Amazon "Made" A CPU Cooler: Amazon Basics Cooler Review

[Music] this is Amazon's take on a CPU Cooler it's actually real and they're cannibalistic Amazon Basics brand is now getting into computers continuing the product centipede-like circle of eating top selling branded products and then spitting them out as characterless first party copies for as cheap as possible it's the Amazon Basics cooler and this 28 dollar mini tower has it all it's got a fan and the fan has an LED it's got some fins it's got some copper heat pipes but there's more it comes in this box they actually just stick the shipping label straight to it and we added the text on the front and the box contains some parts in a manual so it isn't to be fair to them it is in fact actually extremely basic and because it's 28 that's kind of the point of this but the cooler Market is really Fierce where there are already a lot of good options that are not distant in price so like the thermal right assassin spirit is similar in price at least when we reviewed it and it's a larger cooler the Amazon Basics one is a 92 millimeter Tower versus the 120 tower for thermal ride of course you also have stock coolers that these days are much better than they used to be and are pretty competitive options with a similarly sized 90 millimeter fan so this is what we're going to be looking at and while we were looking at it we noticed a couple of familiar details the heat pipes are almost identical to cooler Masters coloring for heat pipes the fin stack also identical to their standard coloring for an aluminum fin stack some companies have sort of a different shade of an aluminum color depending on how they finish it and the fan is basically a classic identical Cooler Master fan so we asked someone at Cooler Master unofficially if this is a Cooler Master product and they they said yes before that this video is brought to you by linode cloud computing from Akamai our web hosting provider that we've been using for over a decade now and our experience as a long-term customer of linode they have reliable server Solutions and make server setup Easy by providing all kinds of first install scripts and launch points you can quickly build your own self-hosted VPN game servers for CS Go Minecraft and more by using their quick start guides and extremely detailed documentation we also have first-hand experience with their support team and can vouch for the quality even when all the mistakes were mine visit linwood.com Gamers Nexus to get a 100 credit when you sign up today or click the link below so basically Cooler Master is making this Amazon Basics cooler they've stuck a black label on the fan on the center of it to get rid of Where The Cooler Master logo would be the back of the fan label also is simplified where the title of it says computer fan and that's basically it I mean it tells you 12 volts 0.4 amps but not more than that the shape of this particular Tower is really identifiable where you see you've got kind of this like chamfered Edge comes in around the back same up here and we were able to with the knowledge that this is originally a Cooler Master product that Amazon is uh cutting pennies out of for the cost and sticking their name on to I mean eventually push everyone else out if they can of the category when we looked into it we noticed that it's a Cooler Master h410r which later was rebranded as an h412r but it looks like the h410 there's a few changes but for the most part Amazon just rips The Cooler Master stickers off debranded it and that's it it's not like they're stealing from Cooler Master Cooler Master is just straight up OEM I mean for Amazon they do the same thing for nvidia's Quadro coolers for instance but Amazon's able to cut costs where most other companies maybe feel like they can't because they have to sit on potentially a real physical retail shelf somewhere if not on Amazon then maybe in a Micro Center or Best Buy or somewhere in a different region of the world Amazon doesn't have to worry about that they sell on Amazon which they own obviously and it sits in a warehouse so they can cut costs on the box to get rid of painting so we actually don't hate we don't put any ink on our boxes either more for because I think it's wasteful because you just get rid of the box but but uh when their competitors have to do it that's where they save Penny same thing for all this packaging it's kept extremely Bare Bones you get nothing more than the literal absolute Basics hence the name and uh it is as I said in the intro a pretty characterless way to make a product but when you compete on price that's really your only Avenue it cut cost anyone can compete on price so let's look at this mechanically so as we look at the cooler it is very basic it's four heat pipes they are copper heat pipes they're not nickel plated or anything like that and it's got an aluminum fin stack very basic it's basically I mean every cooler does this but things like fin pitch and density that's where you get some of the engineering and of course finishes on materials like nickel plating the heat pipes on oh I dropped this one on purpose for a gimmick in a video that's why it's damaged heat pipe's so good that they oppose gravity let's see if they work nope let's look at that side nickel plating the heat Pipes make it look a little bit better things like that I played in the aluminum fin stack but here you don't get any of that there is a fairly basic uh I keep saying that simple cold plate it's got copper heat pipe direct contact