Cutting AMD Coolers Open & Flat vs. Vertical CPU Cooler Benchmarks

nearly every aftermarket air cooler completely revolves around the efficacy of its heat pipes to help disperse heat and cool the CPU fans are necessary in most instances but if the heat pipes and the cold plate are inefficiently laid out the fans won't be able to overcome the lack of transfer efficiency and we already know that not all heat pipes are created equal despite mostly attempting to accomplish the same goals heat pipe engineering varies from manufacturer to manufacturer and some transfer heat more efficiently than others most manufacturers sans coolermaster and similar very large suppliers will source heat pipes supply from specific heat pipe factories rather than make it in-house with only a few doing their own manufacturing what we're testing today is related to gravity though a lot of you have asked us if gravity affects heat pipe performance specifically in a computer use case so we're here to do some simple tests and to talk about capillary action before that this video is brought to you by Squarespace Squarespace is what we've been using for years to manage our own gamers Nexus store and we've been incredibly happy with the choice Squarespace makes ecommerce easy for those interested in starting stores but it also has powerful tools to build all types of websites photo galleries for photographers resume and portfolio sites and small business sites are all easily done through Squarespace having built a lot of client websites the old way before running GM full-time we can easily recommend Squarespace as a powerful fast solution go to squarespace.com slash gamers Nexus to get 10% off your first purchase with Squarespace we originally saw this idea a couple of years ago because when we were doing some CV air cooler reviews at the time people had asked whether having a flat test bench versus a standard case orientation actually affected the results and it's probably time to do some validation on that because we have a whole bunch of CV cool or tests and reviews that we've completed over the last few months so we wanted to look into this idea there are instances outside of computer hardware where heat pipe orientation and grout II may and in some instances will matter especially with greater degrees than what we might see in feeder hardware this is particularly true in applications where there's no heat sink or fan involved and you're just talking about a heat pipe alone heat pipes have been in use for a long time but probably the most notable use is in NASA and spacecraft satellites things like that there's a research paper from NASA from about 1968 where they talked about heat pipes specifically and they're useful in space where you don't have air that you can push through a heat sink so you have to transfer it somehow and a phase change is one of the best ways to shed some of that energy for this content though we are unfortunately we don't quite have the budget to go to space although patreon gets big enough we can do that but being that we don't have the budget to go into space to do some testing there what we will do instead is test how gravity effects coolers in a computer in standard computer use cases in a real world scenario on earth that involves testing it in a flat bench horizontally what we're calling a vertical orientation which would be your standard orientation like this where you've got the cooler sticking out of the motherboard and then we're also doing upside-down and for these to make sure it's all the same we are testing with a thermal tape Corp III as our test platform because we need something to hold the bench secure and all those orientations but also not affect the air flow the problem with doing this type of testing if you use a standard case is that the case is now producing all of the variants in the results and not the actual orientation so we've controlled for that as far as gravity the reason we haven't done this test before is because we were pretty certain of the results meaning that we were pretty certain they would be basically zero difference and so we didn't bother today we're going to confirm that belief but the important thing here to mention if you don't know well first of all heat pipes have a very small amount of liquid in them more on that in a little bit but also heat pipes rely on capillary action to bring the water back from the condenser which would be at the top here to the evaporator which is at the bottom where your heat source is and capillary action can work and does work in opposition to gravity you could show the preschool level experiment here of dipping a paper towel into water or a piece of paper at something porous into water and the water will of course as you all know spread upwards in spite of gravity and that's just from capital reaction so heat pipes are built to oppose this which means that for the most part we shouldn't really see an impact from gravity in a computer hardware application especially because you're starting to introduce other components like a fan which is responsible for the bulk of the cooling capacity of a CPU or GPU cooler once you get into space things do change and once you get into applications where fans aren't possible maybe for just clearance reasons if not for being in a place where there's no error reasons it changes heat pipes at that point can be affected by gravity by even the angle at which they're installed and there's some research papers that we found on that if you're curious to learn more we'll link them in the article that goes up a company in this video and we'll talk about them a bit in the conclusion so let's get into some of the content promised here then we'll talk about a whole lot about how heat pipes are made and how they works again everyone up to speed and then do the testing results it's time for another primer on how heat pipes work we previously made a video showing how heat pipes are manufactured which provides some important context to just how challenging the process is we have another older video with some 3d animations on how heat pipes work in general but we're each having both here copper heat pipes start life as copper tubes they get TIG welded and closed