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  • Avalon - Thursday, October 13, 2022 - link

    Seems like a good cooler and quite similar to the Be Quiet! Dark Rock Pro 4. Any chance you'll be reviewing the latter?
  • ballsystemlord - Thursday, October 13, 2022 - link

    That tower cooler is amazing at higher heat outputs. Perfect for the new AMD/Intel CPUs.
  • rickeo - Sunday, October 16, 2022 - link

    That direct heatpipe contact will likely NOT be good for modern AMD chiplet CPU's.
  • Threska - Thursday, October 13, 2022 - link

    Should have covered ease of installation. Some can be difficult especially dealing with weight and size in an already installed motherboard.
  • meacupla - Thursday, October 13, 2022 - link

    I'm surprised direct touch heatpipes are still a thing. I would have expected the manufacturers to have added a vapor chamber by now. The heat output on these newer chips aren't evenly spread out, unlike when the NH-D15 was released.
  • DanNeely - Thursday, October 13, 2022 - link

    As long as reviewers are sufficiently scared of random temporal variations that they use isothermal resistive heating elements lazy manufactures don't need to bother with actual CPU thermal distributions in the pursuit of fake internet points in review scores.

    Meanwhile manufacuers that do try to take such factors into consideration (a decade ago there was a CPU waterblock manufacturer that offered different flow guides for different CPU families for an extra 1-2C cooling vs a generic setup) at best get no benefit for their work and at worst actually score worse because they're not as efficient at cooling a space heater where actual CPUs don't put much of their heat.
  • thestryker - Thursday, October 13, 2022 - link

    While I agree with you in principal you're also asking reviewers to do a *lot* more work and have results which can't be directly compared. Intel's CPUs, at least until MTL, the heat is right in the center whereas AMD has been off to the side which means you'd have to test both if you want useful results. On top of that you'd also have to test with an offset (or whatever other method is being used) and without to see if there is an actual benefit (Der8auer tested AMD offset on Zen 4 and found no difference).

    In the end so long as reviewers address the availability of any extra features which may assist specific platform cooling that's good enough for me.
  • 404NotFound22 - Friday, October 14, 2022 - link

    Actually no, while Der8auer himself didn't find a difference, his comment section sure did. The benchmark score went up, while the temperature remained the same, as is expected from Zen 4. He admitted not seeing this and said a revised video is coming.

    So yes it did make a difference.
  • thestryker - Friday, October 14, 2022 - link

    He's running a manual OC on the chip, so no that behavior is not expected at all. We won't know what's going on until he's able to rerun the testing.

    (I'd missed the benchmark performance entirely though since I was only listening to the video)
  • Stuka87 - Thursday, October 13, 2022 - link

    There have been vapor chamber coolers in the past, such as the CoolerMaster TPC 812. With the way current CPUs have very uneven hot spots, vapor chambers do start to make more sense.

    The IceGiant ProSiphon is the closest thing we have these days, and it does work really well, though its on the large side.
  • meacupla - Thursday, October 13, 2022 - link

    That TPC 812 has the vapor chamber on the wrong side of the stack.
    It should go CPU | CPU heat spreader | vapor chamber | heatpipes. Kind of like how the RTX 4090 heatsink is designed.
  • Threska - Sunday, October 16, 2022 - link

    Expensive, and more important no AM5 version.

    https://www.microcenter.com/product/635270/icegian...
  • WildBikerBill - Saturday, November 5, 2022 - link

    Meanwhile, MicroCenter is still the seller and selling it with AM5 support here: https://www.amazon.com/IceGiant-ProSiphon-Desktop-...
  • Foeketijn - Tuesday, November 8, 2022 - link

    Then don't delid your CPU. The lid is 100% copper, so that'll take care of any unevenly spread out heat output.
  • edzieba - Thursday, October 13, 2022 - link

    Can you add a photo of it mounted on a motherboard to the article? Just the cooler on its own makes it almost impossible to judge scale (as cooler baseplates are not a standard size).
  • Harry_Wild - Thursday, October 13, 2022 - link


    Exactly what I want only it too high for my case which has 137mm limit on it! 160 mm is to high!
  • megadirk - Thursday, October 13, 2022 - link

    Too bad it only comes with that color option, especially since it's called the "Stealth". At least it's easily removable to paint and not to difficult of an assembly to model and 3d print a replacement.
  • thestryker - Thursday, October 13, 2022 - link

    This seems like an interesting cooler, but like most of the high end air coolers there's so much weight. Would love to see something done bracing wise even if it's just some sort of attachment which can screw into the top of the case.
  • Jonny314159 - Friday, October 14, 2022 - link

    These results just tell me to keep buying the NH-D15.
  • NeatOman - Friday, October 14, 2022 - link

    I think there should be multiple loads they should be tested at. Heat pipes rely on a small amount of liquid in them evaporate (causing it to cool via phase change) and condense to then be wicked back, these evaporative temps can be change by modifying the liquid. This will in turn give you target temperatures that you have to balance with how well your cooling the heat pipes (fins and fans) and the thermal resistance from the heat pipes to the silicon die.

    Older chips with much larger die would be able to move much more heat into the IHS and it would benefit to set the gas off temperature higher inside the heat pipes. Now with chips so small it would be harder to move so much heat and a lower temperature would IMO help cool the CPU die better.

    The next step is what I've seen on GPU's for a long time. Two stage phase change. First is a vapor chamber block sitting directly on the GPU die and then you have heat pipes on top to further move the heat away. It would be amazing to see the Thicc IHS on the Ryzen 7000 series chips be turned into a vapor chamber.

    You can see how the new RTX 4090 can suck down just over 600 watts when overclocked yet with a volume of about equivalent to a max size tower CPU cooler it runs surprisingly cool.

    DO IT AMD.. DO IT ! would be amazing if someone made IHS replacements that are said vapor chambers :-)
  • Ryan Smith - Monday, October 17, 2022 - link

    "I think there should be multiple loads they should be tested at."

    In fact we do just that. If you check the drop-downs next to the core temperature graphs, we test 60W up to 340W. 150W is the default, since it's roughly in the middle of what current CPUs have been doing (though with Ryzen 7000 coming out, that's pushing the average higher).
  • RKCook - Monday, October 17, 2022 - link

    Nice article.

    Any comments on putting this into a vertical ATX case and its torquing effect on the motherboard.

    A kilogram weight protruding from the side seems like it would put a lot of torque onto the cpu socket, potentially to the failure point.

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