Gadgetory

are they launching another series ah okay whatever if you don't like all the series that we have now then just treat this like a standalone video because it's cool either way the idea here was to take top-of-the-line products from a particular category we decided on CPU water cooling for the first one and measured just how far we've come thanks to improvements in design and manufacturing welcome to episode 1 of through the ages CPU cooling blocks mass drop is now featuring the AKG M 220 semi-open Studio Headphones check them and other drops out at the link in the video description so the first step in this undertaking was to gather up CPU blocks from as far back as we possibly could by teaming up with Swift Tech we were able to scrape together seven of their nine blocks going all the way back to July of 2005 a span of over 10 years so time to get started testing them right now that would have been too easy the intention was to use a modern test bench to eliminate as many variables from our tests as possible and as the astute among you might have already realized Intel's latest flagship x99 platform not only didn't exist yet but Intel wasn't even the performance King back then so we needed to source modern mounting brackets for many of the blocks time for some DIY metal fabrication step one was to glue the hold down plate drawings that Swift tech modified for us onto a piece of sheet steel then we went to work with the aviation shears cutting the outside edges we drilled out the middle as much as we could with a step drill finishing off again with the aviation shears and finally we Center punched the holes and drilled through them with a titanium bit cleaning things up a little bit with the dremel this was pretty tedious but we didn't want to bother our friends over at proto case to make them for us if we didn't have to and yeah so the apogee GT Zed required a specific plate thickness and a pretty precise cutout so they ended up whipping one of those up for us in the shop so so much for that but anyway thanks proto case as always you guys were lightning fast on the plate fits perfectly let's introduce now then the test bench that we're using we used an Intel Core i7 6850 k-6 core processor with a 246 millimeter squared die and a 140 watt rated TDP though it should be noted that according to this Tom's Hardware article it's closer to a hundred watts in the real world this might be important for later the rest of the components in no particular order are an Asus x99 deluxe - 32 gigs of Corsair Vengeance ddr4 a random DTX 980ti that wasn't connected to the water loop making it somewhat irrelevant and our water cooling gear an alpha cool Nexus XP 45 triple 120 mil rad with Noctua industrial PPC fans a d5 pump with an e KX top and some the 3/8 inch premium flex tubing we used icy diamond for our thermal compound so each block was mounted using m4 screws with nylon washers to achieve the desired mounting pressure yeah we were a little bit approximate here but as I think you'll see from the results it likely didn't matter much idle temps were recorded using I 264th logging tool after 10 minutes then load temps were recorded using a 3-minute mean average after allowing the water temps to reach equilibrium room temperature was maintained by our zone control HVAC system at 23 degrees Celsius Wow that was boring alright let's meet our first contestant this is the legendary Swift X storm designed by CAF R himself and sold to Swift tech for mass production back in Oh 5 it features an impingement design with a mid plate sporting 35 micro Jets that blasted turbulent water into 35 corresponding divot in its thick copper base it was a nightmare to manufacture making it very expensive and its performance while superior on bear small die single core processors fell quickly behind as dual-core and quad-core CPUs with integrated heat spreaders became the norm the story behind 2006 is Apogee was less about raw performance with 1 degree Celsius being optimistic and more about optimizing for enthusiast CPU design trends and ease of manufacturing thanks to the relatively simple uniform diamond pin matrix in its copper base it was less restrictive contributing to better liquid flow rates for multi block loops it handled and continues to handle large CPU dies with heat spreaders better than the storm and thanks to its cheap injection molded acetal top it was one of if not the first legitimately mass-produced CPU water coolers this right here this exact one was my first block when I got into water cooling about ten years ago the follow up the apogee GT looks outwardly identical to the apogee but thanks to manufacturing improvements and an enthusiast inspired tweak to bow out the base with a thicker o ring to compensate for intel's less-than-stellar IHS flatness it boasts slightly better performance not Swift Tech's 1 to 3 degrees Celsius from our measurement but I'll comment more on that in a moment the Apogee GTX released shortly afterward was basically a hot rod version of the apogee GT with the same copper base plate and then marking that was focused more on the cool-looking aluminum top that whoo-ho I guess that's probably why I couldn't find a working one for this video don't mix your metals kids moving on the apogee GT Zed brought about significant improvements in manufacturing that allowed the small diamond pins of the Apogee GT to be shrunk to only 2 250 microns for a claimed performance gain of two and a half degrees holy crap too bad on our 68 50k it really didn't amount to much but back to my earlier comment about these disparities that are starting to pop up the GT Zed design was as much about optimizing for the dye orientation of Intel's then flagship QX 6700 quad-core as about anything else a trend that we're likely to see continued the apogee xt from 2009 was from what we can measure the last big step forward in CPU waterblock performance sure it was kind of restrictive but it looked amazing and thanks to its redesigned upper housing with the inlet centered over a much larger 250 micron pin matrix it crushed its predecessor with our numbers nearly backing Swift tax claim of a three degree improvement as long as you had a whopping eighty dollars to spare apogee HD which followed two full years later rocked tweak 225 micron pins 30% lower flow restriction to improve GPU block performance and according to Swift tech 2 degrees better temps though I suspect we'd have to pull a 39 60 X or something out of our hats to observe the specific optimizations that were done to achieve that result I'm actually still happily running a limited edition gold-plated Apogee HD in my personal rig which leads us then finally sorry we got lazy and skipped the apogee XL to the apogee XL to the current flagship block that is only available as part of Swift xh2 20 and h3 20 X 2 kits it features the same two 25 micron thin slash pin base plate as the XL but tweaks the Inlet and outlet design of the top cover for improved flow characteristics Swift tech claims about a degree and a half of performance over the HD but we saw a mere half a degree improvement in spite of the five-year-old design of the HD on a modern processor leading me to believe that mo of the performance to be gained with future water blocks will come from compensating for the weird idiosyncrasies that Intel introduces with each processor generation rather than pure thermal transfer improvements though I will be interested to see if the prototype SKF block that Swift Tec showed me at CES will change my mind the fins on that sucker are so small that they can only be produced by shaving copper and bending it up into little tiny fins maybe there will be another leap forward after all I'll be sure to update you in another 10 years or so so thanks for watching guys if you liked this video hit that like button if you disliked it you can of course it the dislike button but if it was awesome get subscribed hit the like button 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