- Compared to AMD, Intel's box coolers
are kind of an embarrassment.
Their main workhorse for many years, the E97378-003,
has about as much sex appeal as its name would imply,
but what's this?
Oooooh, at first you're thinking, damn Intel,
how you get all fine like that?
And then you're like, "But are those even real?"
And that's kinda where I find myself today.
Alongside their 12 Gen CPUs,
Intel launched three new stock coolers,
the RH1, RM1 and RS1.
As you can see, we only got two of them,
but they're the most important ones
and once we got them disrobed,
we realized there is a lot more here than meets the eye.
Beauty and brawn perhaps?
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(upbeat music)
For nearly 13 years, Intel's consumer platforms
used the same 75 millimeter mounting hole pattern
which has been great for consumers.
I mean, who doesn't wanna carry their old cooler forward
to their new system?
But with 12th Gen, that's finally changed.
Alder Lake is Intel's biggest performance leap
in many years and to pull it off,
they needed a new much larger CPU socket
which appears to be the driving force
behind the new expanded 78 millimeter mounting holes.
These obsoleted every previous Intel compatible cooler
including Intel Zone, resulting in the creation of these.
Standing at 47 and 69 millimeters respectively, nice,
the RM1 and RH1's new design language is a refreshing change
from the value optimized Intel coolers of the past.
The larger model features
knurled stainless steel captive thumb screws for mounting,
a pleasing two-tone finish, addressable RGB lighting
and enough cooling capacity for the core i9-12900
and 12900F processors that it ships alongside.
As for the RM1,
this little guy borrows design cues from its bigger brother.
You got your black anodized aluminum cooling fins,
sleeved four-pin fan connector and stylish crown profile,
but there are definitely some cut corners here.
The plastic pushpins are certainly an improvement
over previous generations, but they're plastic
and gone is the RGB lighting,
accent machining and included backplate.
It's the RM1 though that you'll find included
alongside core i3, core i5 and core i7 CPUs,
which means that this is the unit
that most people will actually end up with
and while it appears smaller and more basic
and therefore probably worse,
what's interesting
is that Intel's entire multiplier locked core series lineup,
all the way from i3 to i9
is rated rated at the same 65 watt TDP
which immediately made us wonder,
well, why wouldn't they just use
the same cooler for all of them?
To really understand what's going on here,
we need to look at the performance
of a few generations of Intel stock coolers.
All of them were adapted
to work on our MSI Pro Z698 Wi-Fi motherboard
and we used a core i7-12700 as our standard thermal load.
Now, Intel has traditionally offered
three mainstream cooling solutions.
A basic all extruded aluminum fin heat sink,
a second more performant variant of the same,
this time with a copper slug
pressed into the center to add thermal mass
and facilitate faster heat transfer to the fins,
that's the one we're gonna focus on today,
and occasionally, they've done these weird tall boy versions
for higher TDP chips.
These had remained essentially unchanged
for the better part of a decade
until the introduction of the LGA 1200 socket
for 10th and 11th gen chips.
That saw our old standby here
dumped for a younger sleeker cousin
now with more black and less mass.
Hmm, so Intel kept the construction method,
the profile, the fin count
and even the performance the same
and yet they dropped 17 grams of weight, about 11% overall.
It turns out they did so by machining out more copper
from the center slug and this is really cool
because it goes to show you just how much copper
has gone up in price over the last 10 years.
It's at the point where
when you're operating at Intel scale,
machining out that 17 extra grams of copper per heat sink
then pressing it into pucks and recycling it
manages to be more cost effective
than just leaving it in there.
Now let's our new unit stack up starting with the RM1.
We tested with Blender BMW,
which is about a five minute test on this chip,
in three different fan profiles.
In our noise normalized profile,
the RM1 was disappointingly exactly on par
with our older style coolers.
Then in the auto profile,
it managed, well, extremely similar performance again
within about 1/2 a degree and at full speed,
the RM1 managed to run as much as two degrees cooler
across multiple tests.
But wait, how could that be
that you've got no performance difference at one fan speed
and a significant one at another fan speed?
Well, one factor could be the solid copper core
at the heart of this new series, that's right.
In spite of the ever increasing cost of this metal,
Intel put so much into these new coolers
that they weigh nearly double the last gen design.
We think that this could be to accommodate
the aggressive turbo boost behavior of 12-gen core CPU,
but there's a big asterisk on our results
and that's fan performance.
While doing research for this video,
we found out that Intel actually published
the full design specs for their LGA 115X cooler family,
the older ones, and digging through these,
we found out that there were three manufacturers
of the exact same skew, Foxconn, Delta and Nidec.
Going deeper into these documents,
we found that the fan RPM specification varies by 8.25%
and that's on top of the plus or minus 10%
that the fan can operate at while still meeting Intel spec.
If the new generation is a similar story,
that means that we could easily see a larger performance gap
from just one cooler to the next
compared to one generation of coolers
to the next generation.
With that in mind,
we still think it's worth testing the RH1
to see how it might compare.
The differences were underwhelming,
less than one degree
between the much taller version of the cooler
and the little skinny chicken one.
In both, are noise normalized and full speed tests.
It did manage to shave 15 seconds off our render
and sustain a 50 megahertz higher clock speed
throughout the run compared to the RM1,
so the extra mass in the cooler is making a difference.
I just feel like that difference could have been bigger
and I've gotta question Intel's use
of thick chunky fins here because a lot of smaller fins
would've had more surface area
and therefore probably better performance.
So I'm left feeling like aesthetics
took a priority over performance
in spite of the fact that these are shipping
with core i9 CPUs
and on that note, I didn't even mention
the cute little back lit spinner hub cap on the fan hub.
That's definitely purely aesthetic.
Now, we didn't get to testing these coolers
against AMD's Wraith offerings for a couple of reasons.
One is the different mountings systems of course,
but that is the sort of thing
that will be happening in the near future with LTT labs
and the second reason is that we just didn't really have to.
They're so much better.
You don't even need me to tell you.
With that said, I still need to commend Intel
for value engineering a small but measurable improvement
to their previous thermal solutions
and more than that,
I'm glad they took the time
to make this new generation of coolers
just attractive enough to not look horrible
in the tempered glass side panel world
that we find ourselves in today.
They're also quiet enough to go unnoticed by most people
especially any of those of you
who are lucky enough to also have a presumably louder GPU.
So 12th generation Intel
is making the CPU industry competitive again.
We're reaping the rewards.
That is after AMD made the CPU industry competitive again.
All we need now is for Intel
to finally drop their Alchemist GPU
to shake up that side of things.
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If you're looking for another video to watch,
go check out our launch review
of Intel's Alder Lake 12th-gen core CPUs.
They are a lot better than what they had before
which is good.