Gadgetory

welcome back to harbor unbox today we are testing out two big air coolers designed for use with AMD's new thread ripper cpus here we have one big air cooler and here we have one bloody massive air cooler the question is which one works better to answer that very question I am going to be comparing their cooling performance on the 32 core through 429 90 WX is both these air coolers were developed with that monsterous processor in mind in fact earlier this year at Computex 2018 we sort of caught wind that AMD would be announcing some bigger beefier 2nd gen 3 receiver used because of these coolers they kind of gave it away at least they did for us and we knew it wasn't going to be just the architectural refinements that we saw on the rise and 7 and rise in five parts for the desktop the six and eight core mainstream models now this is because Coolermaster and deep core we're flaunting these new colors at the Computex tradeshow claiming that they could handle up to 250 watt processors and given that the 1950 X is only that's slept with a 180 watt TDP if I'm not mistaken we knew something was up there because there was no way that the 2950 X if it was still to just be a 16 core processor which evidently it is it would have a 250 watt rating that just didn't seem likely and then of course the next day AMD did announce the 2990 WX the world's first 32 core desktop CPU and these things all started to make sense for my initial 2990 WX coverage I used the wraith ripper for the first time and found remarkably low operating temperatures just 59 degrees after an hour-long stress test though it was a little noisy with the 120 millimeter fans spinning it between 2300 and 2600 rpm nothing too excessive and given the results the operating volume was acceptable the plan was to revisit the wraith ripper in more detail after my initial 2990 WX coverage but as usual something more pressing came along and well in this case I never actually got back to it that is until now of course but with the recent arrival of frozen I thought what better time than to test two big old air coolers than right now Before we jump into the results let's just take a quick look at each cooler and I will start with the Wraiths Ripper as we're quite familiar reasonably familiar with this product having already tested it in our day line coverage obviously it's an absolutely massive cooler it measures a hundred and fifty millimeters wide 132 millimeters deep and it is a hundred and sixty-one millimeters tall and it tips the scales at one thousand six hundred and seven grams and you might think okay well a good amount of those dimensions are probably fans but in the case of this cooler it's actually mostly heatsink the Rays river packs just a single 120 millimeter fan sandwiched between the dual tower style heater sink and it's ready to operate between zero and 2700 rpm the heatsink and heat pipes of which there are many but I'll get to that in a moment then the heatsink and heat pipes have been painted black and Coulomb Asus has the black paint enhances radiation cooling performance it's commonly understood that black or dark surfaces absorb heat rather than reflect it as lighter colored surfaces tend to do however the same principle applies of heat dissipation as it works the other way as well so a black surface will indeed dissipate heat more efficiently than a lighter colored surface in the case of the Wraith River we're probably talking only a few percent but hey that's better than nothing and as a bonus it looks really tough adding to the Wraith rippers toughness factor our seven heat pipes that weave their way through the baseplate it's a seriously busy looking cooler the baseplate of course offers full TR for coverage measuring forty five millimeters by 72 millimeters then capping off the design is a plastic cover that wraps around both sides and in cases the 120 millimeter fan the internal fan doesn't feature any RGB lighting rather it's been migrated to the plastic cover and I have to admit it does look pretty awesome there are two translucent strips that run from one side up over the top of the cooler and then down the opposite side and Coolermaster has allowed the RGB lighting to be controlled via software and they supply utilities designed specifically to work with the Wraiths Ripper then the key to all the easiest installation process ever that's what Coolermaster claims and their bang on there are four screw heads in the top of the cooler simply a line up the tr4 socket fasten the screws and you're done it's an absolutely brilliant design the only issue I see with this product is the price and then I suppose the poor availability I despite getting my hands on one of these for testing in my day long coverage over a month ago now they don't appear to be on sale in the US yet I've seen them listed on Amazon that says currently unavailable so not sure when they will be available lot so you guys keep asking me when will it be available and I don't see able to get any solid information on that oddly though there are a few select retailers in Australia that have stock and are selling them for an insane 210 dollars Aussie so it means for Less smaller you can grab the corsair hydro series h 115 i or the deep cool castle 280 for example the suggested retail price is a hundred and twenty dollars u.s. so as usual the australian price doesn't mean to be quite heavily inflated but ever so the wraith ripper is still a seriously expensive air cooler so at least in terms of pricing it appears to be advantage deep cool as the