Bizarre Chinese CPU Cooler: Cylindrical Aigo Shadow Max V5 Review

[Music] hey everyone today we're going to be looking at a an interesting cooler this is the patriotic cooler that's the name of it we'll get to that in a moment and it's very strange it's circular when you disassemble it and sort of pull it apart there's a fan that's inside of this chamber but it's it's an odd fan it looks and behaves more like propeller than anything else so we'll be taking it apart we have full thermal numbers we've got pressure testing all the usual stuff that we do for our cooler reviews it's something a little bit unique and maybe makes sense for a kiosk build that demands attention but thermally well you'll see but we're going to look at this cooler today it's fun it's different we got it for 28 from aliexpress and frankly that was probably too much so let's get started to try and make some of that back before that this video is brought to you by thermaltake and the thermaltake tough ram xg memory thermaltake's tough ram xg series is a freshly updated line of rgb memory available in frequencies ranging from 3 600 megahertz up to 4 600 megahertz thermaltake's tough ram xg uses 10 layer pcbs and heat spreaders are fixed with bright leds everywhere and they market toward overclocking support and capabilities learn more at the links in the description below originally when we saw the photos for this cooler and we've got some b-roll of it turned on everything we'll put on the screen but saw the photos we weren't quite clear on what it was it looked like it could maybe be a thermal or piezoelectric cooler of some kind from the shape it looked like it could maybe be a very bizarrely shaped open loop cpu block there was none of those it's just an air cooler it's very simple it's got some heat pipes a cold plate fin stack and airflow by way of a fan and that's all it is so it ends up just looking kind of weird and different and sometimes there's an appeal to that uh oftentimes performance falls by the wayside as a result but we don't begrudge companies for trying to do something different especially in a space like cpu coolers or cases where it's so difficult to do anything different so uh this thing is here's the box for it this thing as we said we bought it from aliexpress we checked it is on amazon it seems to be about 30 there as well we're gonna be testing it versus the stock amd coolers the noctua nhu 12s redux the 50 cooler so you'll have a pretty full range of of tests if you do actually want to buy one so the name of the cooler in english is i go shadow max uh this is the that says deiying which is just shadow uh it's the v5 apparently there have been four versions of this before uh that's either a very good or a very bad sign depending on why there are revisions it's the max version apparently so that's also good fan goes up to 3000 rpm pretty high the name of it uh here it says well we translated it but the name iqual is just patriotic so i guess patriotic shadow max v5 is the name of the cooler pretty much everything intel so 1155 is on the support list it's 11.5x amd goes up to m4 so that's supported so it's been modernized okay time to look at the igor coiler so this is uh pretty easy to take apart the top cap can rotate first off it's by designs remove it and you pop it off it's got four notches in it so it can be rotated if you wanted to orient it a certain way on your cpu we'll look at if this thing's actually good in a moment we'll get there but from a mechanical perspective they've done well to actually account for one of the most common failings in coolers like this where people can't orient the logo the way they want so that's pretty forward looking actually if we look further in the eye gol cooler you can see internally there's a bunch of leds so there's a rain of leds around the outside uh the heat pipes of course showing through at this point so we know where those terminate now unfortunately they terminate inside of a plastic cavity that's completely enclosed as a reminder this is the evaporator end of a heat pipe there's a little bit of liquid in there it's about one drop almost literally it evaporates down here it rises as a gas up to the top and then it recondenses into a liquid so you get the phase change to help with dissipation it's all standard stuff but it's trapped so unfortunately there's some efficiency loss there we do get to the hot glue extremely early in the disassembly there it is for everyone to see there's a nice blob of hot glue that looks like they maybe applied it like this and then let it drip down as it dried so great attention to detail there i like the little extra strains of glue that are still attached and just kind of free form it's it's very artistic the the hot glue is a nice touch it does terminate in power and control for the leds that's what that is and other than that pretty simple we've got some screws so let's take those out quickly and show you the other side of it okay we have freed the top plate it's actually pretty heavy and that's because the fan is attached so uh pretty simple design let's start with the fact that there's a gaping hole in the cooler looks interesting it's it's pretty unique we've seen stuff like this uh if you had any of the old xalman coolers you might remember they were oriented basically like this except with the heat pipe the cold plate down at the bottom so you get like this flower almost floral design from zalman's old stuff and the cables go down this channel here so we're gonna just take those out now to decouple these it's about the size of one of these there's your andy stock cooler one of them so we've taken the entire space that you could normally use for a fan and have replaced it with plastic not necessarily a bad thing depending on how it's executed but we get the benefit here of more surface area so well at least vertically it's hard to account for the hole in the middle that math gets kind of complex but at least looks like more surface area when the sockets into it we tested it out by powering this and checking for airflow around the outsides you do this with an anemometer or something as simple as a hand and what it does is uh sockets in like that and the air mostly gets movement down here below it and so