Gadgetory

anyone I am Steve from gamers Nexus dotnet and today we're talking about something pretty cool and fun but not super applicable to the real world but still interesting to know we ran tests on two very similar effectively identical liquid coolers using one major difference and that is the cold plate metal so we have an aluminum cold plate here on ACE Tech's 510 LC and a copper cold plate on the 550 LC and the question I set out to answer was when you have a high efficiency cooling unit for CPU cooling like a liquid cooler does the metal type does the cold plate still bear significant relevance on the cooling potential of that device when mounted to a CPU under load and so we put our CPU under 100% load we tested it overclocked and stock using a 4790k certainly not the world's hottest CPU but for these CPU coolers it works just fine and we found a couple of measurements that were interesting but perhaps not too unexpected for the specs both of these coolers are 120 millimeters we mounted them to the same fan it's our testbench fan hunter 20 millimeter fan and both of them are 27 millimeters in width or thickness 2 NM what you want to call it and they both use the Gen 5 ASA tech pumped Gen 5 a stick everything so for a point of reference other current Gen 5 ASA tech devices would include the corsair h 100 i GTX the H ATI that's brand new and any other gtx line courser unit that's come out of this year those are all Gen 5 ASA tech pumps and basically courser goes to a detect or other suppliers like kuwaiti they say we want to buy this product and make these modifications to it and then sell it as whatever they end up selling it as so it's not like they're just buying it off a shelf there are some actual tweaks going on behind the scenes but at the end of the day the coolers that are supplied to Coursera NZXT to other providers are generally coming from either ASA Tech or one of a few other manufacturers in this case we've got the 510 and 550 LC units both of these are available through the system integrator channel so if you go to like CyberPower ibuypower you will find both of these you normally or at least the 510 LC on one of them in terms of branded manufacturer models the 550 LC is out there and branded under coursers flag so that is an available product to the end-user the test we look at is aluminum versus copper in this instance so aluminum has a thermal conductivity of almost half coppers it's about 205 watts per meter Kelvin for 25 Celsius load thermal load and copper is 401 watts per meter Kelvin for the same 25 Celsius load and what we looked at here was how much thermal dissipation potential exists in these coolers per 100 watts and we found the difference as you'll see in these charts to be about point eight Celsius per 100 watts for the CPU cv generates about 88 watts and then after overclocking there's a couple more watts thrown onto that and the biggest difference is in our overclock test it's one point one Celsius difference in thrown walls between the copper and aluminum cold plates favouring copper of course because it does have that higher rating but the difference for the non overclocked test is even smaller one thing that this does tell us is that with hotter CPUs maybe like AMD's FX line it's possible that there will be a greater difference these coolers are not rated to cool some of the hotter CPUs out there they're certainly not rated to cool the 220 watt CPUs so we just can't even test that but for what we're looking at the difference between aluminum and copper for a highly efficient liquid cooler when cooling something like the 4790k or other high-end Intel devices the difference is effectively non-existent it is barely measurable it's just outside of margin of error but only just and the reason for this is possibly unlikely because the efficiency of the pump is so great that the aluminum and the copper even with a 2 X difference in thermal conductivity just doesn't matter as much and the way these radiators work just as a recap if you don't know it's very simple this is the pump it sits on top of the CPU and the pump is where there's basically a little propeller inside of the the enclosure that we see that propeller spins and it pushes liquid down into sort of a channel below the top of the pump and when the liquid goes into that channel it flows through what are called micro fins in the cold plate surface and this is something I've actually done videos on with an Tek and a Corsair in the past have you checked the channel for those so the liquid flows through these micro fin channels and there are hundreds of them depend on which cool you buy that connects directly to the smooth cold plate that we see here which connects to the CPU the IHS more specifically and then you've got the thermal interface in between there to fill any imperfections when the liquid goes through the micro fins it is propelled back up into the other tube goes through the radiator and then if you know how radiator works in a car it's the same thing here or any other device really basically the liquid flows through these tiny channels in the radiator the fins on the radiator the aluminum fins will siphon off heat they conduct heat away from the channels that the liquid flows through and then the fan blows that heat away so it can cycle and repeat like that so that is how it radiator works and because it is a highly efficient system the metals don't matter as much now one thing to note with air coolers the difference between aluminum and copper could be pretty substantial we don't know we haven't tested it but the reason for that is because they're more reliant on metal there's a huge piece of metal sitting on top of the CPU if you use an air cooler so if you replace all of that copper all the copper heat pipes the copper base plate the copper whatever else you've got if it's an older heat sink maybe copper fins as well if you place that with aluminum there could actually be a performance difference that's substantial I don't have to effectively identical copper and aluminum coolers that's pretty hard to come by I do believe I could probably grab some old zalman ones we might test that but just for liquid basically the same so that is it for this video check out our patreon page if you like this sort of content and want to help us do more of it and I will see you all next time