The Best CPU Cooler - Tower vs Downdraft

well good morning everybody mike here with hardware canucks and no it might not be morning for you but i have to start very very early it's like 6 30 in the morning in order for me to beat some of the construction noise that goes on outside it starts at 7 o'clock but anyways what is this video about a lot of you guys had commented in our previous air cooler videos especially the budget air cooler round which you can find up there about why we haven't covered downdraft coolers yet or what's also called top flow coolers and that content is coming but the first thing i wanted to do is a little bit of an education video so in this one what i wanted to do is set the stage so to speak for upcoming content and that is talk about the differences between downdraft coolers and your typical tower designs not only that i want to go into some of the considerations that you have to make for your builds when considering one or the other not only that i want to get into the weeds i want to talk about cpu temperatures i want to talk about vrm memory and interior case temperatures and how each of these type of coolers can affect that not only that we're also going to talk about airflow and what these things do to the airflow within your case so i'm going to get into that right after a message from our sponsor you don't deserve a crappy keyboard an average person spends about three hours a day typing on one a good keyboard doesn't have to be investment either but when you find the perfect one it becomes a part of you forever that is why i've been enjoying the extra 5 k4 tkl over the last two years a gaming keyboard with fantastic stabilizers pleasant sound dampening so you can co-exist together just fine lovely the extra 5k4 tkl a winning keyboard for now and the future check it out below all right with that out of the way i wanted to talk quickly about the coolers that i'm going to be using in this video and yes they're all from be quiet simply because be quiet has within each of their lineups a tower cooler and a downdraft cooler so first of all there's the shadow rock three it's your typical mid-tier air cooler on the other hand you have the shadow rock tf2 which is sort of the downdraft version of that now stepping up into the high end be quiet just launched this bad boy this is the dark rock tf2 it's a dual fan pretty large downdraft cooler so we're going to be turning up sort of the cpu to 11 testing to see how this does against the more traditional tower cooler the dark rock 4. so with that out of the way i wanted to talk about probably the most obvious thing and that's the design differences between towers and downdraft coolers alright so let's kick things off with the ins and outs of tower and downdraft coolers starting with the most obvious thing and that's overall design tower style coolers like this shadow rock 3 use upright heat pipes with a single 90 degree bend that bring the cpu's heat up into the fin array they then use lateral airflow from a vertically mounted fan to cool things off and quickly evacuate the hot air from around that zone downdraft or top flow coolers on the other hand well things get a little bit more complicated and you can see that when comparing the shadow rock 3 to the shadow rock tf2 they're engineered for high thermal density in a compact form factor and in most cases that makes their design a fair bit more complicated in order to move heat away from the core the heat pipes actually need to make two bends instead of one and that detour makes them a little bit less efficient right from the get-go to compensate for that a lot of manufacturers increase the fin density which is pretty evident when you look at these two coolers next to one another they also try to run a bit larger fans on their downdraft coolers and that's exactly what be quiet is doing here too but that added complexity does add a little bit of a premium when you compare them right up against similar tower designs for example the shadow rock 3 costs about 50 and it's rated for a tdp of about 190 watts while the tf2 costs 10 dollars more and it actually has a lower 135 watt rating the other challenge with downdraft coolers is sometimes memory and heatsink clearance while they can be placed in pretty much any direction on an intel based system or flipped 180 degrees on amd there's usually going to be some height restrictions unless you're using a lot more compact design like we're seeing in the itx market right now i mean most memory modules shouldn't have an issue but make sure you check this beforehand and before you make your purchases now when it comes to the airflow of a tower style cooler well it's pretty straightforward when installed into the vast majority of cases out there they're designed to complement the usual front to back airflow direction that means drawing in cool air from over the memory slots and exhausting hot air out the back towards the rear exhaust fan that technically leads to lower case and component temperatures since any heat generated by the processor rises up through the fin array and is generally passed out through the back of the case and even if a hot running