A long while back I made this video looking into whether or not premium PC cooling fans were worth it.
This raised another question however, one that some people are actually rather uncomfortable discussing.
Is after-market CPU cooling even worth it? I can understand why this can be a difficult conversation.
People often don't like their purchasing decisions coming into question.
But in 2015, with much of the hardware development world going into less power draw and lower thermal output,
Is it needed anymore? Let's find out.
And stay tuned to our cores for gaming update where we will explore how many CPU cores are really needed for gaming in 2015.
♪Intro Music♪
The Cooler Master Nova Touch TKL utilizes
exclusive hybrid capacitive switches powered by Topor, and is now available at a more affordable price.
Click now to learn more.
Many a time in the history of PC builders, a young Jimmy or Jane has sat at the checkout window wondering if they should spring for a better CPU cooler at the cost of a weaker component elsewhere.
Hours have been spent researching this question, but to no avail.
Whatever shall they do? If they are not interested in over-clocking or aesthetics, the obvious answer is just to stick with the stock cooler and just invest elsewhere.
But if they want to over-clock is it worth it? How much is worth it?
There are a lot of potential avenues to look at this from.
One we won't be exploring is custom water-cooling loops.
They are too expensive although there are some exceptions. They perform better although there are some exceptions.
You get the point. Essentially custom water-cooling is an extreme variable because it is well ... custom.
There is a metric ton of benefits of custom water-cooling, but many of it come at the cost of well ... cost.
At PAX East 2015, I did a top 5 gaming desktops at the Intel booth video.
One of the systems shown in the video, the Maingear one, had around a thousand dollars in just fittings alone.
Now I know not everyone is doing that and if you are you know what, that's freaking awesome.
And if you are interested in that, that's great! Please post your build in the build-logs section of the forum because it's probably gonna be beautiful -
and I'm probably gonna want to see it.
But this video may not really cater to you.
I personally water-cool, custom water-cooling but I spent about a quarter of that on my whole setup -
including all the fittings and everything.
And I expect most people that are newly getting into water cooling will be getting top of the line processors anyway -
so the whole "is it worth it" question is less likely applicable to them because improved water-cooling is directly on their CPU performance upgrade path.
Now if someone is getting a processor that does have potential upgrades, now we're talking.
We will be testing as a Cooler Master t4 in order to represent a fairly average example of a low to mid range
air cooler at about 30 ish dollars and a Cooler Master Sidon, which will represent
the dual 120 millimeter rad and the similarly performing large dual air
tower coolers like the Noctua and HD 15 at around 100 ish dollars. Last and
definitely least in terms of performance is the general run of the mill, no frills
Intel stock cooler which is bundled with your processor. The antagonist in the
story will be the Intel 4690k, an extremely commonly recommended and
purchased processor that we'll be testing these coolers at three different
settings. One is the stock setting of a 3.5 gigahertz base frequency and a 3.9
gigahertz boost frequency, and next is a slight gigahertz overclock of all cores
running at 4 gigahertz, but a pretty hefty voltage increase running at
1.25 volts, and lastly it will run into another slightly higher frequency
of 4.3 gigahertz, and a heavier voltage increase of 1.35 volts. Please note that
you could run these voltages and get much higher clock speeds
I was simply cranking up the voltage to turn up the heat. Next up we have the CMT
4 and before you comment down below that I'm a horrible human being because I
didn't use the Hyper 212 Evo, I know. I'm sorry we somehow don't have one in
office, I honestly have no idea how Linus has gone this long without having one in
stock. Yeah, anyways, it's slightly more expensive and performs slightly better
than the t4, and as you can see, the general message would have
probably been somewhat similar overall. The 1.35 volt overclock resulting in a 95
degree processor and some throttling wasn't great, but this small upgrade
allowed us to run at 1.25 volts at essentially the same
temperatures as the stock cooler at stock speeds and voltages on the CPU.
A solid improvement for just 28 bucks. Lastly we have the Seidon 240. This
cooler was able to achieve a very nice stock speed load temperature of 47
degrees, and tied the stock coolers stock clock thermal output, but at
1.35 volts, giving you a lot more room to play with. But the Seidon 240 has a
really awkward price position when compared to a 4690k because of 4690k is
240 dollars and a 4790k which is hyper-threaded and has a much higher
boost clock with 4.4 gigahertz it's $340 exactly a hundred dollars more.
Very similar pricing to a Seidon 240. In conclusion, is it worth it? I'll give
you a solid "maybe". From the raw performance numbers, it looks like if you
don't want to overclock, don't upgrade. If you want to overclock but don't have a
ton of budget, get something like a Hyper 212 Evo. If you have a fair amount of
budget, upgrade your processor or if you're already at the top of the line, just
get whatever your budget allows. But that's not the whole story either, is it?
Some people care a lot about aesthetics. I could call them shallow, but I do as
well. Maybe I'm shallow, I don't know. And then there is some solace junkies as
well. I know people that run custom water cooling setups for just their entire
systems and don't even have an overclock, they just do it so they can turn their
fans and their pumps super low and run their computer at a whisper-quiet level.
What solution is best for you? For me, it's custom water cooling. I've had a
bunch of my kit for a while, so upgrading doesn't really cost that much money.
I really like the aesthetics and it's just fun. Are you someone who's going to try
save a bunch of money and not buy an aftermarket cooler? Are you going to go
for, like, the affordable but kind of badass, get a little bit more out of your
processor range, or are you pretty much already up there and just want something
cool and easy? Let me know in the comments down below- Or even if you're
custom water cooling, which is super vast, comments down below,
Over on the forum, either one totally works, let me know. Also down below
this video, you'll be able to see a linked for shirts that are definitely
not a Twitch Plays Pokemon shirt, although twitchplayspokemon was awesome.
Nostalgia... Anyways, over on the forum as well, there should be a "Support us" link
where you can change things like your Amazon affiliate links to our affiliate
codes so we get a small kickback whenever you buy things over there which
is actually super helpful, and there's tons of other ways to support Linus
Media Group as well, like going on the forum or watching videos. Anyways, thanks
for watching, I'll see you guys next time.