on one side and then they progress to have transfer accelerants installed typically heat pipes will be filled with sintered copper powder known as sintered heat pipes where copper powder is dumped into the copper tubes and baked into the inner walls of the heat pipe at 900 to 1,000 degrees Celsius continuously for 8 hours the sintered copper powder heat pipes are what comes out and you can watch our video on how are they're made for finer details on the vacuum sealing or the liquid injection processes other types of heat pipes include those with mesh weaves or groups with the most expensive of the solutions using a combination of sintered powder and one of the other two solutions typically grooves and sintered together to be called composite in nearly all computer hardware use cases the difference between a composite solution and a sintered only solution will be almost immeasurable and a like-for-like test which is why most manufacturers typically just use what other differences would be visible first and you'd have to do a lot of testing on at ETV if you'd really like to see reliable numbers you couldn't really replicate it on the standard computer task batch the cooling process is pretty easy stuff heat pipes come into direct contact or in direct contact with the heat source at which point a few small drops of low boiling point liquid within the heat pipes evaporator will phase change from liquid to gas shedding much of the energy in the process and moving from the evaporator toward the condenser end of the heat pipe in our video of how they're made you can see the injection process where just a drop of liquid is added it's really not much at all the heat pipe itself being one of the best available conductors will transfer its own heat to the aluminum fins at which point the fan wicks it all away as for the gaseous movement away from the evaporator it's a rival in the condenser cools the gas sufficiently to condense back into liquid at which point capillary action brings the liquid back to the evaporator and the heat source mostly irrelevant of orientation but not always our understanding is also that sintered powder helps it guide the gases toward the condenser the forced convection inside the vacuum chambers of heat pipes is what allows for cooling and things like satellites that can't be cooled with normal airflow seeing as they're in space this process can occur nearly indefinitely making heat pipes and those common cooling solution and electronics and common in spacefaring vehicles if the heat pipe is not adequately dispersing the heat and repeating the cycle the heat pipe will become too dry and the machine will potentially overheat and fail especially because in a lot of these applications there isn't a fan present to help cool things down the heat pipes capillary strength must be strong enough to satisfy the pressure requirements to move the cooler water transfer the hot steam and act against gravity when it's present our testing today focuses on figuring out if these consumer air coolers fulfill those requirements specifically when it comes to gravity on earth in a normal environment heat pipe sizes and formations can have an effect on the performance as well although that's out of the scope for today the flatter the heat pipe for instance and we have footage of these two the smaller the interior chamber and thus the lower the maximum heat threshold is that said go in for flat heat pipes can improve service area and contact to other cooling Solutions so depending on the application like in a laptop it might be a better choice bending the heat pipe will have an effect as well and the general ratio is that every 45 degree Bend will result in about a three percent performance decrease so the more intricate or complex the heat pipe design the stronger the heat pipe must be to function note that this decrease calculated is against one heat pipe not against the entire cooling product and so once you start expanding the scope to the entirety of the product three percent might not really matter as for how much liquid is in there we can't give you an exact number in volume but we can tell you that it's literally droplets of liquid it doesn't take much and our heat pipe factory footage you can see how tiny the syringes are for adding each wrap of liquid and how the heat pipes are then moved vertically with obviously the open end up into a chamber to be vacuum sealed and then later TIG welded closed time to talk about the types of heat pipes because there are a few different ones we're looking only at computer applications today although this can apply to other applications as well the interior structures of heat pipes act as a material for the water to travel through increasing capillary strength but also increasing surface area and cooling capacity in general the sintered powder is the most common interior used by heat pipe manufacturing companies and this process involves holding a cylindrical rod in the center of heat pipes as they sit in an oven again about eight hours continuously 900 to 1000 degrees and the metal powder is then heated up to form a porous structure that lines the inner walls of the heat pipe particle size can be varied to produce different pore sizes and increase permeability of the structures themselves we'll cut one of these open in a few minutes to show you what that looks like next up is axial groove interior walling axial groove heat pipes can be a significant cost cutter in production as no sintered powder is required instead the interior walls of the heat pipe are carved into grooves increasing surface area and in turn strengthening the heat pipe effectiveness mesh weave wicks are the most common among typical consumer heat pipes particularly for low end consumer electronics as they're cheap yet still provide additional capillary strength the choice of interior isn't just - good better best though it's also dependent on the intended use case or application of the heat pipe some interiors work better in specific applications for example grooves perform worse and smaller flatter heat pipes that are bent to fit their function again like in small or thin laptops there's a last room for the grooves and so the service area increase