frozen is coming in at ninety dollars us and is currently available at that price so all it's available in the US not available in australia yet so sort of the opposite situation here i expect it to come in at about 130 140 Yazzie if we're not seeing any kind of crazy australia tax on that one in any case this is still a very expensive air cooler so it will need to perform if we are to seriously consider it i have to say while a nice looking cooler it seems rather underwhelming sitting next to the wraith ripper it's a much smaller cooler measuring 124 millimeters wide 82 millimeters deep and 165 millimetres tall that being the case it weighs 36% less at 1036 grams so still a heavy CPU cooler but also quite light mine compared to the behemoth that is the wraith ripper still deep cool isn't messing around might sound like it the cooler is named frozen after all but this is a serious contender the cooler features a super thick copper base plate with full TR for coverage measuring 46 millimeters wide 68 millimeters deep and it's also 15 millimeters thick then extracting heat from the base we have half a dozen 6 millimeter thick copper heat pipes and they snake their entire way through the base plate extending out both sides up through the fin stack deep cool says their heat pipes are in a boot shape and this provides faster heat dissipation I did notice that some of the bends are less aggressive than those of the heat pipes used by the Wraiths Ripper pushing out over the heat sink is a 120 millimeter hydro barring fancy sewing operate between 500 and 1800 rpm improving the build quality here and adding a bit of flair at the same time as an all-aluminium fan frame the frame looks great it's highly unique and it's all aluminium construction means it's extremely durable I really like the silver textured finish and the embedded RGB lighting looks impressive as well speaking of RGB lighting in addition to the fan frames highlights we also find a dark tinted top panel and this is backlit with a light bar and the game of storm logo the RGB lighting is addressable and supports or major motherboard brands such as a soos asrock MSI and gigabyte anyway the frozen is a solid looking cooler I'm just not quite sure how well it's going to stack up against the much larger Wraith Ripper but of course that's what we're here to find out now both of these coolers have been tested on the msi x 399 creation motherboard using the thread ripper 2990 WX both stock and overclocked and I will be reporting the idol and stress temperatures of both the CPU along with the motherboards verum which will be fed err only by the CPU cooler for the stress test I'll be using a blender workload which will be running for an hour at which point I will be reporting the peak temperature then after a 10 minute cooldown period I will record the lowest temperature and report that as the idle result so let's get into the numbers okay so first that we have these stock results and very surprisingly fries and kept the 2990 WX 2 degrees cooler than the Wraith Reaper in our stress test and just a degree cooler at idle now this is an average from three test runs but even so I would allow for at least a one degree margin of error possibly a one to two degree margin of error also the ambient temperature was closely monitored at between 21 and 22 degrees anyway under these conditions it's very clear that both coolers deliver very similar results and I should know that the fan speed was fixed at 1900 rpm for both coolers as I found the auto fan speed setting on the MSI extra aggression I did at times skew the results and the Wraith report was a it loud when the fan was allowed to spin up to 2600 rpm also using the auto fan speeds hitting the fries and cooler spun its fan it just 1300 to 1400 RPM under load while the wraith ripper was much more aggressive as i said going up well over 2,000 RPM so it wasn't exactly a fair comparison what I found really interesting was although the CPU temperature was very much the same the difference in varium temp was massive now this won't necessarily reflect the kind of performance you'll see on all motherboards but it is what you'll see on the msi x3 99 creation assuming no direct airflow over the verum by any other means such as a top mounted case fan for example I believe the wraith ripper suffers in this test due to its size the air exiting the cooler is directed above the verum heatsink as the cooler overhangs the nearest memory modules the much narrower frozen cooler allows the air more room to dissipate and this provides much more direct airflow over the verum heatsink as you can see this had a huge impact on temperatures laying the verum to operate 11 degrees cooler with frozen again this may not be the case for all configurations but on the x3 99 creation with limited air flow over the motherboard these are the results we received both coolers did deliver excellent CPU temperatures though so let's move on to see how they handle the 2990 WX overclocked to 4 gigahertz using 1.25 volts with the 2990 WX now overclocked we see an almost 20% increase in operating temperature and surprisingly Verizon is again a few degrees cooler than the Wraith rip up here we see just two degrees separates these air coolers the frozen is clearly better in our test but the difference is very small this time we do see much similar verum temperatures though again frozen is also better here allowing the x3 night uncreation around 4 degrees cooler under load again adding a case fan to direct airflow over the very room would probably