- There's a point where you
can't make a cooler bigger because you can't move heat to the outermost fins, fast
enough for them to be helpful. So then how the F does this work? I remember Noctua explaining
to me that limitations of heat pipe cooling
technology, are the reason that they still have
not updated the NHD15, a design from over six years ago. So then, does IceGiant, who
claims that this air cooler is competitive with custom water cooling, know something that Noctua doesn't? Actually, yes, but to explain, we're gonna need to have a
look at the test results. Just like the test results
I just got from my doctor. Looks like I've got a
bad case of Segway-itis. Our sponsor GlassWire is
the tool that shows you which apps are slowing
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to monitor for malware, block bandwidth wasters and detect suspicious activity. You can get 25% off today, using offer code Linus, at the link below. (upbeat music) When we showed off the
IceGiant ProSiphon prototype, it reached a level of
insane cooling performance that we had never seen from an air cooler, but it did leave us with
a couple of questions. One, was it good because of IceGiant's thermosiphon technology, or was it good because it had two high
high-speed delta fans strapped to a heat sink big
enough to bend the motherboard. Compared to their proof of concept, the production unit is
much more reasonable. The ProSiphon Elite, is equipped with much quieter fans
and well, it's still huge, but it is considerably
smaller than the old version. The best part, is that
true to their promises, which we didn't quite believe at the time, this new version delivers the same performance as the prototype. Actually, it ended up being
about half a degree cooler, while being smaller and much quieter. Apparently this improvement in efficiency, is thanks to the third
condenser unit that they added which actually, we should
back up for a second and talk about the heart of the
ProSiphon, the thermosiphon. Now we'll have more detail
in our original video on the prototype, but here's the TLDR. Most modern air coolers
work using heat pipes, which are super good at moving heat from one place to another,
like thousands of times more conductive than copper. But heat pipes have a problem, dry out. Inside every heat pipe,
is a fluid that heats up and evaporates, flowing
away from the heat source. Then condenses that the
fins of the heat sink where the cooling is happening and returns to the heat source, using a wick. Heat pipe dry out occurs,
when the fluid starts boiling inside the wick, that's supposed to be returning it to the heat source. This greatly increases
the thermal resistance of the heat pipe and makes it
really bad at it's one job. Now for years, this didn't matter, since you need a lot of
heat to cause dry out. Problem is, nowadays AMD's
thread ripper 3000 series chips, are rated at up to 280 watts and consume much more than
that when you overclock them. So taming these beasts
has been a challenge, unless you want to move
into custom water cooling. Now the way a thermosiphon works, is somewhere in between a
heat pipe and water cooling. Like a heat pipe, it boils
a fluid at the heat source, but unlike a heat pipe, it
uses some fancy engineering to turn the boiling fluid into a pump that circulates itself through the cooler. So you can kind of think of this thing as a wholly self-contained
AIO, but way more reliable because there's no moving parts in here. The actual thermosiphon is
expected to have a lifetime of decades and that's backed
up by a 10 year warranty. And unlike an AIO, where
the pump is expected to be the first thing to fail, the ProSiphon Elite's
weakest link, is its fans. The biggest quirk about
thermosiphons though, is that because they use gravity to work, you can mount it like this or like this but if you mount it like this, you're gonna have a really bad time. We're here for a good time
though, so let's flip it around. (upbeat music) Now normally, the flow of air inside a case is pretty simple. Cold air comes in the front and then warm air is exhausted out the back. But in this case, pun intended, the rear fan is probably
not doing a whole lot because of the way the IceGiant
exhausts its air upward. So in our testing, with
a Threadripper 3970X running at four gigahertz
all core, our CPU temps dropped by four degrees,
by adding two fans to the top of the case. And we also found that
having no rear fan at all, didn't really change things. Taking the rear case
fan out and chucking it in the top of your case, could net you as much as three degrees with this cooler. One fun observation, is that with Nvidia founder's edition cards also moving to a more bottom
to top air flow scheme, a ProSiphon Elite would probably pair well with one of those, that
is if you could find one. For our tests, our case
fans were set to 1200 RPM and the CPU fans were
set to maximum speed. We also monitored our room temperature and adjusted our results
to 22 degrees ambient. Out of the gate on our
Threadripper 3970X 32 core, this thing is shockingly good. It even handled our first
overclock stage easily, with all 32 cores going at four gigahertz, The ProSiphon Elite reached
a maximum temperature of 80.1 degrees and flew
through our Blender Classroom render benchmark, which we had to run at 10 times the samples, so that it would take 22 minutes instead of just two. Man, isn't Threadripper amazing? We then decided to give it all the beans and see just how far
we could take this chip on the ProSiphon Elite. And it turns out, the weak link ended up being the silicon, not the cooling. The ProSiphon was able to narrowly avoid thermal throttling, even
when we pushed all 32 cores to 4.3 gigahertz at 1.37 volts. And for those of you who
don't speak turbo nerd, these are the kinds of
speeds that I would expect to need sub ambient cooling to achieve. Not some roided out air cooler. This seems to be a limit of either our CPU or our motherboard. And I doubt additional
cooling would make much of a difference, unless
we went really exotic. I mean the poor motherboard
VRMs were delivering over 250 amps during
our 4.3 gigahertz run. What we don't know yet though, is if this great result is due to IceGiant's engineering or AMD's. So how do other thread
