Water Cooling is DEAD. Meet the THERMOSIPHON!

thanks to AMD packing a huge number of processing cores into their recent consumer CPUs we are currently undergoing a big leap in the performance of home computers and consequently we're also undergoing a huge leap in the cooling requirements of the aforementioned this CPU is sucking over 500 watts which is why we have this the ice giant o pro siphon Elite and I know ok it doesn't look like much right now but stay with me here guys this is just a prototype and III know it's kind of bulky but in our testing it actually managed to be this Ridge wallet is the sleek way to keep wallet bulge down with his compact frame and RFID blocking inner plates use offer code Lynas to save 10% and get free worldwide shipping today [Music] to understand why this cooler is important we first need to talk about how CPU cooler designs have evolved as each generation has reached its theoretical performance limits we started with simple aluminum heat sinks on chips that output anywhere from 5 to 70 watts and they served us so well for so many years that you might think well if some little fins are good then more bigger fins must be better unfortunately it doesn't work that way as you get farther away from the original heat source along a fin the temperature have said fin will drop once that temperature gets near to the ambient temperature so the temperature of the air around it no matter how much longer you make the fin you will get no additional heat transfer from it so as modern CPUs stretched into the 75 to 150 watt range or even higher in some cases thermal engineers to turn to what at the time was a much more exotic cooling method heat pipes now a heat pipe doesn't inherently add more cooling to a cooler what it does do is transport heat much more efficiently than metal on its own by using both conduction and convection this is what allows massive heat sinks like the Noctua NHD 15 to work effectively but we've got a problem under normal operation the fluid inside a heat pipe boils travels through the vapor chamber to the condenser end where the heatsink fins are attached and then is returned in liquid form to the heat source via a wick normally a sintered metal inner layer unfortunately if you pump too much heat into the system as you well might give an AMD thread Ripper and Intel's high-end desktop chips these days can easily output 300 to 400 watts when overclocked you get what's called heat pipe dry out where the fluid isn't just turning to vapor in the vapor chamber but also in the wick causing it to not return to the heat source greatly increasing the thermal resistance of the heat pipe which brings us to thermal siphons and why this cooler right here is dope as all hell as the kids say instead of using a wick to transport the fluid back to the evaporator like a heat pipe a thermo siphon simply uses gravity and with a little bit of clever engineering this can be turned into a loop basically using the evaporation of the fluid as the pump all of this is nothing new though and it's actually pretty common in high heat output industrial applications the special sauce that ice giant has patented is some internal geometry here that allows the cooler to not just be mounted on your computer like this you know gravity as effects are pretty obvious but also like this so in typical use this plate right here will contact your CPU the refrigerant inside will boil causing it to move up into the condenser somewhere in here where it will turn back into liquid and make its way back down to the evaporator this gives you in theory two main advantages one heat pipe dry out is avoided allowing for overclocking of super high performance chips and two since there's no pump involved the reliability is greater than a traditional a i/o like this one now ice giant couldn't say for sure what the reliability is and they're only planning for a six to seven year warranty but according to their simulations they figured this thing should last around ten lifetimes give or take enough jibber-jabber though let's give it a shot and see how it stacks up [Music] so as you guys can obviously tell from the current state of the mounting hardware the ice giant pro siphon elite is currently in the prototype stage of development but that's actually good news for a couple of reasons first and foremost of which is that the thickness of the unit is actually going to be decreased from a hundred and three millimeters down to just thirty millimeters so that's less than a third and they figure they can do this without losing any performance this helps not just in terms of making the thing less ridiculously bulky and heavy but also in terms of performance because it solves an issue where the fans would end up starved by a graphics card that's installed in the top slot here now one thing we expected was that the fans in the top of the case would help out the pro siphon a lot but it turns out they actually assisted our regular air coolers more now our prototype here is also only four thread Ripper but the final version is expected to have compatibility with LGA 1150 2066 and a m4 and that's it the install process especially compared to an a IO is pretty painless about the same as putting in a high end air cooler so we've got three different profiles in here stock speed which is around 250 watts a 320 watt profile which is 3.6 gigahertz all core and 400 watts Yi mode which is 3.8 gigahertz all cores on a 2990 WX so that is a 32 core processor let's go straight to that shall we now it should be noted that our fans are set to max speed on the CPU so you know well here goes nothing look at her go so hardware info has our package power reported at around 385 watts I can already feel the heat coming off the CPU just from the case fan at the back here and impressively our CPU temp so TDI is just 65 degrees that's going to be tough to beat wow that is a darn impressive result we just just about cracked 71 degrees then again none of that as a surprise because we already ran a bunch of numbers in a more controlled environment before turning on a camera duh what is a surprise though is that our pro syphon prototype beat not only knock to us thread Ripper specific single tower cooler but even Arctic's eight heat pipe dual fan monstrosity of the heatsink here so that's impressive but of course you guys have got to be wondering what about water cooling thing is unlike a heat pipe water doesn't have a point where it dries up in the CPU block or at least it if it does you have much bigger problems to deal with so in theory our thermo siphon should get left in the dust but it doesn't so our course our h1 15i cooled system managed to thermal throttle at just 320 watts though in Corsairs defense the h1 15i isn't made for a chip this size and doesn't cover the entire die as for our ek Phoenix 360 well it did in thermal throttle but shockingly it still lost and there's no excuse here because it's as bulky it's heavier we put a thread gripper specific block on it and it even managed to make a comparable amount of noise if not more a note on that by the way ice giant is currently using Delta fans that are as you guys can obviously hear far from quiet we're not sure if these are going to make it into the final product but they did say that they're going to be prioritizing extreme performance over acoustics so I'm not really expecting this to be a silent solution also guys I want to make it clear that we aren't ready to declare the ice giant pro siphon the best cooler we've ever tested because I would consider the two or so degrees of difference we've seen to be with in the margin of error of our test and our measurement method and also guys we are working with a pre-production model we don't know if when they slim it down to a third it will actually perform exactly the same if that said I see a ton of potential here because the craziest thing about all of this so far is that the pro siphon elite here is still made of all aluminum for easier manufacturing at these early stages so in the future a potential v2 made out of copper could reduce temps a further 5 to 10 degrees though it should be noted of course that that's only applicable to these very high heat output CPUs if you're running like a 90 700k at stock speed or something you're not gonna see that dramatic difference and I think they're gonna have like a passive version for you guys bottom line then should you buy one of these well with the projected price of 130 to 150 dollars I guess I'd give it a pretty big I guess so if you want to talk to your cooler and don't mind this gigantic thing hanging off your socket like it is considerably more expensive than the air coolers that we looked at but it's cheaper and managed to outperform our ail meaning that there's probably an argument to be made for it so we're gonna have a link below to pre-order the production version or if you're in Europe it'll be available on caseking hopefully in the first half of 2020 although I did tell them I thought that that was pretty optimistic big thanks to Katie from ice giant by the way for lending her expertise in heat sinks for this video big thanks to AMD and Intel of course for all these new CPUs that they just launched that need all this cooling so go check out our video reviews for them now that you're done watching and thanks to me for creating this beautiful segue to our sponsor Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of classes in business technology design and more and their premium membership gives you unlimited access to high quality classes on must know topics so you can improve your skills unlock new opportunities and ultimately do the work that you love Skillshare is more affordable than most learning platforms out there with an annual subscription costing less than $10 a month and it got tons of great content check out justin bridges a fashion and portrait photographer from New York City he teaches new photographers the fundamentals of lens's focal length and even photo editing he's got over 50,000 students signed up on his classes and you can use the promo link in the description to get your first two months for free so go check it out so thanks for watching guys hope you enjoyed the future of cooling maybe we'll see you next time oh if you want to check out more crazy cooling stuff then maybe have a look at this video where we water cooled a laptop it was as dumb as it sounds

