Gadgetory

hey everyone this is Steve from gamers Nexus dotnet and today we're looking at the - nique tower 120 xtreme CPU cooler which has extreme in its name so obviously it's pretty good this cooler was first released a few years ago and has become one of the top rated consumer grade coolers of all time so I figured that despite its age we'd review it and use it as an example for what makes a good cooler in the first place this video should help underscore primary elements of CPU coolers that you should look for when shopping for a new one so let's get started first of all the - Niek tower 120 extreme is a fairly large cooler measuring in at 150 millimetres high 43 millimeters across and it has a thirty two millimeter clearance on the underside so low profile memory and motherboard heat sinks should fit under it quite easily the cooler hosted spend centrally rather than on the outside and uses a 2,000 rpm magnetic fluid dynamic bearing fan these bearings should have a longer life and operate quieter due to their bearing type the fan can be adjusted by a fan controller that ships with the cooler which Scrolls from 1,000 to 2,000 rpm and of course the only reason to change the speed would be to reduce noise though otherwise the CPUs pulse width modulation should take care of most of the rpm manipulation it will do that manually for you or automatically rather for you if you want to manually control it 1000 rpm I believe takes the noise level to less than 20 decibels it might even be 15 or 16 or 14 I think - advertises 14 and that's gonna be quieter than most of your case fans it most likely so basically at 1,000 rpm you won't even be able to hear the cooler additionally the unit ships with tx3 thermal paste which has a surprisingly high thermal conductivity for stock-based at six point three watts per meter Kelvin as for its build quality the - nique 120 extreme tower 120 extreme excuse me very long name has a fin design that is supposed to help the fan pole air through the unit and set it out the back hopefully resulting in more equalized temperatures throughout the aluminum than with front fan coolers the heatsink may look massive but keep in mind that the fan beam in the center cuts out quite a lot of area for the frickin that we're conductive material could be the pipeline for heat flow in this unit is pretty easy to follow there are five heat pipes 3/8 millimeter and two six millimeter which are in direct contact with the CPU these copper pipes are connected by a flat and large surface plate that mounts to the chip making for better heat dissipation the surface roughness itself is of course microscopic as with all units and when compared to a lot of other units it's easy to see how large the impact of the smoother surface the Tunick 120 tends to have installation is pretty easy if you're using an LGA 1155 or other recent socket type you'll need a separate mounting kit for the cooler to fit your socket the backplate uses rubberized washers to help hold the plate in place while you screw it into the top side which makes it painless to install in general however the hard part is screwing in the thumb screws for the cooler underneath the massive freaking cooler you'll probably want to do this before you mount it in the case and considering the difficulty of cramming your hands underneath the 120 extreme especially in smaller cases as it's sort of impossible to do without getting cut a few times so do keep that in mind that performance is what we're all here for though and that heat pipe fin design and unique interior fan positioning has helped this cooler become a mainstay in our testing arsenal since 2010 really and it's still performing admirably we put it up against our recently reviewed respire coolers by NZXT and use the Intel stock cooler as a baseline for reference first of all we use eight torture threads with large FFTs on prime95 to threaten the cores then log the results with hardware monitor pro by cpuid and temperatures are all measured in Delta over ambient C which was 21 C and you can read more about our testing methodology in the link in the description below I ran the test with stock thermal paste and our control thermal paste which tests for design and eliminates thermal conductivity as a difference between the units when it comes to thermal paste the techniques paste is actually higher quality than our aftermarket stuff so you'll see a thermal increase for that test the - nique tower 120 extreme was a clear winner as you can see in this graphic with stock thermal paste performing a for a full two degrees Celsius I can't talk today apparently a full two degrees Celsius better than the T 40 with an additional fan when under load it's a full 5 Celsius cooler than the stock T 40 unit without any additional purchases keep in mind that our chip is overclocked so it generates quite a lot of heat meaning the Intel stock cooler is plainly unable to adequately cool the chip when under load it was around 81 C accounting for ambient with the controlled thermal compound the T 40 with two fans is the clear winner and the Tuni cooler comes in about two C hotter under load though keep in mind that the technics stock paste is better performing than this paste what made the unique so good for its time though was its excellent heat pipe and thin design so when shopping for new coolers keep in mind that you should care deeply about the number of exposed heat pipes their diameter the surface area of the surface roughness and overall heat sink size the Tower 120 extreme has a mini heat sink on top of the heat pipes toward the bottom you remember there was that high riser from the bottom of the plate that is because it has a heatsink on it that helps sync Heat additionally before it even finishes funneling up to the pipes so that does help considerably and is not present on a lot of coolers that are smaller this is quite big though and that there is a reason for that so do keep that in mind when shopping for your case and that's all for this video I'll see you all next time