graphics card is installed well any excess heat coming from it should technically get caught right up and expelled to without impacting the cpu too too much so are there any downfalls tower coolers well yeah one of those is obviously height they simply aren't compatible with slimmer cases especially in the itx market and that's really a problem if you have a small form factor system and just don't want an aio or maybe your case is like my patx build and it fits in aio but only if you sacrifice somewhere else like the gpu length and downdraft airflow well that's exactly what it sounds like too it takes fresh air from above and pushes it downwards through the fin array or conversely it can suck up air upwards into the fin array in some ways that runs a little bit contrary to a typical case's natural airflow direction but that's to be expected in this kind of situation remember what i said there are sacrifices here plus this kind of setup can even help with memory and vrm temperatures since there's an active airflow current going directly over them and that's important in itx environments specifically because they're pretty limited with the number of case fans that can be installed in the first place and let's be honest here any extra access to fresh air is a massive benefit in such a constrained space and there's one great example of that and i'm gonna go off screen and grab it and that's this when a case is slim enough that it brings fresh air towards the downdraft cooler like in this century build it's actually able to suck in that fresh air and cool all the components around it but at the same time it can also technically increase some component temperatures especially if there's a gpu blocking some of the outwards airflow since hot air from the processor gets sort of funneled downwards and caught up in that area between the gpu and the cpu but there's a way to counteract this though and that's to flip the fan around so it's drawing air away from around your components while pulling air through a heatsink is always always less efficient than pushing the negative pressure zone underneath the cooler can have some serious benefits for things like vrm memory and even components mounted on the gpu's back if you have a ventilated side panel like i mentioned before this can quickly remove cpu heat so it doesn't stick around in the case causing all sorts of problems so obviously there are a ton of use cases for downdraft coolers but i had a question we had a debate here in the office the other day why would somebody want a downdraft cooler in a situation that's not necessarily space constrained and i came up with a couple of reasons maybe you guys can add to this in the comments but number one is potentially lower vrm and memory temperatures there's a lot of assumption out there that a downdraft cooler will lead to those components being cooled better and i'm saying assumption because you have to see the numbers that we're going to be putting up here in a couple seconds the other possibility and for me this is a big one is aesthetics so for me personally i like the look of a fan pointing towards the side of a case rather than just like a plain jane heatsink maybe you have a rgb it might look even better now on the other hand there it might be a little bit of a niche scenario where you have a slightly smaller case that brings a vertical gpu right over the cpu socket and you might not have the vertical space in order to mount a typical tower cooler in that case you might not want an aio and boom you can actually put potentially a downdraft cooler there like i said if you guys have any other reasons by all means let me know now what i wanted to do is take all of those theories and put them into practice so this is basically what i've gone and done the test system is in a closed nzxt h510 with a single 120 millimeter fan at the front and another one at the back both running at 1000 rpms meanwhile the cpu is an amd ryzen 9 5950x set to run at a constant watts i'll be logging a couple of constant temperatures after 30 minutes of a full cpu load so basically the processor the memory and the vrm are taken directly from their internal sensors and reported by hw info and just a small note about gpu temperatures because i know you guys are gonna ask about that so when gaming there was absolutely no difference between any of the downdrafts versus any of the tower heatsinks there wasn't a difference in temperatures or in clock speeds or even component temperatures on the gpu itself and i think there's a reason for that that's because the vast majority of games out there they just don't put a heavy load on the cpu so the cpu temperatures doesn't matter if it's in a down draft or tower situation they just aren't high enough to impact the gpu and the gpus these days have typically incredible cooling anyways let's start off with the shadow rock 3 since it's a fairly typical tower cooler in this case the 5950x hit just 71 degrees and the memory and vrms leveled out at just 37.1 and 55 degrees respectively both ambient temperatures were pretty close to one another too with the top thermal couple reporting just 27 degrees while the lower one