 In our review of the Core i9-10900K, we were impressed by the performance of Intel's 10-core beast. I mean, this thing turbos just shy of 5 GHz across all cores. And if you set your motherboard to allow it to ignore the time limits on its turboing, it'll actually do that basically indefinitely. Crazy, right? Well, crazy hot. The one thing we didn't tell you guys, because we accidentally left that in the slide, out of the slide, is what kind of cooling it takes to get that sort of performance. So to rectify that error and take things a little bit deeper, we are going to try it out with everything. From Intel's pinner old stock cooler, to a more sensible air cooler, to a high-end air cooler, to a top-tier air cooler, and see just what kind of performance we can get out of this chip, depending on the cooling solution. So, let's get started. So, let's get started. And this video is brought to you by GlassWire. GlassWire is the tool that tells you when a strange new app accesses your network in real time and lets you block it. Use offer code LINUS to get 25% off at the link in the video description. Anthony, do we want to replicate our initial test from the review with a Corsair 280mm AIO? This is standard for our CPU reviews. Or do we want to go straight to the pain train? Let's do the pain train. All right, shut it down. We're shutting the thing down. Okay. Hey, well, we're turboing to 4.9, 4.95. Of course, we're not doing anything yet. First order of business is to establish a baseline. We've got all of Intel's thermal and power limits in place. We're going to go ahead and run a blender classroom benchmark, and we're going to monitor our CPU clock speeds to see where we end up. Now, I suspect it won't be an issue for this cooler, but with the bigger ones, and particularly the water cooler, we're going to do two runs of classroom. One, just to heat up the heat sink, and then a second one to actually take our values from. We're at that, got that 98 degrees, you know, good band. Let's check them out. Very popular with the kids today. I'm always in sync with the youth. That's why, you know, on Friday nights, I hang out in the back street, you know, with the boys. Are there new kids on the block? No, no, you don't want to hang out with the new kids on the block, or Chris Hansen might show up and give you trouble. Unsurprisingly, we experienced significant thermal throttling with 100 degree temperatures and our lowest core managing a sustained 3.6 gigahertz. I'm not expecting much here, but let's see if unlocking the power limit changes anything about that situation. Here we go, ladies and gentlemen. We are removing all limits and going auto S vid behavior. Pow. Pow. Pow. Oh no. I really wasn't expecting this. We're running at the same 100 degrees, you know, 97 to 99 degrees. But curiously, our clock speeds are actually higher. How about that? Do you have an explanation for that? That's bizarre. Our lowest core sustained clock speed is now 3.9 gigahertz in spite of the fact that we didn't change out our cooling solution. Now, that's still not impressive. With the power limits fully removed, we would expect this ship to maintain 4.9 gigahertz, not 3.9 gigahertz over an extended period of time. So now then, it's time for us to swap out for something a little bit better. I don't know how it is the cooler ma- Damn it. I don't know how it is that Cooler Master has been making heat sinks this long, and yet they have such obtuse mounting mechanisms still. I've been saying it for years, and I'll say it again. Everyone else, just copy Noctua. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk, you know? Well, I can't say much positive about the finishing on the fins or about the mounting mechanism. You can't fault the Hyper 212 family when it comes to price to performance. It did spike up to around 100 degrees during the turbo window under stock operation, but it managed an average of just under 69 degrees during the rest of it, netting it a 400 megahertz improvement over the stock cooler. Now we're running our second round with the limits removed, and yes, we are seeing anywhere from 93 to 99 degrees, but our sustained turbo speeds are 4.7 gigahertz. That's just 200 megahertz shy of what we're expecting with water cooling. Of course, most people don't spend 500 bucks on a CPU to leave any of its performance on the table, so we're gonna splurge. We're gonna spend another $20, and we're gonna move up to a Noctua NH-U12S. Mostly, the differences in performance that I'm expecting here are gonna be down to Noctua's superior fan design. Also, they have a much better mounting mechanism, strongly recommended. And there it is. How much cooling do you need to get the most out of your 10900K, assuming that you are not manually overclocking? The answer is somewhere between a Hyper 212, assuming you're using a high-quality thermal paste rather than one of our graphite thermal pads, and an NH-U12S. With that said, even with the 5 to 10 degrees of improvement that we would expect here going to a thermal paste, I would say that our load temperatures in our fully unfettered mode are higher than I would be comfortable with. So, I would still consider an upgrade if you plan to do things like render out scenes like this in Blender on the regular. So, let's see how much improvement we get here. Every time I go a while without mounting one of these, I forget how utterly chonktastic the NH-T15 is. Like, look at this. The performance may actually be better than water cooling, but it sure does clutter up your CPU socket. Like, even just getting at your memory is a chore. Oh, that's better. Those are under control thermals. All right. For your convenience, I'm going to talk through the H115i, so that's the 280mm AIO water cooler, and the NH-T15 air cooler at the same time, because their performance profiles were somewhat similar. Under stock operation, both of them actually didn't manage to outperform the NH-U12s by a significant margin, which I was a little bit surprised to see, especially that equivalency in the hottest core while the system was turboing. But when it came time to unlock the power limits with multi-core enhancement, both these solutions clearly separated themselves from everything that we've seen so far, not just managing 4.9 GHz across the board, but doing it with core temperatures that I would consider to be maybe not the most comfortable. We are still up in the 80 high, 90 low degree range, but once you sub out our thermal pad for a high quality thermal grease, definitely acceptable, and around that 80 degrees that we talked about in our original review. What all of that means is that if I was looking for additional overclocking headroom, I would absolutely recommend spending the $100 plus on a thermal solution like this. But if all I wanted was to get the most out of my CPU, and I knew that I wasn't going to be hitting it this hard all the time, around $50 to $60 for a good single tower aftermarket air cooler is going to do the trick just nicely. Just like our sponsor does the trick just nicely. Micro Center is open for all of your work from home or learn from home technology needs, and they want you to check out the Li and Li Landcool 205 mid-tower tempered glass case. It supports ATX, MATX, and mini ITX motherboards with extra space behind the motherboard tray for cable management. It's got side ventilation for improved airflow with easy access to the power supply and hard drive bay from the side. It's got rear removable SSD mounting brackets and high performance magnetic dust filters at the top and front with a dust filter tray at the bottom. You can check out it and other Micro Center specials at the link in the video description. If you guys enjoyed this video and you like crazy cooling experiments, maybe check out our water cooling the MacBook Air 2020 video. We use an ice bath to explore whether it's actually a thermal limit or maybe a power limit holding back its performance.