Does Your CPU Cooler ACTUALLY Matter? [Stock vs Air vs AIO Liquid Cooler FPS Testing!]

what is up guys welcome back to another geeker video and in today's video i'm gonna be answering a very important question does your cpu caller choice actually make a difference to your gaming performance and importantly your fps should you save as much money as possible so you have more change for your graphics card by sticking with the amd or intel stock callers or should you go for a middle of the road option like this cooler master 212 evo or heck even spend 100 maybe more us dollars on something like this an all-in-one liquid call-out we've run a load of tests in some of the most popular titles out there to really see what the best choice is so without any further ado let's find out after a quick word from today's video sponsor brilliant brilliant are awesome interactive storytellers who inspire people to play with the ideas of maths and science it's a problem-solving based platform that has over 60 interactive courses in maths science and computer science the computer science one was particularly interesting to me hence this youtube channel and brilliant interactive courses are great brilliant lets you achieve your goals in stem building up long-term growth and challenge it puzzles you surprises you and ultimately expands your understanding of the modern world all of their courses have storytelling code writing interactive challenges and problems to solve i really like their computer science fundamentals course there's no coding just a lot of visual examples and interactive problems so it does an awesome job of allowing you to really build up the basics and of course the fundamentals go to brilliant.org forward slash geekawatt the first link in the description below and the first 200 people to sign up with that link we'll get 20 off the annual premium subscription check out the first link in the description below and a big thank you to brilliant for kindly making today's video possible the first thing we did to find a really fair answer to this question is got an even test rig set up we went for a ryzen 5 5600x one of the most popular gaming only cpu choices on the market right now and paired it with a 3080. these are a really good pairing they don't tend to bottleneck each other too much with the ryzen 5 5600x providing some great cpu results even if it does run a little hot at times let's keep it simple to begin with and look at the average and max temperatures of our cpu you won't be surprised to find out that the stock caller was indeed the hottest of any of the three i mean thank god that's the first conclusion of this video at 82 degrees celsius at 4k on average that's not actually too bad it obviously could be better 82 is pretty hot but we're not in heavy thermal throttling territory yet jump up to 1440p and the average temp jumps up by 2 degrees to 84 degrees celsius but our maximum temperature actually skyrockets to 91 degrees celsius which is pretty high when it comes to cpu temperatures thankfully the 212 did a great job of bringing this down by a huge margin and that's not surprising when you consider the heat sink size in comparison to the amd stock cooler to be clear the stock cooler is very impressive especially when you consider its size form factor and but most importantly it's free but if you look obviously at the size difference between these two coolers you can see just how much more heat dissipation power the hyper 212 has these temperatures are all good and wow but if they don't actually impact your gaming performance then frankly who really cares that brings us nicely onto the next graph today which actually shows us our cpu clock speeds now the hotter a cpu runs the slower the clock speed becomes because the cpu has to slow itself down to output less heat and make sure it just doesn't get too hot but what you also have come into play is what they call boost clock speed all modern cpus do this they have kind of a base speed that they run at you know at all times pretty much regardless of cooling conditions within certain margins but if they're cool enough they can boost right up to these high frequencies what we actually saw was around a 150 to 200 megahertz difference between the boost clock speeds on the stock cooler and the boost clock speeds on our liquid cool out the hyper 212 did a great job of bringing the clock speed right up without spending too much money but the 240 mil unit did push the clock speeds even further consistently across all of our tests and this was tested in a range of titles gta cyberpunk and valerie just to be sure of our results and the reason the boost clocks might differ on a game by game basis is that some games are more cpu bound than others cyberpunk for example loves the cpu so this is a great stress test because it needs as much cpu juice as it can get and the cpu in cyberpunk is more likely to heat up than a game say like gta 5. so what impact does this actually have when it comes to fps well let's kick things off with gta 5 tested in the game's inbuilt benchmarking mode here we didn't really see much difference between the stock and the hyper 212 in fact the frame rate was slightly higher on the stock caller which might seem like an anomalous result but at 4k the game is much less cpu reliant because the gpu is maybe struggling to keep up more so than what the cpu is but jump down to 1440p of course the lower resolution we go the more cpu bound we become