the cpu bending correction frame protector fixing buckle good enough we're gonna trust it on our 1200 ks so this competes directly with the 35 thermal grizzly contact frame which we looked at recently in a review and given the price difference we're expecting at least something to be different but for four and a half bucks almost the thermal right frame is in fierce competition with what thermal grizzly started before that this video is brought to you by squarespace we use squarespace for our own gn store and juggle complex multi-piece orders all the time with it squarespace makes it fast for us to roll out new products with detailed pages full of galleries videos and descriptors it's also useful for your own resume sites for photographer or project portfolios or for starting your new small business idea there's never been a better time to try and start your new business than right now and we can vouch that squarespace makes it easy visit squarespace.com gamersnexus to get 10 off your first purchase with squarespace the thermal grizzly frame reduced thermals by about seven degrees celsius for basically no work it's a little bit you have to swap out the intel ilm which is this thing for a thermal grizzly contact frame but other than that a little bit of work it's pretty simple and for seven degrees that's a big drop especially if you're looking at something like a small form factor solution where you need every degree celsius you can get out of the cpu because your cooling options are limited so now we're back to see how the thermal right competing option does we have one more we're going to look at that we bought from amazon it was in between these two price points but we're going to the extreme low today now to be fair thermal rights contact frame sells for closer to 10 to 20 depending on what you're looking at online for us-based retailers like amazon but if you're willing to wait maybe three months to infinity depending on if it ever shows up then aliexpress gives you the cheapest option possible these frames that ship in pretty simple packaging so it comes in one of these and then there's gray which you see here there's a black option here they all look the same in every way except for the color there's red that you see here it's a really nice red actually and then there's a blue option which we have mounted to a motherboard right now and you see that here in addition to the colorways that they offer it comes with a thermal paste syringe that is honestly mostly empty it looks like it has a lot more pace than it really does because the plunger is almost all the way down you get maybe a gram or a little more down here and it comes with a torx driver that you're going to need to tighten the screws now the thermal right frame colors are nice and they do look good when installed on the board but ultimately you're not buying this for the looks you're buying it for function and you won't even be able to see it once it's under a cooler anyway unfortunately but you can rest assured knowing that your build looks cooler than the next person's in ways that nobody can see or qualify so they'll just have to take your word for it the big topic between these two competitors is obviously price because the thermal grizzly option here is again at 35 even if you look at a more generous price point of 20 on the thermal right one 15 saves pretty significant difference like 50 when you're talking at the price point that these are at so there has to be a difference and the one that at least thermal grizzly would market the most heavily would be quality thermal grizzly's biggest claim with its contact for him is that the tolerances are extremely tight they claim no greater than a 40 micron difference in the thickness of this frame from unit to unit and that affects the mounting pressure and how it all works meanwhile thermal right well we tested it and we'll get back to that now for thermal grizzly on these the way they talk about installing it is by doing a witness mark on a screw which we actually show in footage with mike from our team and then aligning it with one of the tick marks on the thermal grizzly contact frame which allows you to get a pretty good estimation for torque without having a torque driver and that level of accuracy is gone with the thermal right solution which instead takes a more yellow approach of tighten it until it stops so thermal grizzlies cost whether or not it actually matters we'll get to in a moment comes from a few places for one we found when testing that the thermal right frame has a thickness variance of about 240 microns or 0.24 millimeters and that's from one frame to the next we have about six of them here so thermal grizzlies variance from frame to frame again is about 40 microns maximally in theory this variance would affect how tightly the user needs to install the screws which will affect things like memory frequency stability at the high end and potentially thermal performance or at least the pressure distribution you'll get across the surface now the frequency is the one variable we're not testing today because there's an unbelievable amount of variables there it's extremely difficult to test and it's hard to quantify ultimately because it's memory overclocking like it's very complicated for other reasons so we're not able to isolate our own memory overclocking skill to the point where we could reasonably identify a difference between the frame so we are going to be looking at the pressure which we can do very well and the thermals which we can also do very well so another reason for thermal grizzlies cost when we're trying to figure it out why why can thermal write sell between four dollars and say 10 to 20 and thermal grizzlies stuck at 35 it can't that's too much to just only be margin and so when we're researching it we learned from thermal grizzly that the company is manufacturing its contact frame in berlin germany and it also noted to us that none of its manufacturing for the contact frame is outsourced at all it's all done in-house all the design and engineering was done in-house and that's all there is to it maybe the box is made by someone else so that's where the cost is the