- Right here on this little motherboard beside me,
I have a cooler mounted on it.
And it's not just any cooler.
It cost me $3.00 and it's brand new.
I think this is the cheapest new cooler
I've ever bought in my life.
Also comes with a blue LED fan and promises to cool an I7.
But actually, can it?
Let's find out.
(electronic music)
So here this cooler is right here on the desk.
It's a Zero; it's made in China.
It's got a heap of Chinese characters on there
which I can't read.
Says it's super silent.
And actually comes with a 12 centimeter fan
and it promises 48 CFM which I'm kind of
a little bit skeptical of those numbers
but on the side here it's got compatibility.
Comes with a very simple kit that we'll mount very easily
to, indeed, the LGA 115X, LGA 1366 and also 2011 though.
I would caution mounting it to both 1366 and 2011
cause they have higher TDP CPUs that I honestly think
will overload this cooler.
Weighing this cooler up.
It weighs in at a monstrous 167 grams,
which actually for $3.00 isn't too bad at all.
That's without the mounting kit.
But here's the mounting kit right here.
It's actually the same one that Antec used on their A32.
With that said, we've got this thing mounted on an i7-3770.
We've even used the included thermal paste in the box
so let's give it a whirl.
(electronic music)
So I am shocked.
This thing is actually not throttling.
So at first, I was looking at the graph and I was seeing it
and it was going up and up and up and I was like no way,
this is not gonna make it.
But then it sort of plateaued out at around 90 degrees.
Now it is not optimal to keep your CPU
at around these temperatures especially 24/7
but at the same time, it's not going to be too bad.
So it is getting to 94 degrees but it is running
at pretty low voltage.
1.1 volts; not draining up a lot of heat.
And so if you guys experience with laptop CPUs,
they actually do run a lot of the times.
Constantly at 90 to 95 degrees.
Somewhere around there.
So it's kind of, I guess,
you getting laptop style performance on your desktop PC.
And another thing to remember is that this is a stress test
and it is loading up the CPU like 100% complete
so usually games won't stress CPUs like this.
And not nearly as much so you could see maybe around
80 degrees in games but we will be testing that,
and also I'm gonna let it run until about 30 minutes.
Just to see if it does throttle.
(electronic music)
So here we are now.
We're running the noise test, and this thing shocked me.
It's running as low as 28 decibels.
So they do say it's super silent on the box
and it is literally whisper quiet.
I cannot hear it all.
I actually had to stop my graphics card here,
the fan on that, to get a proper reading
because before that, this thing was running
at about 43 decibel.
Mind blown so far.
So here we are now after 30 minutes of testing
and I'm completely blown away.
So we haven't thermal throttled at all.
The max we've hit is 95 degrees,
and admittedly it is a little bit of a cooler day.
It's not summer.
So in summer, this thing might actually throttle.
So it is 22 degrees.
But like we're talking about before.
Games don't stress the CPU generally anywhere near
like Idle 64.
So what we're gonna do now is load up games,
especially PUBG comes to mind; very popular title.
Pretty CPU intense.
But of course we do need the more powerful graphics card.
(electronic music)
So we just finished playing PUBG
and the results are surprisingly good.
This managed to keep the CPU
in around the 60 to 70 degree range
and PUBG does utilize quite a bit of CPU.
The RX580 that we're using here was sitting at 100% as well
so that's really good news
for this little cooler right here.
Now all is not perfect with the $3.00 cooler.
There's a normal one there, that's what you'd expect.
It works absolutely fine.
But then we go over to this one here and we try to spin it,
we can that see the fan blade
is not only slowing down quickly,
it's also making this really obnoxious noise.
(clicking)
So if you do come into this cooler
and you do get that noise, there's an easy way to fix it
and that is just what I call the Techiest Man Grip.
Now just grab it and just give it a little bit of a.
Sort of like a flex all ways.
Just really sort of crunching it up there.
Perfect.
And so we got Dota 2 loaded up here.
We can see the FPS on the 3770 is actually really damn high.
GPU's loaded at 100% so we've actually turned
the settings down from 1440P high to medium
to try and stress the CPU a little bit more.
So we'll give this a good 20 minutes of gameplay
and then come back and see how the CPU's holding up.
(electronic music)
So we just finished playing up Dota 2 then
and played a full match on the easy bot mode.
Of course it's so easy to get kills on this mode
but nonetheless, we stress test the CPU
cause I turned the settings down, as we said before,
and that enabled the CPU to get up to about 82 degrees
so I'm actually really comfortable considering
that is a worst case scenario for it in games
cause it's then stressing the CPU a little bit more
than the usual gamer would be used to.
But regardless, it's still impressive.
So let's move over now to a conclusion.
So now we got the verdict on the $3.00 cooler and,
I mean, I think the $3.00 in itself justifies
how impressed I am with this little thing right here.
Now, I did get a heap of them and one of them
did have a problem with a noisy fan, rattling fan.
I easily fixed that by doing the man grip as we saw before
but besides that, I mean, the quality control I'm sure
is not as good as more expensive companies
but this is a cooler that's coming in usually
at a fifth of the price of anything in its league.
And sad thing is I couldn't find this up
on Ali Express anymore.
So it was $3.00 for the cooler, $1.00 for shipping,
and I mean, it's really lightweight.
Comes in a 160 grams and the closest thing
I can now find on it is about $4.00
and it's got a different fan.
It looks like it's the same heat sync
so this looks like it's a standardized heat sync
designed from some factory.
But the fan they've put on the one on Ali Express
that's available now is a little bit smaller
so I'm not sure if that will handle the i7.
But also the other benefit of it was that
it was indeed really silent, like it said on the box.
28 decibels; it's some of the quietest fans
I've ever heard in my life.
So, not a bad job.
I mean, some of these experiments.
Thank you guys for recommending them to me.
I'm definitely going to keep looking out
for things like this.
I'm glad I did grab a couple of em
because they're really going to help if I've got
a standardized build, especially with an i5 in it
and I need to sell it, and I need a cooler.
And it's got a blue LED fan too, to go on top.
I'm just surprised, I mean.
I pay in Australia like $3.00 for a piece of sushi.
I should just maybe start eating this instead.
With all that aside, I hope enjoyed today's video.
If you did, be sure to hit that like button.
Let me know in the comments section below.
Have you ever tried something like this?
If so, what was your experience like?
If not, will you give it shot?
Love reading your thoughts and opinions as always,
and I'll catch you in another tech video very soon.
Peace out for now.
Bye.
(electronic music)