Gadgetory

hey what's going on everybody Jays two cents here and we're gonna talk today about a topic that I've touched on quite a bit in the past but I've never actually done a dedicated video to it and I think that it deserves one because when it comes to selecting the components for your water cooling loop each individual component has its own set of parameters that can make things much more complicated as it is for instance if you wanted a three hundred and sixty millimeter radiator you're kind of like okay cool I got three hundred and sixty millimeters and what the space I can deal with it got three fan slots but then you guys start looking at the thickness of the radiator and then a more importantly the FB I and the radiator so what the heck does fpi mean and how do you accommodate that and work it into your systems well it's going to talk about that today whether you're looking for a pump reservoir custom GPU block or a complete loop in a box alpha cools wide range of products can make your next water cooling adventure an easy one click the link in the description for more details so in my hands right here I have two pretty similar SPECT radiators in that they are both 240 millimeter radiators betweens you can put two 120 millimeter fans on either side or both sides if you want they both are 30 millimeters thick which means on the surface they're gonna seem very very similar in cooling capacity they have also both got 12 rows of coolant flow going on in here so what makes these two radiators so different well it really comes down to the FBI or the fins per inch now radiators have one job in one job only that is to absorb the heat out of the coolant moving through those rows and moving that heat into the atmosphere or exchanging that heat it's happening through the movement of water the fins and the rows are absorbing that heat and then the fans are pushing air through they're transferring that heat from the water to the air and then out to wherever the cooling situation is in your room because remember that heat leaves the case and goes into the room if you don't have room ventilation then your rooms just gonna get hotter and hotter and hotter I think you guys have noticed that but these two radiators are also very different in the fact that they have two different numbers of fpi as well as different types of fins so that's what we're gonna focus on today now the Alpha cool next those st 30 right here is an 8 FBI radiator now what that means is that in one inch of space per row there are going to be eight fins on here that are gonna be touching each one of these rows and transferring the heat into the atmosphere like I said now over here on the nemesis GTS a 240 radiator this is a sixteen fpi but not only is it sixteen fins it's also a split fin design so what the heck does that freakin mean these are the things that start to confuse a lot of newbie builders when it comes to water cooling selection because you're really gonna be wondering to yourself do I need a FB i-- do I need sixteen FB i-- to really twenty FBI because i mean there are twenty and greater FBI radiators out there in fact the swift tech extreme is a twenty fpi radiator so you have just really start asking yourself what do you need in your system what are you cooling now on the surface both of these radiators will perform very very similar if you are cooling things like just a cpu in fact you might see very little if any difference in temperatures whatsoever now the difference that FBI plays is the amount of capacity that the radiator is going to be able to dissipate because what these fins are actually doing is adding surface area to the radiator now not only can you get more surface area for cooling by having a longer radiator but also by having more fins crammed into that radiator so what that means is this Nemesis GTS with that sixteen fpi split fin design is going to be able to handle a greater load generally then 1/8 FBI standards fin would be right here with the neck so SST 30 now you can kind of see - as I hold them up right here in front of the monitor how easy it is to see through this radiator you can see just how wide those fins are if I hold the GTS up here you're still gonna be able to see through it but you notice how you can't really see quite as much through there you can kind of get an idea of just how close together those fins are now there's gonna be trade-offs to this that means if you're running smaller cases you can run fans that have greater fpi and are gonna allow you to be able to get better cooling if you're adding multiple components to it if you're just going with a standard CPU and you're not adding a GPU or multiple GPUs or even doing a lot of overclocking then you can get away with a low fpi radiator some of them are even advertised as sub 8 fin which means less than 8 fins they don't actually say how much you can measure that yourself an account for it pretty easily I've seen some go as low as 6 but you're not going to see much difference because the overall amount of TDP that this radiator can dissipate is going to be greater than the load being put on it if that makes sense so what that means is regarding of the regardless of the fpi the cooling capacity of both these radiators would be greater than cooling something like your average 6700 K or something of that nature because the amount of Watts having to be cooled in heat is less than the radiator can handle now where it starts to matter is when you start to add more and more components like you have here with skunkworks three of these Titan X's is being cooled by one of these radiators in a 560 millimeter equivalent which is for 140 millimeter fans as well as a 280 version of this and it puts a lot of heat into the room now one of the things that FBI really comes into play is noise not just the amount of cooling that you can do with the radiator in the amount of headroom that you have in terms of TDP but what's going to be happening here is you are gonna have more fins which is gonna mean you need higher static pressure and higher rpm fans to push the air through it especially if