cost is coming from where it's made where it's a much higher labor wage speaking with der bauer from thermal grizzly he noted to us that his goal is to do more manufacturing than germany to create good paying jobs for the staff that works for thermal grizzly that cost of course to make it in germany is going to be reflected in the price to consumers so there's your two choices one's significantly cheaper and one has definitely tighter tolerances in our own testing that may or may not matter depending on well it will matter a little bit it's just with thermal right you can adjust for it you have to spend a little bit more time tweaking the screws if it doesn't work exactly as you hope when you install the first time but if you take every step that mike from our team gives you you'll be fine the differences in manufacturing quality do shine through a little bit we've noticed for example that there are some rougher edges on some of the thermal right frames where you can feel some metal burrs along the edge of the aluminum this doesn't affect the functionality it will not affect the thermals and it won't affect the pressure so you could make the argument that it just doesn't matter and if you're paying extra money for thermal grizzly although those faults won't exist at least on hours it also isn't something that'll affect the performance now the back story behind why these frames exist is something that we explained pretty well in our first review that we'll link below we're not going to go over it all again today but we made some animations showing how this the intel ilm or the independent loading mechanism works and how it applies pressure and where it has weaknesses that both of these contact frames are able to competently solve whether it's from the much cheaper the more expensive brand first up in our testing is pressure testing we use a chemically reactive paper with a national institute of science and technology traceable scanner which was made affordable by our patreon backers at patreon.com slash gamers access and by our store purchasers buying things like this limited edition cyber skeleton shirt that's made with water cooling tubes for the rib cage it's got a pump cap with gold around it for the heart by the way we've learned on the team that hearts are further in than we thought and we reflected that in the accuracy of this design you can grab this on store.gamersnexus.net it helps us fund things like buying test equipment like our nist traceable pressure scanner so we use this for the test and we tested this against five total cpus we're only going to show three of them today because they all show the same data points we did five cpus with at least two test passes per cpu sometimes we went with three just because we saw something we didn't like and then we did that with multiple contact frames now critically this is done with a single cooler that we know has a very good pressure distribution it's the arctic liquid freezer 2 and we're using the 420 version of it the reason you just want to use one cooler is one to control how much testing is being completed the first contact frame we did for the thermal grizzly one uh just for mike's time not counting mine on test lead and engineering the test cases andrew's on editing and filming uh or any of the qc time we put in only for mike's testing time 40 hours so that's why we do one cooler and then additionally the goal is to isolate the variable as the contact solution whether that's an ilm or a contact frame and not test coolers although we do swap the cpus so that we make sure we're at least gauging for that starting with the 12700 pressure test we'll go left to right as a refresher the intel ilm had gaps centrally and at the bottom of the ihs shown in both test passes this isn't the worst pressure distribution from cooler to cold plate but we're still missing about a third of the ihs the thermal grizzly frame covered almost everything including more of the center it still had reduced pressure here but to some extent that's expected there isn't any direct pressure application in the center and it's the farthest point from the mount from any of the screws the thermal right frame is the new one this still resolves the bottom center gap that the intel ilm had and it looks similar to the thermal grizzly frame so a very strong start for the much cheaper thermal write option the border coverage is more rounded than the thermal grizzly frame and the center is overall lacking some of the pressure from the cooler so we would say that these are a good improvement overall over the intel frame this one here but not necessarily over the thermal grizzly frame versus thermal grizzly it's basically the same between the two here's the 12 900 ks starting at the left the intel ilm lacks coverage centrally and along the edge closest to the ram just like last time the bottom half of the pressure map is completely lacking as well this was resolved with thermal grizzly which was able to get coverage centrally and along the bottom though lost some pressure between the ihs and the cooler along the top edge it was still a market improvement especially with the central coverage the thermal right frame improves on both the intel ilm and the thermal grizzly solution its coverage is overall even with a gap forming consistently and only in the bottom left so for four dollars this is looking good so far with the i9 12 900 9k the intel ilm showed the same gap centrally and along the bottom as before the thermal grizzly frame improved in all aspects especially pressure centrally and adding thermal right to the mix the coverage was mostly the same as thermal grizzlies the center is improved the ram side edge now has coverage over the intel ilm just like with the thermal grizzly frame and any remaining lacking areas of coverage are acceptable next up is thermal testing so for this it is extremely important to control all of the variables especially the voltages and the frequency a motherboard has more than just cpu v core it has things like vccsa vccio if it's amd then you have vsoc and all these voltages be dim as well need to be controlled and set at a fixed level and not automatically