Gadgetory

hey everyone this is steve from gamers nexus dotnet and today we're looking at two new cpu coolers from NZXT their aspire t20 and respire t40 i was able to run several stress tests on these coolers on my trusty nehalem core cpu but before we get to the performance results let's look at the specs both of these units are targeted to be budget-friendly cooling options with the slightly smaller t20 marked at 30 bucks and the t47 440 and both are also mechanical air coolers that are equipped with NZXT fans operating within a range of 1,300 to 1800 RPM based upon cooling demand by the cpu and they are respect for 27 decibels to 34 decibels respective to the RPM the stock fans that ship with the coolers will push 49.3 CFM on the low setting and 68.8 CFM on the high setting each cooler can fit to 120 millimeter fans right a push-pull configuration which is of course designed to channel more air through the hot lumina piping and cool things off more quickly in theory we will test this in the video as it goes on both units have relatively standard copper heat piping and aluminum heatsink designs with the t20 exposing to 6 millimeter copper heatpipes and 18 millimeter pipe to the cpu for a total of three while the t 40 exposes for total pipes to the cpu all of which are eight millimeter pipes so they're a little bit bigger and there's one more the actual heat sinks use aluminum fittings to spread the heat and measure in at 40 millimetres depth for the t20 and 60 millimetres depth for the t40 so the t40 does give you quite a bit more aluminum to sink all that heat with each added fan will increase the depth by 25 millimeters on average based on your fan so do factor that in when you're fitting your case the units are fairly universal and their compatibility which is very refreshing actually and the shift product will include all of the brackets for Intel's LGA 2011 1366 1155 1156 and 77 yeah 775 excuse me wow it's been a long time since I have said that CPU socket as all of those will fit with the new coolers AMD will fit fm1 am3 am3+ am too and am too plus cpus so either way you can go back half a decade or more and retrofit a CPU if you'd like to that's all well and good but the performance and build quality is really what counts with these so I fitted both of the stock coolers to my system and tested them in a few configurations I tried each product with the stock thermal paste that ships with them which has a thermal conductivity of 4 watts per meter Kelvin as well as an txt silver 6 aftermarket paste which has a thermal conductivity of 5.3 watts per meter Kelvin I then tried the T 40 with a dual fan configuration just to see if it made a noticeable impact on cooling this was also done with aftermarket paste for testing I used eight torture threads on prime 95 with large FFTs for testing and our testing methodology is discussed in the full review links below if you would like to read more about that so my findings were pretty straightforward everything is measured in delta temperature over ambient so ambient was 21 c that is factored out of the temperatures for each of these coolers for idle tests the t20 with stock thermal paste ran at 1.5 celsius hotter than the t 40 and under load the t20 ran a massive 10 Celsius hotter than the T for T the aftermarket thermal compound brought temperatures down considerably and we'll feed heavily into my conclusion in a moment the t20 with aftermarket thermal compound idled at 3.2 celsius hotter than the t48 idol and the t20 underload ran at 2.1 celsius hotter than the t 4t as a final note to the performance section the t 40 with an additional fan and aftermarket paste ran one Celsius cooler at idle and three Celsius cooler under load than the t 40 with only one fan and aftermarket paste so a decent difference there but really only relevant at the end of the day if you're planning to really push that overclocking barrier as it will give you a small amount more Headroom for pushing voltages just that much higher so as for the cooling differences the temperature differences i think a lot of it it can be easily attributed to the fact that on the t20 you have fewer heat pipes exposed to the cpu than the t 4t of course and also the t20 is significantly harder to line up then the t 4t on top of the cpu there's less surface area so it's more vital that you that you really get dead center with that t20 as far as build quality goes first I want to note the installation process was a little bit more involved and more painful than most cpu coolers I've worked with though not terrible because at the end of the day it's a pretty cheap cpu cooler it's 30 or 40 bucks depending this this difficulty was due to the two screw mounting bracket design thats it's centrally across the CPU it is quite easy for the cooler to slide around while it's still being screwed in due to this design which means worst thermal paste distribution and more involved time and effort so do be careful when you're mounting it because it will screw up your thermal paste if it slides around the mounting screws also and this is a bit more of an issue than the previous one also shed metal fibers when unscrewed and refitted in my model this slightly concerns me because if one of these fibers were to in an unlikely scenario cross an integrated circuit or bypass cap and enters it or enter the psu I'd be worried about a potential short that said as long as you're careful installing don't remove and reapply it several times like I had to for these tests and you're generally just careful about watching where the the scraps are going I don't think it'll be an issue the chances of a short even with the shavings are quite low but I do think it's important to get out there so you you're aware of the issue before you buy it the performance is an exemplary but it is still quite good at the price and at such relatively low prices these coolers do pose a great value option for system builders who want to toy with overclocking or better cooling on the stock options the hyper 212 endowments lower end products are as viable as ever but with impending sales on NZXT products they're well worth consideration and from what I've been told the CPU coolers could well be the best price to performance option available during times of large sales without a sale though there are quite a lot of other choices out there in this range and they all perform equally well some better some worse so that leaves the T for T and t20 decidedly average within their own price points if you're picking strictly between the two units i would encourage choosing the t 40 and i'm tempted to discourage picking the teach one e altogether given a mere ten dollar difference for quite a large performance difference i would also highly recommend you either higher quality thermal paste or an additional fan as the results proved to be worthwhile investments if you are looking into overclocking if you're running stock settings both are irrelevant don't waste your money just be careful about adding too much on to the purpose purchase since another fifteen or twenty dollars will put you into the price range of higher pedigree coolers at the end of the day they're both decent products that will perform just fine for most intermediate system builders it'll outperform stock heat sinks admirably and give you a great launch point for overclocking but it's still nothing mind-blowing so that's all for this video I'll see you all next time peace