- This is a powerful gaming computer.
(vacuum roars)
We designed it specifically
to deliver the most performance it possibly could
while being completely...
(snaps fingers) (vacuum quiets)
Silent.
It wasn't easy, though,
because while Noctua's new NH-P1
passive CPU cooler works great,
it's also hard to fit in many cases.
So we decided to do something a little more fun and...
Well, creative.
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(upbeat music)
We started with this sweet little portable rig,
the highlights of which are a 3060 Ti graphics card
and an Intel Core i7-11700K,
all with 32 gigs of Crucial Ballistix DDR4
crammed into this teeny, tiny little Silverstone ML08.
This thing manages to be powerful, functional,
and certifiably cute.
Just look at this little handle. It's like...
It's so fashionable.
Which is all well and good
until you hit the machine with a heavy load
and it folds like an Intel MacBook, which...
Wait. They're supposed to fold.
(Windows alert chimes)
Thankfully Noctua has the solution,
so let's open this thing up and...
Aw, geez.
How did this delightful little ABC board book
for children get in here?
LTTStore.com.
Aw, there it is. (cackles)
Got 'em.
Anyway. Holy crap, is this thing ever massive.
Meet the NH-P1.
And it is both heavy
and completely unlike any other heat sink that I've seen.
It weighs in at just a hair over 2 1/2 pounds
thanks to its huge stack
of unconventionally thick aluminum fins.
There are only 13 fins,
which is a fraction of what you'd have
on a normal heat sink.
And the fins are spaced super far apart like this
so that the heated air they create
has room to convect itself upward and away from the cooler,
allowing it to draw fresh air into it passively.
That's right, it's designed to be used
on modern CPUs without any fan.
And this action is facilitated by six heat pipes
that carry heat away from the CPU.
And then the whole stack is actually braced together
so that these poor heat pipes
don't just bend under the weight of this thing.
Now, looking back at Noctua's earlier prototype,
they've made a lot of changes to the design.
Notable ones include going
from large, tabbed holes in the fins
to smaller, punched-out ones
and the way that they actually reduced
the number of the fins
that directly attach to the cold plate.
Now, I would've thought that more fins
directly soldered to the heat source is more better,
but Noctua is clearly leaving the bulk of that work
to the heat pipes.
Now, of course, it's time to find out if it works.
Oh, yeah, we're gonna need to make some modifications here,
I think, ladies and gentlemen.
(Dremel whirs)
Now, the cooler we were using before is a Noctua NH-L9i,
and it's great for its size,
coming in at 59 points on Noctua's performance scale.
But surely this thing will be better, right?
Wait. 42 points?
Is this even an upgrade?
There's one way to find out, I guess.
Hmm. What are these Sharpie marks based on?
- [Colin] I put the cooler on and then put the case on
roughly where it went and marked it.
- Oh, okay.
Uh, all right. Good luck, everybody.
I swear, I think Colin is sabotaging me here.
Okay. Oh god, this is so approximate.
In spite of my team's best attempts to sabotage me here,
I'm gonna do a bang-up job of this.
And a bang-up job of not-
- [Colin] I like how you put your thumb directly
in the path of the razor blade.
- Because I didn't think of it, did I?
Where's the top line, though?
- I think it might be there.
- Did you draw it, though?
- [Colin] I can't recall.
It was yesterday. Everything's a blur.
- Oh no.
- [Colin] Just put the cooler on top of it. See how it fits.
- Okay.
- [Colin] Come on.
- Ugh.
- [Colin] This isn't life-altering, Linus.
- It's pretty life-altering.
It's case-altering, that's for sure.
I mean, I don't know.
Is that where it goes?
- I, uh, nuh, put...
Just mock it up in the case
and then put the case back on it.
- What?
Aw, god.
That's pretty straight so far.
- [Colin] Um...
- I mean, straight-ish.
- [Colin] Is it A-plus?
- Well, it's at least a B.
Do I get an A for that one?
- No. - What? Shut up!
That is totally pretty straight-ish.
- That's a B. - Oh, shut up.
You guys are being rude. - Minus.
There. There's an A-hole if I ever saw one.
(Colin laughs) (Linus snickers)
- [David] That is nice.
Don't mind me, just using my sponsor to clean my sponsor.
Got an LTTStore.com desk pad. That's how to clean it.
For mounting, Noctua seems to have made a revision
to their superb SecuFirm2,
and this is called SecuFirm2+.
The main differences are that Noctua has switched
to Torx heads for these nuts,
and these posts are a little bit wider than they used to be.
Deez nuts.
Oh. Uh, have we test fitted this?
Wait. - Yes.
- And it goes on, hey? - Yes. It's very tight.
Up against that VRM.
- Yeah. - Yeah, it's a smidge.
You gotta fudge her in there.
- Oh, okay.
One of our concerns,
when I was talking to Colin about this project,
was, "Hey, Colin, the side panels for this case slide on.