fluctuating the board will auto fluctuate voltages depending on how the bios is built and depending on what the cpu wants at any given time so we fix these for our testing because without doing so the thermal data is pointless we also control things like the fan and the pump speed and we control the local testing environment to be basically exactly 21 degrees celsius plus or minus one degree and then we do a delta t over ambient for the temperature that we present all these controls are extremely important to getting good test data and we use a 12-900 ks that we've manually tuned for all of this testing here's the chart the blue bar shows the original intel stock ilm red shows thermal grizzly and orange shows thermal write our tolerance is about plus or minus one degree celsius the left labels show data for the average all core cpu temperature under load the average maximum temperature per interval and that's over hundreds of rows as always and the core decor delta or the hottest core to the coolest core the thermal grizzly and thermal right frames both improved significantly over intel stock ilm dropping by about seven to eight degrees celsius on average or about 10 degrees on the average maximum core temperature for the thermal right frame the core decor delta is mostly the same and largely within error although there's technically data to support some improvement with the two contact frames these frames clearly work and there's data to support that they work but what there isn't is data to clearly support that one is meaningfully different than the other outside of the intel ilm changes or comparisons and we did five test passes minimally with multiple remounts in there so we have at least two passes for the first mount then we do another amount and this allows us to make sure that we're eliminating or normalizing for human error or averaging over as much as possible in the installation process especially with thermal rights where it's not as mechanically dictated as thermal grizzlies mounting solution so we're not seeing a big difference and we can't really make a claim as to one being thermally superior to the other at least between the ones that we've tested but thermal write does have more variance frame to frame so it's possible that you have to change how much you torque the screw to get the maximum result depending on if yours is one that's a little bit thicker a little bit thinner within the tolerances ultimately the natural variation between the thermal grizzly frame and the thermal right frame makes these two look identical in thermal testing and in pressure testing so with that i'm going to throw it over to mike who's going to walk you through the installation process because these things there's a reason they don't come stock on intel boards and it's because it's very easy to screw it up during the installation and introduce instability uh even when you're running default settings and not overclocking so mike can take it away thanks steve we're going to be going over the installation and then we're going to talk a little bit about some of the differences between this contact frame and the thermal grizzly frame that we reviewed previously and sort of what my end user experience was when i was testing this frame so if you haven't already seen the thermal grizzly review you should go back and watch it this installation segment is going to be a little bit more brief and not going to have quite as much detail as the thermal grizzly review did so be sure to check that out so i'm going to go ahead and place our frame down and now the frame is marked with the same um indications that the cpu has for the right corner the little triangle that they put in the the corners but again the holes are offset so you can't orient the contact frame incorrectly it just won't the holes won't line up and you won't be able to install it now i'm going to place my four screws in their respective holes and i'm going to start walking them backwards and by backwards i mean counterclockwise when looking down at the top of the screws and what that's going to do is it's going to give me an audible click and i'm going i'm continuing to move counterclockwise here so you guys can hear that click but this is this is a way to prevent cross threading and we went over this in the thermal grizzly but it's a very important uh technique to to use especially with these finer machine threaded screws and i'm going to give it about 90 degrees from when i hear that audible click and i'm going to go caddy corner or diagonally across the cpu here and i'm going to do the same thing so there's the click it fell the threads are falling into place and i'm going to give it about 90 degrees there move across here do the same thing 90 degrees and our final screw and 90 degrees now i'm going to go through all four corners and continue to slowly walk these in and the reason i'm doing this in in segments or in 90 degree increments is it's going to prevent the frame from becoming off kilter or or walking unevenly down towards the cpu right so i'm i'm slowly lowering the cpu ideally in a perfect world we'd have four screws that we could turn simultaneously so the frame would sink down on the cpu and you know in evenly so now that we've got resistance on all four corners we're going to start tightening down in smaller increments and i'm going to do that to try to avoid over tightening again and walking the frame unevenly down on the cpu and creating uneven contact with the pins now thermal write unfortunately doesn't provide any torque specs or guidance on how to do this process their instructions are picture based and they basically have show you where the screws go and then show you the frame fully installed i while testing this went until i've hit a hard wall of resistance and then i did not actually tighten into that hard wall of resistance so i guess we could break it down into sort of two different steps right during the initial installation while we're walking it down there shouldn't be any resistance right we walked our screws backwards we got them to thread properly and then we we lowered the frame down onto the cpu and then as soon as we hit that resistance