is minimized the positive byproduct of heat pipe manufacturing is that capillary action naturally occurs in such small diameter tubes particularly with the help of the tube walls manufacturers know that pretty much all earthbound PC hardware cooling setups will either have the heat pipes directly above the CPU or to the side of it as in a normal standing PC case Noctua actually specifies that it's coolers aren't made to be installed upside down with a cpu above the cooler in general the assumed reason you wouldn't want to do this would be because gravity could have an effect on the water inside the vapor chamber and might prohibit it from circulating through the cooler leaving the liquid form water at the condenser went upside down with the already water vapor at the evaporator again if everything is working as it should this should be mostly irrelevant since wicked will work in opposition to gravity but that's not to say that gravity won't have an effect or that different designs of heat pipes could be less useful in these applications the main focus for our testing will be to determine if gravity can have a measurable or meaningful impact in a reasonable computer application a fourth but rarely used design called a composite heat pipe usually utilizes both a mesh wick as well as a porous sintered structure to further increase how fast the steam moves and how fast the water travels through capillarity and this is supposed to also help in these use cases where it might be in a sub optimal orientation this however is usually the most costly form of heat pipe production which is why it is rarely used in consumer components time to take apart the heat pipes to get a better visual and show just what we're talking about when it comes to the varying structures we tore down the heat pipes on a few different coolers including the deep cool Assassin 3 the Andy rathe prism and the throne will take contact silent 12 the stock Wraith and the contacts island 12 are the cheapest coolers we took a dremel to with the contact 12 costing about 20 and before anyone gets worried we do have two of the deep cool assassins threes one of which we bought and one of which was a review sample starting with the contact 12 we removed the upper portion of aluminum fins manually in order to expose a larger section of each heat pipe which unfortunately resulted in at least one casualty but no owner remembers that old motherboard article where they talked about bleeding for building a computer this probably was what they were talking about we started with cutting off an entire section of each heat pipe with the Dremel and then went with splitting it down the middle to get a cross-section inside we can clearly see the poorest sintered powder structure which is exactly what we were expecting for this one as it falls within the mainstream coolers next on the chopping block is Andy's Wraith prism which didn't require any force to disassembly but was still somewhat awkward to cut with its angles any water previously inside any of these heat pipes would be completely evaporated by the cutting and instantly would exit the pressurized interior once it's broken open anyway this is why it's sort of silly when people ask if a burst heat pipe would mean water damage in the same way that an open loop leak might there isn't enough in there to cause any damage if it even survives the burst Satan process to begin with the inside shows similar results to the thermal take cooler with a visible sintered copper interior and a small hollow core last up is the assassin 3 which is advertised to have a new centre technology that extensively increased the heat pipes internal surface area direct quote from deep pool which really just means that they're claiming they use sintered and grooved approaches for you composite heat pipe this isn't new but it isn't common either deep cools marketing leans heavily on the heat pipes being better than the standard as a result of the grooved and sintered combination opening up the heat pipe seems to show a different story we couldn't see any noticeable differences in the assassin threes sintering versus the other two coolers even after carefully removing the sintered powder without ever touching the inner walls of the heat pipe it flakes off with little effort with just a fingernail which is fine because it's all internal anyway we still weren't able to find any grooves on the heat pipe walls we've reached out to deep cool for comments on this and we'll look into it more later but it's about today's focus the orientation testing is so now we'll move on to data for each cooler now that we're to get into the chart some discussion on testing methodology first of all we have a whole hell of a lot of controls in place for CPU cooler testing and we have years of documentation on them we've validated some of our testing methodology in thermal chambers as well just to really make sure it's all dialed there's a lot of things that can very easily be done incorrectly with thermal testing for CPU coolers if you're not really certain what exactly you're dealing with or how exactly to test from one test to the next you could easily have a couple of degrees variants because maybe you didn't monitor the power consumption actively at which point you might have a couple of Watts Delta from test day to test B depending on the software so that has to be monitored you could have differences from voltages in the motherboard not being properly controlled all the way down to minor voltages every voltage really needs to be controlled to have good testing results that are repeatable that includes not just B core but SOC v dim and everything else that you can find in your particular motherboard settings our testing includes three different runs to test heat pipe efficiency across three orientations again flat vertical and upside-down and our conventional test bench does not support the vertical and upside-down configurations we want us to do so again we use the Corp III and we removed the glass panel from it instead leaving just the four the four aluminium feet or pegs for the glass on it but taking the glass off that way there's no surface anywhere close to the CPU cooler that could influence the