Gadgetory

so the conventional wisdom at least used to be that when you were shopping for a power supply you could basically judge the quality by the weight the heavier the power supply the better it probably was that is until some cheapo manufacturers started literally putting hunks of metal in them to make them seem better that got us thinking what about hunks of metal could you literally walk down the cooling aisle with a luggage scale and buy the heatsink with the best price to weight ratio to cool your CPU maybe gee skills km 780 our mechanical keyboard features a brushed aluminum top plate on the fly Mac for recording and various Cherry MX key switch configurations learn more at the link below we know more weight or mass if you want to be pedantic about it does not mean better cooling a 2 kilogram block of aluminum on top of a CPU would weigh a lot but wouldn't do a good job of cooling it down for long so what you're actually after when it comes to dissipating heat is surface area the more surface area that you have the more cooling will be available so then if we assume that most commercial CPU coolers are designed by mechanical engineers and not by chimpanzees and that most companies are interested in saving cost while optimizing performance then it would make sense that most heat sinks out there represent the manufacturers best efforts to strike a balance between material cost and heat dissipation so assuming that everyone has done their homework equally the heavier the cooler the higher the performance should be but as we know so very well around here not all engineering is a so we grabbed a bunch of coolers off the shelf and devised a test the weight of each cooler was recorded with the fan but without mounting hardware we kept the room at a consistent 24 degrees Celsius and set the fan curve to full speed on our system for all of our tests the cpu we used was a core i7 7700 k with the i-264 FPU test running for 30 minutes before the average package temp was taken for the next five and looking at their results there are actually some very interesting takeaways here first of all the NHD 15's our performance of every a i/o liquid cooler is a great testament to how well engineered it is and while we're praising strong products for their efficiency Corsairs dual 140 millimeter AIO outperforms the Thermaltake triple 120 AIO which has worse case compatibility if I had to hazard a guess here though I'd say that this is down to the similar surface area of these two layouts and the design of the fans the most striking thing about these results though is that after a weight of about 400 grams the heat transfer to weight ratio absolutely plummets with the coolers that removed the most heat per gram being the lightest ones why is this well getting finally into the purpose of making this video to let Alex nerd out for a bit it's actually because of a design concept called the infinite fin approximation basically for a thin of similar thickness material and airflow it can only get so long that is to say the distance from the heat source before adding more material is basically a waste this concept is illustrated using this graph where the y axis represents heat flow one would be all of it and zero would be none so for an infinitely small fin you would to pay zero heat that makes sense and for a mile-long Finn I mean by the tip of it practically all of the heat from the source would have been dissipated to the air before it could possibly be conducted there that is why in the early 2000s CPU coolers transitioned from Finn or flour based designs to the heat pipe ones of the late 2000s and the liquid cooling designs that are common today so newer CPUs generated more heat but they didn't get any bigger so there was no point in making the fins longer which means that these new high conductivity fluid based mediums heat pipes and water helped solve the challenge of moving the heat away to lengths optimized fins elsewhere is this something that we can show happening in real life actually yes the easiest way is by using this FLIR one thermal camera looking at the Noctua Nhu 12s the ends of the fins come in at about 38 degrees Celsius 14 degrees above the temperature of the room whereas on the massive NHD 15 the fins are only about 31 degrees Celsius and remember the lower the difference in temperature the slower the heat transfer so with a given heat load these longer fins are cooler and therefore are dissipating less heat per amount of material bringing us then finally back to our original question can you judge a coolers performance by its weight well actually it turns out you kind of can surely there are some exceptions out there and some did better than others but everything we tested seems to have had some engineering thought put into it so that's good to know we are working with Rosewill to give away nine that's right nine of them Nebula series gaming headphones they've got the GX 10 30 and G X 50 models the GX 10 features leather at ear cup cushions bright blue LED backlighting around the ear cups and compatibility with most devices not to mention a $25 price tag while the GX 30 and 50 both have detachable microphones as well as RGB lighting but the GX 50 has 7.1 virtual surround so the GX 30 is 35 and the GX 50 is 45 to purchase at the links below oh and also linked below is the link for the giveaway 9 chances to win go check it out thanks for watching guys that this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy a cooler in the video description also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join