you start to get thicker and thicker radiators lower fpi radiators are perfect for those that are looking for a much quieter solution don't need nearly as much Headroom for overclocking or water cooling you could easily cool a CPU and a GPU off of a single 360 millimeter you know st 30 or even st 45 and have no problems whatsoever in the optical language the esti number is referring to the thickness you got st 30s to 45 st 60 and sta TR like the monster red which is freakin huge but what that means is I can put a slower speed fan on this radiator and have plenty of air moving through it versus putting a slower speed fan on this radiator and I would have a lot less efficiency in the amount of cooling because having all these fins won't do any good if I'm not properly pushing air through the damn thing so what that means is more noise because as the air is going through these fins there's gonna be more turbulence that err which is gonna be wanting to go off at an angle if you guys have ever seen the way that smoke blows through a fan it doesn't blow straight up it blows out at an angle at the same degree at which the deflection of the fins are against the air so air goes through the fan and comes sideways out of it usually or diagonal but these fins are going to reach straighten that air back out as it goes through the radiator so that's gonna create some sort of noise turbulence these right here having a wider set fin means that there's going to be more room in there for that air to make that turn and it's not gonna be bouncing as much off the walls of the fins or creating that very choppy air noise that you can get with radiators now that's a common misconception a lot of people have with water cooling is that it is dead silent well it can be it can be dead silent but that means that you're gonna have to run as big of a surface area as you can at the lowest fpi that you can so that you can get away with very slow speed fans but you need a lot of them split fin designs are actually not about getting more fpi in that space it's more about the durability of the fins because they're not as long and they're not going to be as fragile or have as much opportunity to get something down in there and smash them so they're actually a lot stronger I would definitely recommend a split fin radiator if you can swing one they tend to be a little bit more expensive they're more expensive to produce and manufacture because there's extra tooling and manufacturing going in there but at the same time I do like the structural rigidity you get with the core the rows and the fins on there but when it comes to cooling you're generally not going to notice a whole lot of a difference between these two and still it until you start reaching the thermal limits of the radiator so the recommendation is still to always get the biggest radiator that you can fit in terms of number of fans you've got a case that's got three 120 millimeter exhaust fans on the top and you can fit the distance you need before you hit the motherboard or the drive cages to fit a 360 up there by all means do it same thing with the front of the case if you're putting a front mounted rad on there and you've got room for a 240 or even a 280 do it because having more surface area means like I said you can make it quieter by slowing down the fans and keeping things much more acoustically pleasing if you will that's one of the reasons why you don't really hear Dunc works in my videos even though I'm sitting right next to it and not just because I have a lav mic but because of the fact that I'm running massive radiators surface area with fans that are only running at 50% so it keeps things nice and quiet not to mention it helps a lot with dust and stuff you're not getting as much forced dust in there that is one thing to also keep in mind - when it comes to high fpi density radiators is the fact that there's a smaller space in there which makes it easier for dust to collect so you're gonna definitely want to keep these things as clean as possible now one last thing I want to address is I've seen some people refer to fpi as kind of a linear number meaning this thing having 16 and this thing having 8 means this can cool twice as much that's not true whatsoever it's just a different design when it comes to physics in the way that the air and the heat is transferring or exchanging the heat out of the radiator into the air it's not a linear curve by any means it tends to taper off quite a bit as fpi increases rather than getting steeper it tends to taper off quite a bit where it's not going to give you that linear 8 fpi is half of 16 it just doesn't work that way anyway guys I hope this videos helped you I know it's more of a just a talking head video I'm still preparing for some builds that I'm gonna be doing I'm still dealing with unpacking a lot of stuff and it seems like every time I get the shop arranged how I want it something comes along that makes me have to move things around or take up space and it's just taking me longer to get that going but I hope this videos at least helped you guys understand one additional stat when it comes to radiators and how to shop when it comes to building your custom loops again I still highly rely on you guys to help me understand what cut Opik content you guys want to see especially when it comes to the niche topic of water cooling so let me know what you guys want me to do and things like Twitter comments or Facebook messages or just the comments here on this video anyway time to go what radiators are you guys using did I miss something do you think there was something important here I should have mentioned that I neglected to do I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case I neglect to do things all the time gets me in trouble with the wife - with the amount of things that I accidently neglect to do and that's not a sexual joke I guess you could sort of take it that way but it wasn't intended to be all right I'm gonna get out of here before I put my foot any farther in my mouth and with that thanks for watching guys and I will see you in the next video