and here you can see that the stock callout does take a little bit of a beating in fact five frames per second less on the stock cooler than on the hyper 212 that for you know 25 essentially which is the cost difference between these two is a pretty extraordinary upgrade and it's giving you in the region of four to five percent uh in terms of an increase uh the 240 mil msi mag core liquid did a great job too brings the fps up by another four frames per second and what that actually means is there's a 9 fps difference between the stock caller and the 240 mil suddenly a liquid cooler doesn't seem like such an extravagance anymore cyberpunk 2077 was a pretty similar story here the kind of diminishing results are really on show the amd stock callout was the lowest at 51 fps but the hyper 212 jumps to 53 and the 240 mil only up to 54. so here there's not really any difference between the cooler master and the 240 mil unit that is at 4k though jump down to 1440p and here we see a slightly more pronounced impact at least between our stock cooler and our more expensive units in fact we see around an 8 fps differential so you're actually gaining eight frames per second in cyberpunk by ditching the stock cooler that's kind of ridiculous and just shows you know the impact on performance that cpus have especially at low resolutions we're more reliant upon the cpu at the low res and as such we need it to run cooler so that it can boost slightly higher in terms of its clock speed let's take the liquid cooler out of the equation for a second though and see if a budget builder should you know really spend that extra 25 is that better spent on ram or a bigger ssd or heck is it even put towards a slightly better graphics card which of course in today's climate are incredibly expensive so every dollar we can save is gonna be mega mega useful well here at valerian at 4k we saw a whopping 21 fps difference between the stock cooler and our hyper 212. now this result might not seem like much when you consider that we're already running at 284 fps on our stock cooldown but it does show that the cpu running slower is impacting our performance and if you're wanting to drive as many fps as possible to your 360 hertz monitor then in this case it is worth its weight in gold buying something like a hyper 212. and as we'd expect at 1440p the result is even more pronounced and that brings us on to our conclusion in just a second here we saw 326 frames per second on the amd stock caller jumping right up to 352 on the hyper-212 that's right we saw once again a 25 to 30 fps difference by going for the slightly higher end cooler and of course this is much quieter in its operation than something like a stock caller which is always something that you want to bear in mind and that brings me on to a few key conclusions and takeaways and there are a couple here so bear with me the 240 millimeter cool air for a gaming only build is definitely a bit of a luxury i think if you're going for you know a ryzen 9 or an i9 then a 240 or 360 ml rad is going to be very beneficial if you're video editing all day then a quiet liquid call out which keeps temperatures super consistent is the way to go but i think if you're a gaming only user and you're just looking to get the best value for money in a system and you're not too bothered about you know extra aesthetic points uh for a liquid caller then something like the hyper 212 or equivalent options from deep cool or be quiet on your screen now are worth a look at it also hugely depends on what resolution you are gaming at if you're gaming at 4k a higher resolution what to the outsider might look like a more demanding scenario you actually need a worse cpu cooler and that's because the low resolutions the graphics card is is under less pressure and the cpu more pressure your gpu at lower resolutions is more dependent on the process app than it is at higher resist obviously if you want a game at 4k around the clock then a stock cooler is probably not the way i would recommend but for those of you out there looking for you know the most competitive settings and a pc which runs at the highest possible frame rates in valorem or fortnite or cyberpunk at 1080 and 1440p then spending 30 40 on a cooler is not a bad shout so that brings me on to the final question then what's the best upgrade for you watching at home in terms of getting that extra frames per second well it seems to me like this middle of the road hyper 212 is the best show it goes without saying that if this upgrade means you can't suddenly buy a much better graphics card or a much better cpu then it's not one you want to make but in today's current market conditions where hardware pricing is absolutely crazy an improved cpu cooler could actually be the free performance win that you need to up your gaming performance in 2021 and that's a really interesting takeaway and on that note i think that pretty much wraps it up who thought a simple cpu upgrade could be the solution to 2021's pc hardware problems i'll link a web article with full resolution graphs and all that jazz down in the description below if you want to check that out any comments questions or queries leave them in the comment section below thank you very much for watching though and as always we'll see you in the next geeker video adios

Channel: GeekaWhat

Views: 39,489

Keywords: geekawhat

Id: L8xkQqcWGyk

Length: 10min 14sec (614 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 29 2021