eliminate this performance difference but in situations where the motherboard sees limited air flow fries and will likely allow for better performance then finally we have this unrealistic extreme stress test we're feeding the 21 90 WX 1 point 4 volts to put maximum load on the CPU cooler and the VRM this C's frozen and the Wraith River basically delivering the same performance frozen was a degree cooler but that is within our margin of error there's also just a true degree difference for the verum 10 for now as well okay so those results I have to say were very surprising I was expecting the much bigger and heavier rain Ripper to dominate Verizon but as we saw that wasn't the case I've also recently just got my hands on a retail version of the Wraiths Ripper for testing I used the version provided with my review kit for the twenty nine nine WX and twenty nine 50 X so I retested with the retail version just after finishing all the initial testing and confirmed that there's no real changes with this particular version the base was noticeably smoother for the retail version but temperatures were within a degree of what's reported here I have to say they were getting a retail version of both these coolers hasn't exactly been easy and even today availability is still very poor for now I think it's safe to say that performance is very similar depending on conditions one might come out a few degrees ahead of the other and again I should just note that the fans were locked at a maximum fan speed of 1900 rpm for the tests done in this video that was just to normalize the operating volume and limit it to what I consider to be a tolerable level as I mentioned earlier in the review on auto the race Ripper wanted to spin up to 2600 rpm and here it was quite loud allow them what I would want to live with at that speed I'd rather just get an all-in-one liquid cooler which is actually also cheaper so for testing I did lock the fan speed for the Wraith Reaper at 63 percent which saw a peak temp of 87 degrees in our 1.4 volt stress test but that full fan speed the temperature did drop to 78 degrees of course if we allowed fries in a spin its fan at full speed you'd also see a similar drop in temperature so I guess the only question remaining now is which cooler should you buy as usual that one is a little bit difficult to answer as they both have their individual strengths but there is one metric that we can discuss that makes the choice a whole lot easier and that is of course the price the $120 us MSRP of the Wraith Ripper makes it one mighty expensive air cooler after all the $90 u.s. price for the frozen and that's not the MSRP that's the current retail price and that still makes this cooler very expensive we just didn't see a little over 30% more value in the wraith Ripper cooler I can understand why it costs that much more to produce but sadly it doesn't translate into better performance in a nutshell the advantages of the Wraiths Ripper include the dead easy installation process and the beefy but attractive appearance the advantage of frozen is that it's more compact and provides greater compatibility it's obviously cheaper but performance is comparable and it's a universal cooler that can be used on all current AMD and Intel platforms so that makes it much more flexible should you change to a different platform in the future personally I do prefer the look of the Wraiths Ripper but be aware it is a absolutely massive cool if you haven't noticed already and because of that it is a bit of a hog it will hide your motherboard so it does hug the look of you build somewhat so if you are trying to build a showy build that shows off all the components then you may not like the fact that the cooler hides pretty much most of the top section on the motherboard and then of course when you have a graphics card in that sort of hides that section of the board so in the build I did with this cooler you didn't see much of the MSI X 399 creation but still overall a great looking cooler really love the RGB effects even those of you who don't really like RGB lighting I think you'll agree that it does look quite good on this cooler the frozen cooler also looks great in my opinion but I do prefer the Wraiths Ripper if I had to pick one of them purely on looks still a good-looking cooler overall though frozen is just a more sensible product in pretty much every way it's cheaper performs just as well it has Universal platform support that's a really important feature if you decide to change platforms or whatever you can keep your rather expensive air cooler greater compatibility with memory so you can have taller memory and not have the heatsink block that and cause problems for you and it also doesn't block the primary PCIe slot on most of the X 399 motherboards so taking all that into consideration I would recommend deep cools frozen and on a final note coming up on the channel soon I will be adding more coolers to the mix so testing more coolers on the 29th 90 WX to hit them with a maximum stress test I'll be adding more air coolers and some all-in-one liquid coolers as well and we're doing that in an effort to work out what is the best value best performing a cooler for your second thread ripple workstation for now though that is going to do it for this one if you did enjoy the video be sure to the like button force subscribe for more content if you appreciate the work we do here at harbor unbox then consider supporting us on patreon but as always thank you for watching I'm your host Steve and I will see you next time