Gadgetory

Andy's new race CPU cooler increases the surface area of the aluminum heatsink by 24 percent and it's a good deal larger than the previous cooler if you look at the two of them here side-by-side and even larger still then the cooler before that the race the reason for launch is primarily a refresh of the existing FX line particularly the FX 83-70 and it is launching at the same price as the current FX 83-70 cpus but the old cooler will be available for $10 cheaper with the FX 83-70 so you pay 190 instead of 200 the Wraiths cooler uses the larger heatsink surface area and it also has a new fan which spins at a significantly slower rpm and this is a good thing because the previous cooler if you've ever used them spins up to a maximum of about 5500 rpm we get 50 to 52 and the new cooler is about 29 47 rpm so it is almost half it's about 40% of the original rpm and the cooling as you'll see momentarily is pretty comparable so that does mean that the AMD stock coolers will finally stop making the shrill Banshee shrieking noise the Theia that the older models have made and that's something that we tested so let's talk about all that you can view the test methodology link to the description below we've got that all in the article if you want to know how we tested how our automation sort of works at a very top level and things like that keep all of the testing accurate and fairly transparent also note quickly there's no objective decibel level analysis at this time because we don't have the tools for right now we're investing in thermal and if we can't do it right we don't do it at all subjectively what I can tell you is that the old cooler at its maximum rpm is absolutely unusable this is the previous model not the new one so the old cooler was so loud and such a high frequency that anywhere beyond maybe the halfway point the 3,000 rpm mark it was just unbearable and really caused a lot of stress to sit next to so the new cooler even at its 3,000 rpm is generally quieter than the system and GPU fans in our test bench so that makes it more or less inaudible or imperceptible and fan noise or any noise is logarithmic so it's not really just as simple as saying you can add a couple more decibels and that's what you expect the output to be but generally you should expect a very slight increase in noise from the Wraiths cooler the old cooler was substantially louder to the point that it is actually the loudest device I've ever tested short of a server fan at 12,000 rpm or something like that let's look at something for which we do have objective benchmarks and analysis so this chart shows the equalized temperatures for peak load averaged thermals on the different coolers on the bench so we look at the thermals over time there's another chart for that and then we average the peak thermal area there's a set area and every test where that happens we average that and then we get a value to three significant figures which you can see here that we averaged out from a two significant finger measurement and you can read all that in the article so the a.m. the Wraiths cooler at its maximum 2,900 rpm or less was pushing a forty one point zero seven four Celsius and that third figure is actually important here because if you look at the old stock cooler at its maximum loud rpm it was pushing 41 point zero seven eight so that is a very small imperceptible barely measurable difference we can only measure it because we log for such a long period of time and we use accurate instruments so it's unnoticeable to the average user except for one thing and that's the RPM and the noise so in order to achieve the same cooling performance as the Wraiths the old cooler had to operate at two times almost anyway the speed and that made it much louder it's idle temperature was also a bit higher at six point two nine four Celsius versus four point eight three six Celsius of the Wraiths and that is again not really something you're going to notice in your rig but it is just noteworthy because it shows a clear cooling advantage for the Wraiths and that is likely a result of its larger surface area so even though they're about the same under load the larger surface area of the fins will help drive down those thermals during idle periods just by nature of having more fins to sink the heat into and then dissipate it here's where it gets more interesting so we take the old stock cool and we clock it down so to speak to the same revs as the AMD ray at about 2900 rpm the noise level is fairly comparable from a subjective standpoint it is not too different with the old stock cooler and the cooling performance is actually noticeably different so it's now about a 5 Celsius more or less gain for the stock cooler the new one versus the old one so you get 41 point zero seven four versus forty six point nine and that's again not super noticeable but when you're talking about coolers ultimately you're just fighting over a couple Celsius and a 5 Celsius differential is actually pretty massive when it comes to the world of cooling especially with air if we look at something more standard for an aftermarket cooler you can see the NR max t40 fit up there the top they use a 140 millimeter fan it spins at much slower speeds 1,200 rpm so it's significantly quieter to the point that your other fans will be louder and this is true for most aftermarket coolers of this spec it's a $40.00 cooler so it's not just an animatic saying that is true for most of those coolers and that is at thirty eight point seven eight Celsius so not a huge advantage over the Wraith or the old cooler even at max rpm anyway but the noise levels are again what you're looking at here and it is of however a big difference from the old cooler at 2900 rpm so if you want something that's quieter and more tolerable then the Wraith would probably be the way to go short of buying an aftermarket cooler and the Wraith is going to be about ten dollars more so that the price isn't changing of the 83-70 still 200 bucks but the old one goes down to 190 that makes the rate ten dollars more and if you wanted to bump up to a sort of entry level air-cool you'd be spending at least $25 on average from hyper 212 to an AR 0 1 or something like that and that we think generally is worth it for anyone doing any kind of overclocking or prolonged system service life because you'll want that extra few degrees to help eke out more life from the CPU or the neighboring VRMs and that's another thing we don't show here is that if you have a larger cooler there's actually some potential to sink some heat from the BRM especially if there's vapor chambers and both involved and the Wraith won't do that as much but let's get to the conclusion here so the rate is a good cooler and so far as stock coolers go it is actually the best stock cooler out right now comparing against Intel the old Andy and the new Andy and for that we hope AMD will continue in the future because the wraith is good enough that we can actually say if you're buying the cpu you're not planning to overclock and you don't necessarily intend to have long system service life then yeah you can stick with the wraith because it's a tolerable noise level and it's reasonably cool comparatively anyway now for anyone doing serious stuff we still recommend aftermarket and this isn't really addressing the question of buying an FX processor am3+ platform at all we're just talking about coolers here because generally my feeling anyway and the kind of feeling of the site is that the FX line and am3+ line are old enough now five years old with am3+ that it's sort of becoming an odd choice to buy because ends right around the corner if you really want Andy and Intel is just cooler and quieter and perform similarly for games it's different story sometimes with certain applications but generally speaking the older architecture is a bit more difficult to work with it's got PCIe limitations it's got USB three non-native limitation so you have to get an aftermarket chip start it onto the board and create USB three that way and it just kind of becomes a little messy when you start doing that sort of stuff you can create issues with IO transfer rates or hannes and freezes and things like that which don't happen on many of the platforms out there but they've certainly happened on some of the ones we've tested so generally am3+ FX I'm not a huge proponent of recommending at this point because the other processor is so close but if you are buying one then probably do get the wraith model if you plan to not use an aftermarket cooler because it is substantially better than the old stock one if you're buying an aftermarket cooler well I just gave you the answer you buy the old one you throw out the cooler so that is all for this I hope to see Andy continue the wraith cpu cooler with their next line as the cpu hopefully become more relevant again and the LED on the side is kind of a nice touch there's a white LED on the side of it but you know it's an LED so not much to say about that thank you for watching check the patreon link in the post roll video to help us out directly or hit the link the description below for the full test methodology and more information and I'll see you all next time