Gadgetory

thermal takes engine 27 as a small form-factor CPU cooler that uses whirling metal blades for an internal fan of sorts though the fans theoretically also serves as additional service area for heat sinking and dissipation the hope is that cool air enters the top and gets forced outward to a more traditional heat sink theoretically permitting a smaller physical footprint while retaining competitive cooling performance to traditional fan and heatsink designs today we're reviewing the thermal take engine 27 and its sandhya / cool trip inspired engineering first this coverage is brought to you by XOR diem games and their indie game bear with me a more themed adventure that tells a sarcastic dark and nonlinear story with playable sidekick teddy bear go figure the game is currently 50% off on Steam at the link of the description below the original sandhya cooler had a different design than the one that Thermaltake is using though some aspects of it are the same in the sandia model rather than having a centrally mounted fan made out of aluminum they spun the entire aluminum heatsink so the entire set of fins just spun in a circle with no traditional fan centrally or otherwise the cooler also used a hydrodynamic air bearing and it conveyed the did the heat transfer across an air gap basically this was not something that ever really came to market in a consumer or CPU cooling usage we have never had our hands on one cool chip also worked on this design and works with thermal take on the engine 27 so this is the closest thing we've got to it right now and the idea would be that in the original model use the entire heatsink as a fan and therefore have greater surface area and theoretically you eliminate some of that thin layer of air that accumulates around the blades of a normal fan and heatsink setup so Dante has taken the piece that got the most heads turning the rotating aluminum blades and stuck it in a more traditional heat sink using 119 L shaped aluminum fins in the outer layer and 40 aluminum fins in the inner layer with a kinetic bearing and an 8 pole motor internally the motor does mean that you'll have to divide your RPM measurements by 2 get an accurate reading bios doesn't quite understand what it's looking at this is the exact same thing that you'd have to do with most liquid cooler pumps to determine their real rpm as they also have double the poles of what is expected for PWM thermal takes engine 27 is $50 and it's 27 millimeters in the height as indicated by the name engine 27 the cooler is one of these select few that would fit in something like Silverstone's at Pt 13 case or the petite series cases which are really slim small form-factor HTV see boxes that would be what you would use something like this for it also means that depending on how high you're willing to go in terms of cooler height the competition is pretty slim something like Silverstone's MTO 8 115 XP right here is 32 millimeters in height so even this is larger than the engine 27 and fitment is not actually going to work in the PT 13 which demands a 30 millimeter cooler or thereabout so there are a couple of interesting scenarios for testing this because we've got to take height into account the silverstone MTO is 7 would be the next smallest that we could consider at 23 millimeters but overall the engine 27 and its fan is meant to be used in small form-factor boxes where you wouldn't be stepping up to something like a cryo rig c 7 at 47 millimeters because that's clearly going to be better than both of these but we'll be looking through all of those in our thermal testing today taking the thermal take engine 27 apart reveals that there's a fixed base that doesn't spin connected to the cold plate and outer fins via a thin layer of thermal paste the base then transfers the heat to the rotating fins as you would expect but is also still transferring the heat to the outer thin as for the rest of it thermal takes website uses a thermal image to demonstrate the temperature of the CPU cooler and the surrounding motherboard components let's momentarily ignore the flawed approach to pointing a thermal camera at a heatsink and just talk about scales in charts we're going to remove thermal take scale and show you the image with no scale the direction we get from this is that the VRMs are hot a towel as you'd expect maybe eighty to ninety c while the cooler measures just 35.6 c let's have the scale back in its twenty three thousand to forty five so probably ambient to 45 Celsius for some reason so what looked like a potential 50 C difference is actually a 10 C difference and is totally insignificant and again ignoring the fact that pointing a thermal camera at a heatsink is pointless anyway at least this kind of heatsink we still don't know anything either testing we don't know what motherboard it was so we don't know the vrm spec and more importantly it's an irrelevant measurement that means nothing the fact that a CPU cool or a block of aluminum appear is cooler assuming they've done the thermal imaging correctly and taking all the parameters into account like emissivity and reflectivity and all of that assuming that why what does it tell you it tells you that the block of aluminum is cooler than who knows what motherboard components were surrounding it so that is exactly what you would expect and it would look the same if we took an image of this cooler or pretty much any other cooler now again this is just a fundamental misunderstanding with thermal cameras we don't know the temperature of the CPU just because we can point a camera at the cooler and get the temperature theoretically of the blades so this is a marketing image and you should ignore it completely and instead defer to our testing which is actually useful getting into this review we're abandoning our standard cooler test bench in favor of an ITX pacific bench these small form-factor coolers can't handle as much heat as the big stuff so with a TT engine 27 were rated for about 70 watt TDP CPUs because of that rather than use something way beyond spec like a 6700 K we're opting instead for an i3 6300 CPU and an ITX motherboard because ultimately this cooler is meant for ITX so we'll be testing it on ITX components all the testing methods are in the article linked below as always if you're curious but for competition we're testing against the silverstone and t o8 115 XP and the cryo rig c7 coolers both of which are also small form factor the silverstone