air path as air comes into it and leaves it and in continuing that theme when we did the upside down testing we elevated the p3 on top of a series of boxes which got it far enough a couple feet away from the floor so that point you're it's not even a consideration the distance of the floor to the cooler was no longer a concern so this case works really well for this type of stuff it's basically an open-air bench it's just bigger and less space efficient but it secures everything and then for the rest here we we controlled all the voltages so v core v 2m V SOC all that stuff extras that are in there the fan speeds are manually controlled that's really important there should be no auto governance at all of fan speeds so we make sure that's not present and then room temperature is controlled to a fixed 21 degrees Celsius plus or minus about one degree and then also to help account for that plus or minus we monitor the room temperature ambient temperature every second of the test and we bring all that data into test results then we produce a delta T over ambient when you're talking plus or minus one it's functionally a linear difference and that's true for maybe about the first ten degrees or so after which it becomes nonlinear so that's some of our controls we have a lot more but there's not infinite time in the video and one other thing that is important test me what the p3 allowed us to rotate the case for each test without remounting the cooler and remounting the cooler is one of the biggest possible areas where you can introduce error so we do test without remounting and test with remounting and we look at the aggregate and then we determine if it all looks accurate to what we expect so that is done for the first set it's done without remounting and that means the same pace application all that stuff paced aging is also checked at the end of the test by rerunning the first set of tests to see if the numbers are the same as the test that happened earlier and each one is allowed to reach steady state so has sufficiently long at least about 30 minutes to reach steady state flat line and then you get the average from the final couple hundred rows of steady state or of data so let's go to the charts starting us off is naktu as NHD 15 not to be confused with the NHD 15s which this isn't this is not to his dual fin stat cooler with two fans part of our testing methodology for this cooler includes permanently marking the fans in their exact testing locations on the fin stack and leaving them in those positions permanently as vertical positioning on the fin stack for the fans will change the test results we've tested that as well we eliminate this variable by fixing the fan position Noctua is a popular choice for aftermarket air quick and the NHD 15 is one of the longest standing heavyweights that has some name recognition Knox we're also explicitly dis advises use of some of its coolers and upside-down orientations so it's going to make a good start in trying to represent the high end cooler market in thermal testing the Noctua NHD 15 showed no significant difference between any of the tasks passes remember these are averaged across multiple runs you're looking at the average and for one full pass of flat vertical and upside down we do not remount the cooler this means that there is no remounting variable there's no mounting pressure variable there's no there all pays the application difference for one set of passes and we do multiple sets of passes we also rerun validation testing at the end to ensure that the compound has not changed their own performance over the course of testing eliminating another test variable it does not change if you were wondering if we were to break the aggregate into its disaggregate parts the run to run variance is exceptionally small in this testing we were unable to determine a meaningful difference between flat horizontal or upside-down thermal reforms in idle where we're in the eleven point six to eleven point seven degrees Celsius over ambient range this remains true for t diode performance where our range of zero point eight degrees is within our error of plus or minus one degree or a two degree tolerance there's a possibility that this cooler is brute-forcing past negative externalities so we'll use the other coolers for testing against that this is especially true with the NHD 15 which has significantly increased fin surface area to pull heat away from the heat pipes than a lower-end cooler like the Wraiths the delta may make up for any of gravity's potential impacts here vr moss temperatures throw forints is identical between the flat and upside-down results the vertical results are marginally higher but as these are not cooled by the heat sink directly is outside of the test scope and it starts to bring the motherboard aspect into consideration more the second cooler in the line-up is the AMD wraith prism which is commonly bundled with Rison cpus many AMD owners either use the cooler or have used it in the past which makes it a good inclusion and representing a broader spectrum of coolers it's also on the opposite end of the spectrum from the NHD 15 which would mean any difference that will be seen in the mid-range of cooler should theoretically be amplified here as the cooler wouldn't be able to make up for the differences like the D 15 might be able to the heat pipes on the race prism flatten out to make direct contact with the IHS which also could theoretically amplify any consequences we might have from gravity's effect on heat pipe transfer capabilities even though the heat pipes were flush against the IHS and the cooler is significantly weak d15 we found no discernible difference in cv temperatures throughout the three tests this is why capillary action is good for heat pipes it works well in all orientations at least for this application the idle temperatures were with an error at fourteen point four to fifteen point two degrees celsius over ambient or a range of zero point eight degrees load tests had us at sixty five point two sixty six point three and sixty four point five degrees celsius over ambient a maximum range between averages of one point eight degrees celsius still with an error all three tests showed