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 4,705,291

Keywords: Water cooling, cpu cooling, thermsiphon, thermosyphon, intel i9, threadripper

Id: M13dWRL9qkc

Length: 12min 17sec (737 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 15 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/frenchpan]

Seems neat, but I do wonder how the actual production model will perform. Linus mentioned the production version being much smaller and it may not have the crazy delta fans.

If you make those two changes, will it still perform in a similar manner?

[u/Spyzilla]

Would love to see a build with this mounted on the CPU and GPU! That thing is MASSIVE

[u/duy0699cat]

Great cooling of aio (~360mm?) and longevity/maintenance of air cooler, hope this will be the silver lining for tr4 cooler. Afaik, noctua u14 and other air coolers cannot tame the 280w 3970x in acceptable noise volume, while most AIOs dont have proper tr4 block, and the enermax still struggle with corrosion.

[u/hiktaka]

That thing cooling 95W passively (no fan) would be neat.

[u/sirHitthis]

240ex is up there? Dang, and I replaced that for a h115i

[u/guicoelho]

Amazing! Did you post it on /r/overclocking too?

[u/someshooter]

I know I saw a LTT video where a Noctua cooler beat a 360mm rad so this isn't that big of a deal I think.

[u/Deshke]

the concept is nice but could Linus start using the F* SAME FANS for A to B comparisons? of course these delta fans will get you a better performance than with a default EK Fan.

[u/Samura1_I3]

5$ says the're using some kind of Tesla valve inside the pipe to ensure the fluid always travels one direction. This is a really cool idea. I wonder if microfluidics is going to play a more significant role in coolers in the future.