what that's going to do is push the air down and out almost at an angle probably if these fins were oriented a little differently it would be optimal but the air ends up largely concentrated in this area down here so you're getting good cooling on the heat pipes which is valuable and you're getting a lot of concentrated air on this maybe it's easier to see this way so you're getting a lot of concentrated air down here on this thing where there's a small finstack this is not new companies have done this a lot be quiet has done this a lot but adds a little bit of extra surface area right on top of the cold plate sometimes it's a gimmick sometimes it's useful in this instance there's airflow directly contacting it because most of the air is coming straight down so that's pretty much all there is to it in terms of construction mechanical qualities this is a 4-pole motor you can always tell by just you push it around until you feel magnetic engagement until it makes a full circle and that's four so we've got four magnetic poles in there that's pretty standard for a fan and then for the rest the heat pipes there's five of them they are six mil heat pipes yes they're six mil heat pipes so i'm one for one now i'm using metric today uh six ml heat pipes the cold plate uh we'll do a pressure test of and and get a better idea for the engagement across the surface that's going to be big with anything where you have direct contact because they have to do an excellent job of smoothing that out to make it work well and then also the mounting hardware comes into play there as well so that's the mechanics of the shadow max the diagonal cooler it's like i said it's 28 bucks we're going to see how it does in testing maybe a replacement for a stock cooler obviously a small tower like maybe even a hyper 212 which isn't that great but you get more surface area bigger fan will run quieter at a given temperature a tower like that a more standard one will be thermally better in almost every scenario unless exceptionally poorly designed but this one's trying to be unique we can't fault them for that that's something we've wanted a lot so as long as everyone knows how the performance is and it's not completely terrible maybe it's okay but let's get started we'll look at some of the pressure mounting and thermals and acoustics for this one up first is our pressure map as always a huge thanks to those of you who have bought from store.gamersnexus.net for making it possible to buy our expensive pressure mapping and nist traceable equipment we're almost sold out of our popular wireframe mouse mats so if you'd like a quality mouse mat or pad and want to support gn visit store.gamertexas.net to grab one and help us with content like this back to the pressure map this is done with the cpu inactive so the cpu doesn't actually matter other than to provide us with an ihs the 3950x mount has a massive gap centrally which is where the dies are and there's some coverage around the perimeter this is easily the worst pressure map we have ever seen of a cooler there's nothing that even comes close to this level of bad thermal paste will make up for it and it does make contact when there's paste there but the pressure is so minimal centrally that there's a lot of performance left on the table for this cooler looking at the 3800x it's more of the same there's a huge gap in coverage centrally the points closest to the mount have some pressure picking up on the skin but nowhere else does and the pressure that does pick up isn't even that much even the perimeter pressure is just it's insufficient here the end result is that igo's mounting hardware needs a lot of work to fix these shortcomings to look at installation to understand that pressure map for amd two brackets are installed to the underside of the cooler with two screws on each side the end of each bracket has relatively wide hole spacing for the screws which can be problematic for security since there's enough wiggle room to shift the screw by maybe a millimeter or so frustratingly the included am4 backplate is not to be used for this cooler andy's backplate is actually pretty well built it's all metal it's structurally fine there's not really a reason not to use it it's just a piece of metal anyway so it's a waste of material to make a replacement instead igoa wants you to use the flimsy plastic backplate that supports both amd and intel that they provide this may be part of the pressure problem as well but otherwise this is kind of familiar to an older style of installing heatsinks four standoffs get installed with specific holes in the back plate as again as an old and now mostly retired style and then they're secured with plastic clips we're up to nine pieces of hardware just to get this far plus four for the earlier screws and two for the earlier brackets that's 15 pieces of hardware already making matters less reassuring the standoffs have wiggle room in the motherboard screw holes allowing for more room for the user to execute a bad mount the cooler can now be seated on the cpu and threads tightened in a usual diagonal pattern from here it's all standard the cables can be connected for rgb leds and fan control and you're done intel follows the same process except it uses different brackets adjacent to the cold plate and yellow clips are used to hold the screws in place in the back plate instead otherwise the rest is the same as the amd process historically most of our cooler testing has been oriented around a 125 watt and a 200 watt heat load we only recently added 65 watt testing for lower end cpus lower end coolers like an r5 relative at least the high end stuff so the chart is still getting populated and it's a bit sparse right now it'll take a few months to build out a dense chart like we have for the others we do however have enough here to start the igo shadow max ended up at 48 degrees celsius over ambience in the r5 heat load meaning it's actually not bad it's surprisingly okay probably more so than it deserves from that pressure map and the surface area helps make up for a lot of the downsides but it's doing okay the shadow max ended up within margin of error of the wraith prism cooler we tested both at the same noise level of course for this and actually better