this is potentially a pitfall where if they haven't refined the tolerances and I sincerely doubt they have then the areas between the aluminum plate and the copper heat pipe are more likely to require some assistance from extra thermal paste to make contact because it may be a deeper Valley or Groove but at 28 dollars you know it is up against again that the spirit about the same price the ak-400 depending on which version you get is not too far in price and is a far nicer looking cooler performance wise we'll look at that in the review today and then you go up a little higher still to say 30 something dollars maybe uh maybe 40 or so and you get something like the Peerless assassin rather than the Assassin Spears and then Mike will expand it a little bit on how it actually installs and what his thoughts and criticisms are on this but before we get over to Mike we're going to talk about the pressure map and the flatness for this cooler pressure scanning is first this tests the mounting hardware and pressure applied by the mounting kit which helps us to understand points of contact by the cooler to the CPU we use carefully calibrated scanning tools for this that were made affordable thanks to all of you who support us on patreon over at patreon.com Gamers Nexus thanks for all of your help and we just posted a new behind the scenes video exclusive for patreon backers over there since the CPU is powered off for a pressure test it actually doesn't matter what CPU we use to mount it to it's just a test vehicle so for this one the 3950x scan presented extremely poor contact we're relying on thermal paste entirely to bridge the gaps here which means that this cooler will perform significantly worse if you have bad paced spread we apply our paste manually and spread it over the CPU so it's no problem for our tests it's just something you need to be careful about there's one good point of heat pipe contact at the bottom of the skin partial contact act on the top pipe basically none without Pace that leaves on the second pipe and some on the third adding the 3800x scans it's basically the same just with another CPU so it's not a matter of an individual CPU but the cooler itself is just making poor contact everywhere this is actually the worst scan of a CPU Cooler that we've seen yet the flatness is up next for this test we measure from a Known Zero Point to test for depth in microns the most important part is that the flatness is consistent from point to point not necessarily the absolute depth and this is the chart The Wider the Box the more range there is point to point that's the median and these are done in quartiles the highest point isn't necessarily damage as long as the Box itself is narrow in this instance the Amazon Basics cooler is one of the worst we've tested yet again the flatness has similar Peaks to the Assassin Spirit which breaks the bounds here and to the freezer 34. however both of those had excellent median results so so the box has been thin with those indicate overall a flat contact patch the A500 by Corsair was the previous worst for median point-to-point flatness and that was due to a design error where the heat pipes weren't smoothed equally in the instance of the Amazon cooler the deepest pits are mostly in between the direct heat pipes and the aluminum plate that surrounds them that's fine if it's all filled with paste and in our testing it is but higher end coolers typically have tighter tolerances here and smaller gaps and that's just the obvious trade-off for going cheap you lose quality somewhere this was clearly it for Amazon and or Cooler Master now that we know about how the mechanics affect the cooler we're going to go over to the installation and criticism of the mounting mechanism from Mike welcome back to another installation segment let's go ahead and jump in out of the box you're it's going to come to you like this with no brackets installed so we're going to go ahead and take the fan off which is actually it's very easy to install and uninstall I actually really liked that and we're going to get these brackets installed so both the Intel and AMD have have two brackets that install from the bottom here via one screw that holds them into place go ahead and walk this backwards so you might be noticing I don't know if it can if it's a apparent or obvious in the footage that's being collected right now but this screw is off at a little angle and we will be talking about that a little bit later okay so the brackets are installed we're ready to move on to putting it onto the motherboard which I so conveniently have ready to go right here so you're going to remove your AMD stock brackets which I didn't have screwed in it's almost like I plan this and then we are going to oh we got apply our thermal paste can't forget that all right and now we're going to put our cooler into place on the CPU so this cooler is directional in quotation marks the front side of the cooler or the front face is larger than the back the back tapers so the fan can only be mounted on this larger face so we're going to face that towards the ram I'm gonna place that down I'm going to hold this AMD bracket up so that I can rest the cooler on it and I've got those lined up now so I'm going to go ahead and start all four corners of this cooler in there respective threads okay and that's all started and now I'm gonna go die alternating diagonally across the cooler I'm just going to start tightening down all four corners here it's cooler you can tighten down until