Are we gonna have to have
a much bigger hole to account for that?"
"No, no, no, dawg."
Because the cooler goes in after the fact, so...
Yeah.
(Linus grunts)
Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
Torx me, baby.
Oh no! There's so much extra over there.
- Aw. - Oh no!
Don't show that, David.
Get my good side.
Is it somewhat more convincing like that? (laughs)
- [David] Yeah, that's not that bad.
- Aw, it's really big on this side too! Colin!
- [Colin] Hey, you scribed the lines.
You can't blame me for that!
- [Colin] You did the cutting.
- I did.
But you put the lines on.
- [Colin] Hey, they were just guidelines.
And put case on roughly where it went and marked it.
- Oh, okay.
Aw!
It's a good thing it has this light on it
because otherwise I'd have no way of knowing it turned on.
Come on, baby.
- Yeah! - Whoa! Hey, there it is.
All right, let's go ahead and run our 16 threads
of small FFT Prime95.
And when we ran this before on the L9i,
the cooler became heat-soaked almost immediately,
causing our CPU to clock down to 3.2 gigahertz
to protect itself.
And here,
in spite of the lower estimated performance rating,
you're gonna actually see our CPU's
still running at 4.4 gigahertz.
That is because there is so much more thermal mass
in a passive solution like this one
that it'll take a lot longer to thermal throttle.
That is, if it thermal throttles at all.
I mean, we're giving it a pretty big advantage
putting it outside the case.
And there it is, after only a few minutes
you can see it's tick, tick, tick,
steadily going down as the temperatures go up
and then reach a ceiling.
So modern processors have a mechanism to protect themselves
where they will actually clock down their frequency
until they reach a point of equilibrium
with the cooler that they are equipped with.
So we're gonna allow this one to keep running here.
But I also want to disclaim this demonstration
by pointing out that in the real world,
this kind of synthetic test would never really happen
unless you're super into Folding@home
or you habitually run things like long Blender renders.
The huge amount of thermal mass that the NH-P1 has
would allow it to soak up
short one- or two-minute spikes in heat output,
so it would be able to maintain its turbo clock speeds.
Then, once the load is alleviated for a while,
it could slowly cool off
while you're performing light tasks.
So by artificially hitting it with a 100% load,
we are intentionally using up all that thermal mass
and then testing the maximum amount
that the cooler is able to radiate away.
Now, as for whether you would want a product like this,
comes with a six-year warranty,
but given that it has no moving parts whatsoever,
I'd say a warranty on the cooler
is kind of the least of your concerns.
And the bigger issue to me is that passive systems,
aside from CPU temperatures
which are gonna range between 90 and 100 degrees,
can have other components nearby
running at higher temperatures
than I would deem comfortable,
like the power delivery on the motherboard.
And while the last few years of laptop engineering
has taught us that 100 degrees on a CPU is apparently okay,
it hasn't taught us that it's necessarily okay
for the other heat-sensitive components around it.
Now, you could alleviate that issue by mounting a fan,
which more than doubles Noctua's performance rating to 89.
But if you're gonna put a fan on this thing,
an NH-U12S Redux is rated
for over three times the performance,
according to the same manufacturer,
and costs less than half as much.
So...
Just get that, right?
Mmm, not quite.
Putting on a fan, like the NF-A12 that Noctua recommends,
allows you to set that fan to only spin up
for high-stress situations,
just like the Seasonic SGX-650 power supply
that we used for our test system here.
So that means that the rest of the time,
you can reap the benefits of just using convection
to move air around for zero fan noise
and way less dust being sucked into your case.
Although $110 seems like a steep price to pay
for marginally less noise and a little less dust.
So how could Noctua possibly justify releasing this thing?
For you, we asked.
Number one: it took a long time to develop.
Number two: the much thicker cooling fins
meant a new, costly stamping process.
Number three: they know it's a niche product
that isn't gonna sell at particularly high volume.
Number four: aluminum prices have exploded
over the last year and this is a full kilogram of it.
And number five: it comes with Noctua's more expensive
NT-H2 thermal paste and a high-quality Torx screwdriver.
And besides, a little less dust
doesn't really do the value of a product like this justice.
Colin, for example, has a perfect use case
for a cooler like this in his workshop,
which, by the way, we are going to be upgrading soon
with a new file server and CAD machine,
so get subscribed so you don't miss that.
In a workshop environment, dust,
be it from unsealed concrete floors or from active projects,
gets inside everything.
And that can not just hamper
cooling performance over the long term,
but depending what kind of dust it is,
it can destroy sensitive electronics.
So pairing this guy
with a power supply like we did that can also run fanlessly
would be perfect for an environment like that
and well worth the price you pay.
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If you guys are a fan of these kinds
of overdone small form factor builds,
why not check out our original hot rod PC.
We're gonna have that linked in the end screen
for you to enjoy.
Like...
My ring is stuck.
- [Colin] Uh-oh.
- I am the tech tips guy.
Mr. Tech Tips.