we slowly walked it down further until we hit a hard wall of resistance so and once we hit that hard wall i didn't tighten it down any further because of the resistance of the pins pushing the cpu back up it's creating tension on the frame and it's going to keep it locked into place so that hard wall of resistance exists on this contact frame because the bottom of the frame is making physical contact with the top and the motherboard which is of course different than the thermal grizzly solution which which doesn't actually go down and tighten all the way into the board there's no washers or standoffs or anything that's actually touching the the top of the pcb on the motherboard i actually in use really liked this it made for consistent mounting and certainly gave me a more measurable understanding of when the frame was evenly tightened down as well as just being pretty darn secure because we worked through that second level of resistance i knew i was you know pushing the cpu down onto the pins and getting good contact and i was kind of trusting thermal rights machining and engineering that those the cpu isn't getting pushed too far down or too far up i didn't have any issues while testing this frame getting it to boot or post i had no i caused no damage to boards thank goodness i'm sure steve appreciates that so overall i was impressed of course looks pretty cool but then again who cares it's not going to be visible under cooler so that wraps up the installation segment and i'm going to throw it back to steve so that's it then here's what we can say the thermal right frame purely from a performance perspective in our testing performs about the same if not identically to the thermal grizzly frame so they've done well there they've matched a far more expensive competitor in the market where again your price range is at least 15 between them and at most closer to thirty dollars of difference with the sort of asterisk that it may take quite a while to get to you there are some machining issues where we can feel these harsher edges that catch on the skin on the thermal write option but all the ones that we felt on the frames we have are on the outside where it's not going to affect anything it does mean you could see it where some of the quality differences but again a lot of the quality or a lot of the differences in general might not be things that you notice if you're doing extreme overclocking and you care about the memory frequency greatly we would still suggest leaning towards the thermal grizzly frame instead because it's been tuned specifically for that and that's the one variable that is very difficult to test for just because of you're introducing all this overclocking difficulty and it's something that we're not particularly adept at testing for with maximum memory frequency for an overclock so thermal grizzlies tolerance should help you there and the more specific guidance on how to mount it and torque it properly thermal rights is easier in that regard it's also potentially easier to screw up just depending on your own skill level mechanically and how good you are working with normal hardware like tools so there's a few ways to look at the conclusion purely on price and things like color options thermal writes doing extremely well the blue and the red ones look really sharp we love how they look on the motherboards unfortunately you're not going to be able to see it once it's in your computer and you've got something over it now maybe now even even if you get something an acrylic block or something you're ultimately unless it's all acrylic at which point you'll really need the frame because it's not going to cool anything at some point there's copper involved you're not going to be able to see it unfortunately even though it does look cool so that's kind of an irrelevant point but pricing wise very fierce competitor we can recommend the thermal right one we would advise a little more caution when installing it but you can deal with it and you save a lot of money if it's something you're interested in uh for extreme overclockers we'd still say go thermal grizzly just because the tighter tolerances and because it's been tested by an exo-seer who's very respected and it's just that's too hard for us to test right now maybe something in the future for us but that's one of our limitations with testing uh and then for other aspects they're mostly things like social angles where if you care about where it's made and you would prefer something made say in germany well then you're gonna pay for it and that's just how it works uh even things like the aluminum price where der bauer and thermal grizzly are using a 77.5 aluminum and going to a cheaper aluminum like say a 6061 or something it'll save some money and also the price in germany when we looked up the supplier pricing for metals would put a frame like either one of these at a little over two dollars in cost just for the aluminum before you even get to the machining the manufacturing process the shipping the packaging everything else so it's really hard to compete with a frame that's 4.35 cents on aliexpress if you have two dollars of cost just in the metal alone and part of that gets into a greater discussion that we're not going to get into on this channel but it gets into things like trade subsidies that are frankly way outside of our scope and we barely understand so there's no point in even talking about them but both of them perform very well they're both improvements over the intel ilm you've got enough information to make your choice between them now and thank you for the suggestions for those of you who want us to review the thermal right one we have one more coming and it's going to be a walmart option we'll see how that does check back for it subscribe for more as always you can go to store.gamers store.gamersnexus.net or patreon.com such gamers and access to help us out directly and you should be buying one of our cyberskeleton shirts if you want it because they're limited we will not make them again after the first run and it helps fund testing like this thank you for watching we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 798,673

