Gadgetory

okay so the traditional way of building a CPU cooler you take a big old hunk of metal you take a plastic fan and you slap it on there in hopes that the raging inferno of a Pentium D processor you've got will stay alive long enough to become a weird curiosity for the employees you hire 10 years down the line who were it's still in diapers when you started building computers but not thermaltake now thermaltake took a metal heatsink okay I'm with you so far slapped a metal fan onto it because Yolo in an attempt to cool down a modern CPU in one of the smallest form factor coolers that I've ever seen but does it work so if you were just here to find out if a metal fan would work then you'll be sorely disappointed because I'm also going to bore you with some science and history the sandia cooler concept with its metal spinning top and static metal base first showed up on the scene in 2012 with this video gaining considerable attention among PC enthusiasts due to its promises of vastly improved efficiency smaller size and quieter operation compared to more traditional heatsink designs then there was no news until Coolermaster showed up at CES 2015 with a couple kind of ugly prototypes that featured grooves between the spinning top and the base presumably to improve heat transfer and an outer heatsink to further improve cooling performance fast-forward to today and this tech is finally on the market the fundamental idea here is pretty simple theoretically when the air gap between the fixed grooved metal base and the spinning grooved metal impeller is small enough heat transfer can still occur as though they were connected in practice this was pretty difficult to pull off but through a combination of patience and apparently balancing the impeller like the wheel on a car Thermaltake was the first one to do it to test how effective the engine 27 was we gathered up a bunch of other small form-factor coolers from reputable brands and a stock Intel heatsink since if it doesn't offer a compelling improvement over that you're clearly better off saving your money we used an asus z170 AI pro gaming motherboard thanks bros and a core i7 6700 K with an NZXT grid 2.0 for fan control for each test we used a pea-sized amount of IC diamond thermal compound and we analyzed the results two different ways first we looked at what we could expect from each cooler out of the box using the silent mode curve in NZXT scam software the engine 27 was the worst-performing cooler in this test at about 10 degrees higher than the nearest aftermarket competitor under load and all of this while managing to be louder than the Intel Box cooler as measured by our X Tech 407 750 digital sound level meter the second method of analysis was to introduce a noise ceiling limiting the maximum rpm of each cooler to the speed at which it reaches 45 decibels the same as the stock cooler so performing worse than the stock cooler or thermal throttling would result in a fail grade for this test all of them passed but CPU cooling isn't the be-all and end-all and maintaining enough airflow to the component nearby is of critical importance the good news is that all of our coolers performed similarly with the c7 only pulling ahead when we allowed it to get a little noisy leading us finally to the reason presumably that thermal takes engineers thought the engine 27 deserved to exist its size it's not the top performer in any category but this one at a full centimeter shorter than the nearest competitor from Noctua and less than half the height of the top performing aro 6 from silverstone the engine 27 is compatible with any case that's wide enough to fit a memory stick so with form factor as a consideration I'll be giving a few awards here today the aro 6 gets my big and beautiful award for being the best performer if a little top-heavy the Noctua NHL 9i takes home the middle child award for being so ugly only its own mother could love it but otherwise a solid compact choice and the Thermaltake Engine 27 gets my better than nothing award for working better than I expected given its size making it a great option if you don't have anything else it will fit so congrats to the winners thanks for watching and good night and I've got another award this time for one of our lucky viewers we are hooking one of you up with the SSD to go pkt from angel bird they set us up with these bad boys for CES 2017 you can check them out in our gear bag video over here and they gave us an extra one with a silk-screened LTT superfan like logo fing on and everything it's a 256 gig portable SSD drive it's super tiny it's USB 3.1 with either a Type A or a Type C connection to your computer and it can handle up to 560 megabyte per second transfer speeds so all you got to do to enter to win is check out the link in the video description so thanks again for watching guys if you dislike dislike if you like then like if you really liked then maybe check out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link to Amazon in the video description you can also join our community forum and I'm pretty sure there's something else down there right cool t-shirts like the one that I am wearing I think that's pretty much it subscribe blah blah blah blah right check out our other videos like that one