than the amd wraith spire at 35 dba for both obviously it's not worth spending 30 dollars to get the same performance as an included wraith prism or a four degree improvement over a wraith spire a small tower as well like the nhu 12 s redox yields significant gains over all these options we'll soon add a 30 tower cooler to test it as well so check back for that in the next one thus far though in the noise normalized 35 dba testing it's not terrible so that's actually a good start from something that looks like it was form over function at 100 fan speed the igo shadow max ended up at 43.4 dba when measured with standardized methodology at 20 inches distant that hasn't noticeably quieter than a maxed out wraith prism louder than a maxed out wraith spire and significantly louder than the scythe fuma 2. for cooling all that extra noise didn't amount to much power it only shot about 4 degrees from the previous test in celsius of course and it ended up only better than a passively cooled solution and the quieter spire stock solution the wraith spire solution was stuck at 51 degrees over ambient so there's a bit of gap here the shadow max is thus far definitely inefficient but it is working so that's something the last chart in this very simple review by our standards will be for vrm thermals we cut the 125 and 200 watt heat loads for this cooler since they're just they're going to be too much for it but vrm thermals on the r5 will be interesting given the downdraft flow the amd wraith spire has the best vrm thermals thus far in this limited testing and that's because it's downdraft it's not the best cooler let's get that clear but pushing air down and out towards the mosfets clearly has some benefits the prism is next and then the redux which is benefited by its larger fan and a wider area spray of air after this is the aigwa shadow and despite the downward flow on the igo air isn't spraying at the right arc to hit the vrm as effectively as the amd stock coolers ultimately however all of these thermals are well well within spec we're not even close to a problem so functionally it's irrelevant and there won't ever be any meaningful impact to the life on this board's vrm if you were to use one versus the other it might matter on an extremely low end motherboard but we couldn't quickly think of one where the agua's difference in the relatively higher reading would be life and death for a lower end board as compared to the other coolers on this chart additionally at some point it becomes the motherboard's problem anyway so it's fine this is mostly just useful because it tells us about the flow pattern which is less outward than we initially thought so the cooler in the conclusion is really pretty simple at the end of the day it's not terrible it did a lot better than we expected it to do and it's it's not really worth buying at 30 there's a lot of better coolers out there especially something that's a proper tower at the cheap so this isn't a value purchase it is not a price to performance purchase either but it maybe makes sense if you want something really unique that is at least capable of running a system without thermal throttling if it's a lower power cpu like again an i5 and r5 something below the 70 80 watt area it'll do okay it'll do better than the stock cooler from intel it does about as well in sort of the best case scenario as some of the amd's stock coolers when they're noise normalized that's about the most you can ask for out of this thing so it's not terrible we wouldn't recommend buying it there's sort of a it's just it's not good value it's got some mounting pressure issues it has many inefficiencies and the hardware and the installation so it doesn't get a recommendation from us but it does get a if you have a specific personal use case where you want to use it maybe you want to mod it do something cool with the top cover plate you could probably pretty easily pop actually you could very easily remove the logo they have here if you wanted to maybe 3d print your own or something like that laser cut your own you can do that maybe there's a use there where it's interesting for modders it's interesting for someone who's trying to build something that looks unique but isn't necessarily good and that's about kind of the end of it for this one we did some research on our company they've been around actually a long time from what we can understand it looks like i go or or igor and dark flash are either sibling companies or dark flash may own i go we're going to go with the american pronunciation here for ease but may on them they have a parent company at least one there might be another above that did some digging through it uh the companies do have experience manufacturing this stuff dark flash you may have seen on newegg and amazon more of sort of bargain bin price components but that's where they decided to start there's nothing really wrong with that so they've been around they have some experience it appears to be mostly a legitimate real company so if you haven't heard of it that doesn't mean they haven't been around but it does appear like i go here is trying to get into a western market with something that's a bit unique they had a lot of other coolers as well including standard towers we probably won't test those but maybe if there's enough interest we will but otherwise at about 28 30 dollars there are absolutely better things than than the shadow max as it's called in the west so that's it for this one thanks for watching let us know what you think of the this cooler the the shadow max v5 we're curious if you want us to look at other coolers that are unique interesting weird and you've seen some you want to see what we think of them feel free to point us towards them in the comment section below youtube will often filter comments with urls in them so if you just type in the name of the product we'll look it up wherever it may be and uh and find it maybe that'll give us some fun stuff to look at next that's not a standard cooler so thanks for watching subscribe for more as always you can go to store.gamingtexas.net or patreon.com gamers nexus if you would like to help us in purchasing more strange coolers and we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 480,330

