Gadgetory

wasn't part of evil welcome back to the channel today we're going to be taking a closer look at AMD's one of AMD's brand new stock coolers that comes bundled with the r7 1700 and that is the race aspire and this is not to be confused with the race the original race that AMD launched a year or two ago nor is it to be confused with the race max which is the other new stock cooler from AMD that comes bundled with the 1800 X and the 1700 X now it's perfectly reasonable for you to be wondering why am i doing a standalone video on a stock cooler that seems more or less uninteresting and it might be for some of you but the way I see it is that the r7 1700 is probably the most appealing of the three Rison chips right now of the r7 family due to its lower price point at 330 MSRP and the fact that you can overclock the crap out of it and pretty much get similar performance on par with the 1800 X for a fraction of the cost so with that in mind users looking to buy the 1700 are also probably checking out the included spire cooler thinking well is that cooler really good enough or is it cool enough or quiet enough or should I just throw in the towel right now and assume that I'm gonna have to buy a 30 40 $50 cooler anyway so that's what we're really going to answer today now with that said let's dive into some of the basic specs of the race spire starting with its TVP of 95 watts which is actually fairly nice because we only have a 65 watt TDP on the horizon CPU the 1700 is a fairly low power chip so the fact that AMD has bundled a 95 watt TDP cooler with it means that they've actually kept overclocking in overclockers in mind with this particular launch so that's actually really nice we're going to have additional Headroom to take the chip a bit further you may have also noticed that the spire is significantly smaller than both the race and race max and that's actually a really good thing because the one complaints is a big complaint that I had with the original Maxx the original race cooler was that it was so freakishly large that it was intruding on the RAM clearance and actually you couldn't even install the leftmost dim properly unless you had like a like a full ATX board because with a with a small form-factor board you just had all that component tree being squeezed together on the PCB and with creating all these sort of clearance issues between the cooler itself and the memory you're not getting that at all with the spire regardless of what form factor motherboard you're dealing with so I think that's a huge plus overall the other thing I want to mention is that the fan itself on the spire is 92 millimeters it's actually fairly large for a stock cooler these days very much modeling after the race in that sense but it's also fairly quiet as we will see a bit later and that is being controlled by a 4-pin pwm fan header which is also nice to see the spire also comes included with a second cable it's got a four pin connector that plugs directly into the RGB header on your motherboard should you have one and that's just to control the RGB ring that goes around the fan we're not going to be diving into any customization or or demoing that at all this is more so about the performance again but if you were to control or configure that the LED you would have to go into the appropriate motherboard manufacturers software so if you had a crosshair Asus board you'd have to use Ora if you were on MSI motherboard like I am would be the MSI gaming app and so forth but pretty cool to see some a little bit of bling factor on a stock cooler for once that is pretty sweet however of course you don't have to enable that you can just not use the cable don't plug that in and all of a sudden it's it's completely unlimited so the last day to discuss here is mounting and the spire actually mounts to the motherboard very easily it probably takes 10 to 15 seconds to do and at first it looks like it does it the same way as the Intel stock coolers with pushpins it's actually not the case these are in fact ridges regular Phillips head screws that screw directly into a name for backplate that goes behind the PCB of course of the motherboard and installation is just a breeze super simple straightforward and it works properly it's less awkward than the pushpins on the intel side and it's much less awkward than the stupid seesaw bar the seesaw retention bar that we that we find on older A&B and also the the race coolers as well and I think now we can talk about some of the testing so testing hardware first off rocking an MSI x3 70 X power gaming titanium motherboard that is just way too long for for a name we've also got a gtx 1070 that's rockin a Founders Edition stock frequencies to 16 gigs of Corsair Vengeance lpx ddr4 of course which is one of the few ddr4 kits that's validated for Rison and then we've also got a left of 1600 watt power supply a 512 gig SX 900 SSD from a data which we're using as a fresh clean install boot dry it's a really fresh drive there's really not much else on other than the essentials and of course the right spire and all that jazz so that's pretty much going to do it for our testing setup we are rockin Windows 10 54 bit of course with the latest in video drivers three seven eight dot six six oh all right and testing so I fired up the test bed for the first time everything running stock the Wraiths cooler is that stock whatever default curve that it runs at and the 1700 is running at stock frequencies which in precision boosts up to three point two gigahertz on all cores under multi-threaded workload so that's what we were rockin there so for this initial test we fired up GTA 5 at max settings 2560 by 1440 2x msaa and what we found after about twenty minutes of gameplay was that the CPU temperatures were staying in the low 60s and that's in degrees Celsius of course which is fairly reasonable granted we aren't putting a huge thermal burden on the CPU just yet because we haven't overclocked it at all but I mean the fan is just running on auto we haven't maxed out the fan speed on this fire by any means and I guess I was just expecting a little bit worse in terms of thermal performance than what we're seeing here I mean it's not super chilly in my room or anything ambient temps aren't they could always be lower