ripper coolers stack up? To find out, we dusted off our trustee Noctua NH-U14S TR4. There are other options, notably the Cooler Master Wraith Ripper and the Thermalright Silver Arrow TR4. But other reviews have shown the U14S, to be both cooler and quieter. There's also the Arctic Freezer 50 TR, which does slightly outperform the U14S, but RAM compatibility on
that thing is atrocious, so it's off the table. NHU14S then, well all I can say is, it might need some sexy
sweat bands, lttstore.com, because this thing got hot, 13 degrees hotter to be exact, dang. We also tested out the NZXT Kracken Z73, which predictably wasn't able to keep up. But, really any cooler that's
not specifically designed for Threadripper, isn't
going to be able to compete with one that is properly
able to cover the entire IHS. And the reason, is that the dis underneath, are so spread out. Now we did have the Enermax Liqtech TR4, but the pump died in our unit which is apparently a
common issue with these, so probably just avoid them. leaving us with only one other option, full custom water cooling, now. (banging) It's not exactly a fair fight,
when you consider the cost. $170 for a ProSiphon Elite, that is really expensive for a cooler, but it's still less than half of this $440 of raw, PC cooling goodness. And get this, the ProSiphon
only lost by two degrees. What, one thing we haven't talked about yet though, is noise. And with four fans, you might
expect it to be pretty bad. In practice though, it's not. Even at full blast, they
were barely able to crack the 42 decibel noise floor of our office. And there's no high-pitched whining, so it's pretty easy to tune
out, even though it is louder than Noctua's solution, which I would still recommend for stock operation. Bottom line then, if you've
got a Threadripper computer, buy this just buy it now. So I mean, you can find
anywhere to buy it. Who's carrying it? Okay then, but wait, Linus, there's like four minutes left in this video. Ah, let's talk about the
problem for IceGiant. Most of you aren't made
of fat stacks of cash and you don't have a Threadripper system. And on any other platform, the U14S, isn't Noctua's biggest,
baddest cooler, the NHD15 is. So, for our Intel cooling comparison, this is the only cooler
we're going to test against because frankly, if you want performance without going full custom liquid cooling, this is what you're buying. If you still need some convincing that it's better than an
AIO, go watch this video. Installation on LGA 1200, is actually a little bit easier than Threadripper. IceGiant appears to have taken our advice and basically just ripped off Noctua's secufirm mounting system. Now, since the point of this cooler is its ability to handle big, heavy loads, we overclocked our core I7 10875K, to 4.9 gigahertz all core, so that it would consume
a tasty 230 watts, which the NHD15 was able to
handle without much issue. As for the ProSiphon Elite, well it handled it, but worse, five degrees worse to be exact. Now it's still a solid result. The ProSiphon was able
to take all 10 cores to the reasonable limit of our silicon but there are a few things
holding it back here. First and foremost, the
ProSiphon Elite was optimized for multi-di designs, like Threadripper and AM4, where the heat generation is spread out across the IHS. Intel consumer chips instead, have a small heat generating di right in the center and
conventional heat pipe coolers and AIO's for that matter,
are designed to deal with this specific scenario. In the future, IceGiant
thinks there'll be able to take on other coolers
on more conventional chips, maybe by switching to a copper cold plate. But honestly, I doubt it would make a ton of sense to buy anyway. Most consumer chips are
generating much less than 200 watts under normal circumstances. And that's where heat pipe
coolers like the NHU14 or D15, are still very
efficient at scooting away heat. If you're using an Intel extreme edition, sure the ProSiphon Elite Intel edition, could be a good buy. Can certainly generate enough heat for it, but we didn't bother testing
that because frankly, no one should be buying an
intel extreme edition right now. Just get a 5900X or if you really need the threads, a
Threadripper, with one of these. Thank you to Ting Mobile for
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will work with Ting. Just check them out at linus.ting.com, and receive a $25 credit. If you guys enjoyed this
video, maybe check out, you know what, go check out
the video on the prototype, 'cause it gets into a little bit more of the science-y stuff
and it's worth a watch.
TL;DW
- Production version of IceGiant ProSiphon Elite performs as well as prototype, but is smaller and less noisy
- If you have a threadripper & want maximum cooling and don't want to go custom water cooling, just buy ProSiphon Elite, yes it is that good
- If you have an Intel chip (where dies are placed differently on the cpu), you are better off with a Noctua NH-D15 air cooler in terms of thermal performance (and noise), at least until IceGiant comes out with a specific version for Intel CPUs
here's an interview with Dr. Katie Carpenter, the Principal Thermal Engineer for IceGiant explaining how this cooler works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0a9O2XPKSpM
Was hoping he'd test with a 5950X. Curious what the temps would be like with such a low TDP
There's so many cool cooling products coming out now. I thought the Cryo cooler was super cool. I'd love to see an AMD version.
Is it just me or those fans really look like a 1:1 copy of Arctic's P12/14 fans?
https://www.icegiantcooling.com/prosiphonelite
10 year warranty
164mm CPU clearance
Ok with both vertical and horizontal
I'm surprised they don't offer a thermosiphon only package sans fans, since the target market for this has a fairly large overlap with the MUH NOCTUA circles.
Man, that looks really cool. Wish I had a reason to buy one, lol.
11:00 "Maybe by switching to a copper cold plate" So is this thing aluminum?
How do we think it would cool an early batch 3900x vs a 280 aio?
They focus an threadripper and intel, kind of hitting both ends of the spectrum, but left out am4.
Damn I wonder if this would fit in an NR200