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, cooler reviews, cpu coolers, best cpu coolers, cpu cooler benchmarks, aigo shadow max v5 benchmark

Id: L-0RPAJcYFc

Length: 17min 50sec (1070 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 13 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Hellascrupman]

Looks like one of those old school orb coolers that was cracking cpus left and right (you needed crazy pressure to secure them). What's old is new again.

[u/bubblesort33]

I know they say not to use the AMD mounting backplate, but can't you? Wonder if the screws just don't fit.

Wouldn't be shocked if you find these in pre-build eventually with a different branding on top.

[u/eiglow_]

The Aerocool Mirage 5 is a very similar design too.

[u/TetsuoS2]

Might be a better cooler if you spend the time to take it to a belt grinder.

[u/InvincibleBird]

Timestamps:

• 00:00 - Unique CPU Cooler
• 03:03 - Disassembly & Up Close
• 07:42 - Getting Into the Testing
• 08:27 - Worst Pressure Map Yet
• 09:42 - Installation of Aigo Shadow Max V5
• 11:23 - 65W 35dBA Noise-Normalized Benchmarks
• 12:36 - 65W 100% Fan Speed & Noise
• 13:17 - 65W CPU VRM Thermals
• 14:36 - Conclusion

[u/VenditatioDelendaEst]

It sucks in through the sides and blows out the bottom??? Seems completely backwards IMO.

That fin stack looks like it's begging for a squirrel cage blower with ducted intake through the top...