but actually a fairly good start for the race spire but now let's see how it performs when we crank things up on the multiplier I got the chips table at 3.9 gigahertz at 1.3 volts of course CPUs II was reading it a little bit higher at one point three one two but overall very very consistent on the V core and then I fired up GTA 5 once again all the same settings and saw the core temps start to spike up I mean they just started climbing the ladder once they hit about eighty degrees Celsius I rebooted into the BIOS and I just cranked the race fan of the the spire fan up to a higher percent and before you start judging and start thinking well it's probably going to sound like a turbine mention at this point it actually doesn't the spire fan is incredibly quiet even at 100 percent fan speed I was remarkably impressed by how quiet it was I actually had my again my AC my window AC unit running at the time when I cranked the fan to 100 and I literally had to put my ear to the cooler to make sure that it was actually taking effect because it was just being drowned out by the window AC unit which isn't really that loud to begin with so especially if you're gonna be using headphones while you're gaming you're really not going to notice the race spending up to 100% at all especially inside of a conventional clothes chassis and on that note before we can get off to a sound test you can actually hear 100% fan speed sounds like I did want to mention that you're also the microphone is also going to be picking up the fan noise coming from the GPU and the power supply as well so just bear that in mind as you go about listening so with our r7 overclocks 23.9 gigahertz table and our race fire cooler now operating at a hundred percent fan speed I jump once again into gta5 just to see how much lower the temperatures on our CPU would be and what we found was with just GTA 5 no background applications just the game alone we were seeing temperatures now in the high 40s that's actually really good especially running overclocked and all that when you consider everything I will say that idling temperatures are are oddly high we were seeing like high 30s and low 40s just at idle and so the fact that we're really good raising like seven to ten degrees jumping into a game is kind of interesting I'm not exactly sure if idling temps are high or if the overclocking temps are low it's just just kind of strange but that that is only does only like that only answer is part of the question because the r7 1700 is really appealing to gamers who want more than just gaming who are actually doing multi-threaded applications like live encoding if you're going to be gaming while streaming maybe editing your videos at the same time so I decided to retest with GTA 5 still running but this time streaming it out to 720p at 60 frames per second as well as having a couple chrome tabs open as well just to see exactly how much the temperatures spiked up and sure enough we did see it increase going from the high 40s again to the 50s and 60s now so I was monitoring these temperatures within AMD rise and master by the way so I don't know I still don't know it's still too early to tell just how reliable that application is for monitoring temps but it's really all I had on hand at the moment so just bear that in mind going into these numbers so getting to the 50s and 60s I mean that's still very reasonable considering that we're almost overclocked to four gigahertz here now I did try to overclock to four gigahertz however the voltage required to hit that at least on my particular chip which was one point three six to five that's actually what I got away with when I was using using that not too a cooler in the other video that voltage was introducing too much heat for the spire to really handle and so what we saw was a little bit of thermal throttling once we got up to like the high 70s and then all of a sudden it just Auto failsafe and shut down I mean it just crashed from instability or from getting too hot to prevent any sort of damage from happening and that was kind of a bummer so we didn't quite we're not quite able to hit that four gigahertz mark with the spire at least with my chip you guys might be might fare better in the Silicon Lottery and whatnot and be able to hit four gigahertz no problem with this cooler but at least in my testing setup today I was unable to do so so that sort of leads me into how I feel about the spire overall we can kind of wrap this video up is that if you aren't trying to hit the utmost highest overclock with your r7 1700 then the spire is a perfectly sound solution that is incredibly quiet for what it is and actually offers some really decent thermals especially on you know is it is a 65 watt TDP chip with a 95 watt TDP cooler so you do have that additional Headroom if you did want to overclock you just might not be able to squeeze every last ounce of performance out of your CPU as you might with say a higher-end aftermarket air cooler like a tower cooler for example or of course a liquid cooled option but overall a very solid value add from AMD that I think is going to save a lot of users a nice chunk of change on an aftermarket cooler the last thing I want to mention is that the spire is a downward firing cooler so you're going to be exhausting hot air at completely different directions all over inside your case but as long as you have the proper airflow path that's going through your chassis and you've got some nice intake fans maybe a couple exhaust the top and the rear then that should pretty much redirect and refocus that exhausted air from the cooler out the appropriate exits of your chassis so that's pretty much all I have for you guys today let me know what you think about the spire so far in the comments and also feel free to toss me a like on this video if you enjoyed it have a good one guys I hope you all have a lovely weekend or whenever or a weekday depending on when I post this video I'm not sure but yes thank you all so much for watching as always feel free to check out some of the links in the description ways that you can help support the channel there's my store you can subscribe to bit with ultra but I am going to get out of here guys so have yourselves a very good day and I'll see y'all in the next week