unit measures at 33 millimeters tall with cryo rigs quite a bit larger than both thermaltake and the silverstone at 47 millimeters tall this means that cryo rigs will undoubtedly outperform both the others and that lower rpm but provides a smallest to largest look at performance across the stack as always for all the testing methodology check see link to the article in the description below which also contains the full review where we talk about all this stuff in text form if you prefer that the measurements use our delta T over ambient so this is not sort of the exact temperature of the diode or package readings it's a delta T value which we've explained in the past it's to help equalize some of the testing and that is all in that article linked in the description below if you have any questions at all we're only showing three coolers right now as ITX cooler testing is new for us the cryo rig c7 lands at the top of the bench with a load temperature of about 53 Celsius delta T as coolers also 47 millimeters tall or 20 millimeters taller than the engine 27 and 15 taller than the nto ate at a loud 3600 rpm Silverstone's n t o8 operates at around 57 H Celsius delta T load with idols around 7 Celsius the Thermaltake Engine 27 at 2500 rpm its max speed keeps temperatures in significantly warmer at 59.6 celsius delta T load none of these are particularly impressive but they are all more or less equal when considering that the lesson2 cooling performance and potential of a small form-factor cooler priority 7 bandages to properly differentiate itself with a more noteworthy advantage in cooling and one which is attributable to its larger stature and superior heat sink but Thermaltake and silverstone aren't too far apart and those are the head to head competitors in this bench and they are the numbers that matter most purely from a competing size perspective Silverstone and Thermaltake are the ones worth highlighting right here we're setting each cooler to run at an RPM that equals a noise output of 43 DBA this means that the Silverstone cooler operates at 3300 rpm and the sound will take engine 27 operates at 2500 rpm so we'll highlight just those two results 59.6 celsius versus 60.1 that's what we come out with and that's within our 0.5 C range a variance on CPU temperature generation and measurements for all intents and purposes when equalizing the noise levels these coolers are identical in performance here's a chart showing all of the noise levels the coolers tend to be more effective in terms of cooling to noise when around 40 DBA just by coincidence with the engine 27 maintaining a some level of acceptable performance when at 70 percent fan RPM with a 36.5 DBA output you'll start to struggle with higher workload scenarios if you want all the noise levels for everything we've tested here's a quick chart for that you might want to check the article again links in description below for more times read through the data because the watt but the testing methods for these are comparable enough that we can put them on the same a chart really it puts into perspective how effective a liquid cooling is given the height of the cooling block assuming the tubes and radiator can also fit in your SSS box pretty uncommon but worth a look one thing that isn't shown with our noise testing we do just a straight DBA test what we're not showing is a frequency spectrum analysis which would be useful admittedly but it's something we haven't expanded into just yet at least not since the fury ACT this thing the thermal take engine 27 it's noise levels even when matched to the silverstone are a lot more they're a lot less tolerable put it that way basically it's a matter of the type of noise so the type of noise coming out of the Silverstone unit even when they're both at 43 DBA is a lower hum it's more what you would find with any fan whereas the type of noise coming out of the thermal take cooler is similar to Sandhya's noise that comes out in their original marketing pitch video they did where it's got that high-pitched whine and they said it was a variance in some pre-production saying whatever the type of noise the same that's coming out of this so it is a higher pitch noise and that means it's less tolerable at least to me that's a subjective thing I suppose in general we find that the lower hums like out of this are a lot more tolerable than what's coming out of a high-pitched whining spinning set of blades the engine 27 is a unique attempt at making a smaller profile cooler it's interesting and Thermaltake explains that they worked with cool chip to develop 27 strictly in terms of thermal performance it's around where the comparable size NGO 8 115 X Pele and particularly when considering equal noise output it's also over two times the price with the NPO 8 at $20 and the end twenty seven at $50 if you can fit a forty seven millimeter cooler and still have breathing room above it for the fan cryo rigs c7 at $30 is the clear winner of all of these coolers is just a lot bigger and won't fit in a slim htpc like the PT series Silverstone cases ultimately the engine 27 is in a bad cooler it performs about the same as the Silverstone n t o8 especially again when accounting for the noise levels so there's no crime against humanity for making this thing the only thing that this has working against it well there's two things one is it's priced significantly out of its performance bracket so at over two times the cost of an equally performing Silverstone cooler which is a traditional fan and heatsink arrangement it's hard to justify spending fifty versus twenty in this case there's also the high-pitched whine which if you lower your fan speed and you don't run it 100% all the time it kind of goes away so it's going away around seventy to eighty percent but you will start having issues with really intensive workloads if you need that 100% fan speed and are also trying to avoid the noise so really specific set of requirements there but this is a really specific type of cooler so if you are interested in more ITX cooler reviews like this one let us know in the comments below this is something that we've got at least three we can put out immediately and might look into more as always at patreon link in the post oral video or patreon.com slash gamers next to self without directly subscribe for more the full review all that stuff will be linked in the description below thanks for watching I'll see you all next time you