these go snug and it it's totally safe I actually kind of like that it takes out any kind of guesswork on the installation next you would go ahead and install your fan which I will do because it's so quick and easy with this fan I actually really liked this um this Fan's plastic Clips I'm normally not a fan of plastic for parts that you have to pry on but this seems pretty substantial and does a pretty good job it's easy to take on easy you put on and easy to take off the Intel brackets install identically to the AMD brackets they they thread in Via one screw each from the bottom of the cooler and of course they included an Intel back plate this one's plastic but it does have the adjustable holes for um Intel 1700 and 1200 socket types so and you got everything you need there it is it is plastic I'm not a huge fan of that but you know we're looking at a budget cooler okay let's talk about criticisms um I had two things I didn't really like about this Cooler's installation Hardware um and one was more of a manufacturing flaw the female threads on the AMD brackets that are currently in use right now they were tapped at an angle I was very careful when I was initially installing this and I I noticed it when I was trying to get the screw to thread that it every time the threads wanted to catch I was noticing that the screw would tilt off to an angle I normally back a screw out we've talked about this a lot but I back a screw out uh you know in in Reverse or counterclockwise in order to make sure that I'm catching the threads properly before I go clockwise and or in a tightening Direction and these were very clearly at an angle we'll get some close-ups of that in fact I'm going to go ahead and take this cooler off now to show you the other item that I wasn't too fond of as you can see this is the screw I was talking about the top of it is kind of canted off to the side as compared to the screw on the other side which is obviously flush and fits nicely together but that brings me to my other criticism which is the driver that I'm having to use for this these screws were Phillips head ones Phillips head two which is your kind of your standard your common screwdriver Phillips head it won't work here they don't fit so um you know for something a little bit more expensive maybe that's a little more acceptable but you know this is a budget cooler and maybe this is somebody's first time assembling a computer at all so it's a minor criticism but it's something to be aware of and that wraps up the installation segment for the Amazon basic Schooler and I'm going to throw back to Steve now okay now we're back to me to do the thermal analysis so for our thermal testing we have a whole methodology video on it we'd encourage you to watch it but the quick Basics that matter the most we do all of our testing in a heavily control rolled ambient environment so the ambient temperature is kept flat for the entire test we take a delta T over ambient reading and then for variables that we control it's basically all of them but there are a lot people don't think about so for example the motherboard you really need to be controlling uh not just V core but vsoc V dim vddg vddio every possible vsoc every possible voltage you can find for the Board needs to be controlled because if any of them are Auto controlled and adjust even a little bit during testing you've invalidated your comparison between other coolers so we control all that we also have a current sensing setup so that we can monitor the current for every second actually goes down to milliseconds but of the test to make sure the power consumption is the same when we test this one versus this one so we know that there are no changes in the test setup because power is ultimately what you're testing how well does it cool a known power load through the CPU so that's some of the controls we have a whole separate video on it but let's take a look at some of the numbers we'll start with the 68 watt heat load when noise normalized this would be comparable for low end CPUs like r5s i3s non-k skew i5s and stuff like that the Amazon Basics cooler held the CPU at 41 degrees Celsius delta T over ambient in this test marking it as comparable to the veteran V5 despite the v5's initial budget oriented success it's been largely outmoded by other coolers that's the risk with competing on price someone especially Amazon can always be cheaper the Amazon cooler is significantly better than the 35 DBA noise normalized AMD stock cooler results including The Wraith prism and The Wraith Spire the 11 degree reduction against the Spire makes it actually a meaningful upgrade and compared to higher end options the thermal right assassin Spirit which was about the same price actually runs three degrees cooler that's significant when the heat load is this low as there's really not much room for better coolers to stretch their legs the 100 fan speed test is uncapped so louder coolers can Propel themselves to the top of the chart however the Amazon cooler already operates close to the 35 DBA normalization we perform and so it has little change the Amazon cooler held the CPU at 40.5 degrees Celsius over Ambience only a 0.5 degree change on average from the previous results that has it in the same hierarchical positioning so the Vectra V5 now holds a one degree lead but it's noticeably louder at 43 DBA the hyper 212 versus Amazon Basics are effectively Cooler Master competing against Cooler Master here runs 1.3 degrees better the Assassin Spirit maintains a