consistent thermal results with a slightly increased load temperature in the vertical test setup this is within room for error and isn't enough to certify that the flat or upside-down orientations were superior in any way the deep cool gamers storm assassin three is last similar results were found in our testing with the assassin three the same three orientations were run with the same repeat validation passes but no actual difference was found deep quote markets the assassin three as a superior air cooler to its competitors because of its groove center interior heat pipes as opposed to these sintered powder or mesh coolers on the market but we also didn't see any grooves in ours so we'll have to follow up on that either way even with this advertised to change the cooler still resisted drying up from a lack of capillary strength due to gravity and showed no benefit to being mounted flat as opposed to the standard vertical mountain thermals ranch from ten point three to eleven point five degrees celsius over ambient and averages for idle anyway and for low it was fifty two points to two fifty three point nine degrees which is exceptionally tight together with vrm thermals again out of scope but overall equivalent in conclusion then again we can only speak to our data there's a lot of CPU coolers out there there are a lot of applications of CPU coolers and of course there are a lot of applications of just heat pipes that are not CPU coolers and so we can't speak to everything for our our data today for the three coolers we test it and likely you can extrapolate this to most of the CPU coolers similar to these which would be nearly all of them but we can't firmly say it's true for all of them so with maybe some extrapolation we are not able to produce a meaningful difference between the results of horizontal vertical or upside-down now upside down is a bit of an edge case anyway upon doing that but for purposes of CPU cooler testing what's really important is that if you're testing flat versus standing from what we've seen so far there's no difference meaning that if you're looking at test bench results where the technician tests in a flat bench as a standard versus in a normal case which by the way the case basically invalidates everything anyway because now you're testing against that case only and that's really the biggest inhibitor but anyway if you're looking at those two options or maybe a p3 standing vertically they're all about the same and not just about but in these results they are the same there with an error so there's it doesn't matter is really what it looks like from our data now there are scientific studies and we've read a couple of them that show weakened thermal performance based on the inclination of the heat pipe the angle the orientation of it so the reason gravity comes into question even though we're talking about capillary action is because it actually it does matter and some applications of heat pipe installations it's just that in our field of computer hardware on earth which is important to specify here even though it sounds like a joke it does not seem to matter the orientation doesn't seem to matter the inclination doesn't seem to matter perhaps it might in something like a really confined work space maybe a laptop but we don't there's no point in us testing that because we'd have to start modifying a laptop to do it and that's not realistic anyway so you should just test on a unit by unit basis so even if significant results were shown favoring one orientation or another it's obviously not practical to flip your computer upside down that's not practical to change the orientation if you want it one way or the other so even if there were a deviation or excursion from the mean of what we've seen here today I have a couple degrees just use it the way that it makes the most sense for you so the real reason it's important is for testing accuracy not for actual use case for practicality you should use the cooler and the computer and the orientation which makes the most sense for your desk space and your case that you've chosen overall our current standing based on the data we've collected over the last couple of weeks and a whole lot of retests we had two people working on the for this it was me and Jake overall we don't believe any consideration should be given to heat pipe orientation when you're building a computer and most coolers seem to work past any negative effects if they exist and all the interior structures function pretty much the same so that'll be it really fun an interesting topic to research there's a lot of scientific research on this as well we've collected a couple of links for those we'll put them in the description below and the the notes for this video and the article if you'd like to read more some of the NASA papers are pretty interesting they're a bit dated but technology hasn't really changed much heatpipes go figure a copper tube with some copper powder inside of it doesn't really change a lot over the years thanks for watching if you like this type of content would like to support us in producing more of it please consider going to patreon.com/scishow doing some additional behind the scenes videos there lately and bonus ask GN episodes for patreon backers we've done a couple in the last month and we're going to keep doing a couple a month you can also go to store documents excess net to pick up a mod mat or a shirt like this one subscribe for more we'll see you all next time [Music]

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 332,334

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, heatpipe orientation, gravity vs heatpipes, does gravity matter for cpu coolers, cpu cooler gravity, cpu cooler flat vs vertical, cpu cooler test bench vs case, cpu cooler vertical vs flat, heatpipe tear down, inside a heatpipe, heatpipe cross section, how heatpipes are made

Id: 2aQg1v5rXKw

Length: 28min 2sec (1682 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 28 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/AzZubana]

TLDW: Performance is independent of orientation.

[u/SandboChang]

It’s painful to see all these great heat sinks going to the bin.

[u/[deleted]]

Useless and meaningless tests.