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, thermalright contact frame, thermal grizzly contact frame, thermalright vs thermal grizzly cpu frame, cpu bending frame, intel 12th gen contact frame

Id: iYU1OskbY-Q

Length: 24min 18sec (1458 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 28 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/based-richdude]

This is a perfect real world example of why companies outsource, very minimal difference in quality/performance and 85% cheaper.

[u/no_butseriously_guys]

Can't even get Thermal Grizzly's frame anywhere.

[u/Recklen]

Anyone remember copper/anodized aluminum shims for Athlons?

[u/NKG_and_Sons]

Given that Thermalright was apparently first to market with their solution, too, it's just clearly the more attractive product.

TG's better quality in terms of fewer burrs and tighter tolerances seemingly doesn't have a measurable advantage in the end.

It's fine to pay a premium for better quality and made in Germany, but from what I've seen, I'd probably prefer Thermalright's solution even at the same price, thanks to simpler but just as effective mounting.

[u/MrMoussab]

They tried so hard to make people buy thermal grizzly's frame instead.

[u/inyue]

Can someone give me a link to buy the $4.35 Thermalright?

[u/ctrltab2]

Mike makes it look easy, but I am curious how many first time builders and even veteran builders would mess up swapping the ILM?

[u/psychosikh]

TLDW:

Thermal Grizzly's $35 contact frame : 8 C under stock

Thermalright $4.35 contact frame : 9.7 C under stock

(Max core temperature 312W 420MM AIO)

Be carefully when installing.

[u/knz0]

I happened to have one sitting on my desk for a week, but I had been lazy. This video made me finally install it, so thanks for that. I booted up normally and I'm typing this right now, so I guess I didn't screw up anything.

Installation was surprisingly easy, I think they amount of time they spent in the video warning users was a bit excessive. But maybe it's better to be safe than sorry. LGA1700 mobos are expensive and you don't want to be fucking up your pins.