leading position at a similar noise level while the Scythe boom 2 keeps its impressively efficient ranking with the best noise to Thermal results on this particular chart the only thing that beats this is going to be liquid coolers which are tested on higher end CPUs but for comparable prices the spirit would be the closest and then probably the 15 coolest cooler and then the 20 to 30 dollar 212 variants although those are also pretty outdated time to move to a denser chart and higher heat load this one tests 123 watt CPUs so r7s and some i5 skus and non-ki7 CPUs land here depending on generation this will also push the cheaper coolers to their limits the Amazon Basics cooler is the worst one on the charge it's at 63 degrees Celsius over Ambience but it's within error of the Vectra V5 the best single fan air cooler here is the noctua nhu14s with its 140 mil fan and then the Assassin's Spirit which is closer in price the spirit is nearly five degrees cooler than the Amazon basic solution which is a big jump considering the equivalent price the spirit has more recently been renamed we'll talk about that later though a 63 over Ambience is in the 80s for average temperature meaning without the delta T over ambient and given core to core Deltas can push some of those numbers into the 90s for individual cores we're at the limit of what's possible for 123 watt load with this cooler you should not buy the Amazon Basics cooler or the V5 for that matter for a hotter CPU particularly if you have a hotter ambient or you're using a closed off case finally at full speed 123 Watts it's still at the bottom of the chart some parts Shuffle when running quieter since they can't Brute Force the workload but Amazon remains in the same spot the vetero is a couple degrees cooler thanks to its noticeably louder fan so the Amazon Basics cooler honestly is better than it has any business being and that's because it's a Cooler Master cooler if Amazon actually made it probably wouldn't be as okay it's not impressive so once again the thermal right Spirit uh if you get it at a similar price it's just a better option certainly for efficiency you end up better with something higher end like a fuma 2 but that is a much more expensive one but there are plenty of coolers in the 30 range even though hyper T12 we wouldn't recommend it today there's better options ak-400 included but even that is uh depending on which version you get it's going to outperform the Amazon one for a similar price the stock coolers from AMD these days I mean the stealth for example really kind of struggles to keep up and in terms of noise efficiency they are they're very inefficient for the cooling capability you get at the noise level that they run and that's just the nature of a smaller condensed cooler but it's kind of quote-unquote free because it comes in the box but the conclusion here really is just that the Amazon Basics one it's an upgrade from a stock cooler from what we've tested and probably in most cases that is more noise efficient than a stock cooler but it's not better than a comparable aftermarket option for around thirty dollars and maybe when you check online the Amazon Basics one is cheaper than we're saying here the price has seem to change on them so if it drops 20 bucks a little more worth considering but even still because the Rebrand of Cooler Master you know there's going to be a Cooler Master option for around the same price and potentially you get a little bit more Flair with it depending on how much Amazon is cutting cool West would be another one to consider if you can wait for it to come in you'd be buying that through AliExpress or something though but we have a review where it's a 15 air cooler it does really well if you can stand or want the dragon that is emblazoned on the top of the cooler we still wouldn't recommend the Amazon Basics one overall though nor would we recommend The Cooler Master H4 10r or whatever it is that's the base model because it's gonna have the same problem specifically because the mounting pressure it's the worst Mountain pressure map we've ever seen it's really impressive in that way but not for a good reason and you only really get contact in that pressure map we showed earlier maybe the top pipe bottom pipe some of the third none of the second and it's just not good pressure distribution the flatness is also all over the place and that's because of those valleys where the heat pipe connects with the aluminum of the base plate but most companies that do a little bit higher end they have tighter tolerances more Machining and they'll fill those gaps a little bit better and run the heat pipe closer to the aluminum plate than what's happening on the Amazon one I.E The Cooler Master one so we still wouldn't recommend it but if you buy one it's not like it's a joke or it's true garbage uh it's okay and if you install it just make sure you apply the paste carefully we manually spread pace for our testing you should probably do the same but all that really matters is that you have enough going too little Pace here will actually impact the performance is you're not going to go too much so uh yeah I mean that's it for this one thanks for watching as always subscribe for more go to store.gamersaccess.net let's grab a shirt like this one or one of our mod mats and you can go to patreon.com Gamers Nexus to help us out directly if you like this kind of testing and our objective analysis thanks for watching we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 291,983