got to just 3.5 degrees above ambient and now that we have something to compare it to let's talk about the shadow rock tf2 cpu temperatures in this case were pretty comparable to the shadow rock 3 with it hitting just 3 degrees higher but remember what i said about the potential for lower memory and vrm temperatures from downdraft coolers well that didn't happen here at all instead they both climbed up by four degrees look my theory about what's happening here is pretty straightforward i'm running a relatively hot cpu and that heat is being funneled right towards those components it could be that when using a lower wattage processor you'll actually see some very different results but look that's just my hypothesis here as for the case temps well they go up in both areas which is exactly as expected for any downdraft cooler that is unless you have an absolute ton of secondary airflow and this case doesn't in the way i have it set up at least finally what happens when you flip the fan so it's pulling air through the heat sink well check this out processor temperatures do head a bit higher by 2 degrees or about 5 degrees more than the shadow rock 3. but both the vrm and memory temperatures are the lowest in this test and that's probably because the fans are actively working to draw air away from those items instead of blasting them again and again with the cpu's heat meanwhile the case temperatures they sort of take it on the chin since i think the fans are now causing any of the hot air not sucked out by the exhaust fan to deflect right off the side window back into the case this is definitely something you want to be aware of if your case doesn't have side ventilation with that done let's step things up a bit to the higher end cooler so the dark rock series and the situations changed a bit too since i massaged the 5950x a bit so it was running at a constant 155 watts that might not sound like all that much but this is one hot running processor and all the other parameters though they are pretty much the same as in the other test so the first up is the dark rock 4 which is a pretty traditional higher end 75 cooler with it installed the processor leveled out at around 83 degrees the vrm temperatures they hit around 59 while the memory finally leveled out at 37.6 degrees and the two temperature probes i've hanging around hit 30 degrees and 31 degrees respectively with that as a baseline this is the dark rock tf2 and i know what i said about downdraft coolers supposedly being a little bit shorter and more compact vertically i mean sure it's a lot shorter than the high-end tower coolers at 134 millimeters in height and that actually makes it more compact than actually some of the 92 millimeter coolers out there like the pure rock slim 2 i looked at a little while ago but even with two fans installed it still has the space to fit 49 millimeter high memory modules underneath and that's pretty impressive but the main challenges and complexity are the same as with all the other downdraft coolers out there so it carries a premium price of 85 bucks and actually goes for more than the dark rock 4. and in comparison the cpu temperatures were actually right in line well two degrees hotter but that's pretty much dead even in my books vrm temperatures on the other hand they remained about the same in both situations since there's continuous airflow over them but the memory does jump a bit in comparison to the tower cooler and case temperatures well that all depends on which one you look at the probe on the top of the case ended up at 37 degrees which is getting pretty toasty while the lower one only registered a four degree uptick but what happens when we flip this thing around with the fans pointed upwards like i did before with the shadow rock tf2 well cpu temperatures are only two degrees hotter than the standard config while both vrm and memory are actually two to three degrees cooler and just like before this configuration ends up raising case temperatures in both zones well i guess that wraps things up and if anything i hope this video allowed you guys to have a little bit of a snapshot into the differences between downdraft and tower style coolers now i hope this also provided a little bit of an educational lesson and maybe open up some people's eyes to the potentials of both but if anything i'm hoping that this sets the stage for upcoming content and it also helps you guys make the right decisions when spending your hard earned money so look i'm mike with hardware canucks i'm going to see you in the next one and i hope you have a great day

Channel: Hardware Canucks

Views: 156,125

Keywords: top down cpu cooler, downdraft cpu cooler, best air cooler, corsair, cpu cooler, best cpu air cooler, best cpu cooler, cpu air cooler, gaming cpu cooler, cpu cooler test, best value cpu cooler, best cpu cooler for overclocking, budget cpu cooler, cheap cpu cooler, best cheap cpu cooler, best cpu cooler 2021, best budget cpu cooler, cpu cooler review, best cpu cooler under $50, best cpu air cooler 2021, hardwarecanucks, hardware canucks

Id: meZ9YqsMP_I

Length: 14min 22sec (862 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 20 2021