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, amazon basics cpu cooler, amazon basics computer, amazon basics cooler review, amazon basics cooler benchmark, amazon basics cooler worth it, cpu coolers, best cpu coolers 2023, cheap cpu coolers 2023

Id: iRe8zVCjCNw

Length: 22min 18sec (1338 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 04 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/deadgroundedllama]

The cooler is a 'de-branded' Cooler Master H410R/H412R.

[u/Ronin058]

The H410R is about the same product age as some of the older Hyper 212 variants, isn't it? I'm seeing Google search results dating back to the late 2000s / early 2010s?

Part of me suspects that Cooler Master is not so much "making" the product for Amazon as it is using Amazon as a conduit to dump old inventory.

[u/advester]

Amazon partnered with the wrong OEM. Their cooler is $28, which indeed is cheaper than the $40 Hyper H412R that it is debadged from. But Thermalright has the better product Assassin X 120 for only $18. Amazon Basics is going to turn into a “cheap” brand that isn’t actually cheaper, if you research your purchase.

[u/phrstbrn]

I'm a little disappointed how they chose what coolers to compare against in the review. GN included a bunch of 120mm and 140mm coolers, which some of those may compete on price, but they exist in another category - the small coolers have a time and a place.

Including the Aigo Shadow and AMD stock coolers was good inclusion, but I think they should have focused more on 92mm coolers in the review. For example, something like the ARTIC Freezer 7 X would been interesting in both the size and price category, and maybe throw in a NH-U9S for a "same size, higher price". I'm sure there are others in the small form factory category worth including. Include one or two of the larger 120mm or 140mm price-comparable options in there, and the NH-P1 is interesting for at least a reference point, but if you're going to compare against 8 120mm/140mm coolers, you need to include more 92mm and smaller coolers as well.

I think not including more 92mm options in the review is a bit of a miss. Maybe Steve or somebody can fill in why they chose to do it this way.

[u/hardrivethrutown]

I have owned a h412r, I could recognize it immediately lmao

[u/PyroKnight]

I find it odd and a little dissapointing how he didn't touch on the obvious clearance advantages of this cooler versus the others he compared it with. Really in any modern gaming case (like what his viewers would have) this likely isn't a concern, but I can see this cooler being useful on many prebuilts as an upgrade to stock coolers.

[u/Aleblanco1987]

4 heat pipes, not very tall and cheap.

I'ts what most people need with great case compatibility