 How bad could a $5 heatsink that we bought on eBay possibly be? How do you even make a computer cooler for $5 shipped to our door? $5. Well, we're gonna find out on the cheapest heatsink on the market. And yes, my friends, we are starting another series, the cheapest on the market. And it's gonna be flippin' awesome! HP's new Omen X lineup comes equipped with Intel's 7th generation Core i7 processor. Check it out at the link in the video description. The brand is XYCP, and this is the, whatever that is, CPU cooler, 65 watt, maybe that says three year warranty? And it also has support for Core i7 and 12 something. Okay, let's get it open. So that, my friends. Holy crap. It's like feather light. That is $5 worth of heatsink. I mean, look at this. When they were designing the flower heatsink fin arrangement, like this just looks like, you know, someone accidentally, you know, bumped it on the assembly line. See this hook kind of came off there. See, no problem. No problem. You just put that baby back together. No big deal. But, but look at this. There were like, wasn't room for the, for the frame for the fan. So they're just like, no problem. We'll just bend it. No big deal. No problem. That's where the, that's where the wire comes out. Okay, so we're looking at an 80 millimeter fan. There's somewhere in between, like 75 millimeter fan. I think that's 80 mil. Oh man. This stuff, this stuff looks quality. Let me see there. That's a good stuff. That's a good stuff right there. Whoa, it's really runny. Actually, that doesn't look especially quality. Look at this. Look at this. It's just like, it's like a little thermal volcano. Warning, remove before installation. Warning, have your head checked before installation. All right, so you can see what they've done here. The construction method is pretty, actually very, very basic. So they've got these, these pieces right here that are basically running all the way through and compressing. So they've got all these fins coming in. You can actually follow the lines because it's quite cheaply made. This is a very old, old construction method. They've got these four pieces of aluminum either side that extend the base and that are basically used to crush all the fins together. Then they machine the bottom as flat as they can in a couple of minutes there and ship it off. Now let's put this thing up against its main competitor. So the stock Intel heat sink with the fan and the mounting hardware is 180 grams. This bad boy comes in at 157. Can it possibly hold up? So first things first, we've got to clean off our CPU with alcohol for the most fair possible comparison. We're using a 7700K. Then I've got a brand new Intel stock cooler. I'm going to go ahead and throw that bad boy on there. So I'm using the included thermal compound. We're not introducing extra variables in our test. So we're going to hit this baby with an Ida64 stress test. Here we go. Utilization 100%. CPU temps, well, we'll give them a minute. I'm just taking in the sounds of the heat sink. Okay. So you can probably hear the way that the fan is. You hear that ramping up and ramping down. So our temperatures and our turbo speed actually reasonable. So we're hanging in here at 4.45 gigahertz on our 7700K all the way up to 4.5. So this thing's turboing up to the max at 100% load and we're sitting at about 85 degrees on the CPU package. Ideal, perhaps not, but certainly not going to damage it. And what we also hear is that that fan is working really hard to keep it there. So let's lock that sound in our minds and try out our $5 heat sink. All right. So with it clean now, we can put on our thermal lava here. Oh, look at that. That oh, shoot. Oh crap. Okay, well. Oh quality. Oh beautiful. Okay. Okay. Now I'm ready with my mounting hardware. You basically put these little clear plastic inserts into the hole that corresponds to the socket you want. So it's 775 or 1150 whatever. Then we just, I guess put this on here. Oh, do not tell me this is not going to align. Oh man. Oh, you hear that crunching? Oh shoot. I legitimately don't know if it's going to fit that way. Oh, how am I going to get this out now? Maybe if I can press it. Ow. Oh crap. Shoot. It's hooked on there real good now. Well maybe I can get this side out. I don't know how I'm going to remove this after. Shoot. Ow. Okay, I got to get the video card off here. Okay. Well there are some creature comforts that definitely come with using a more modern design. But if we put it on this way, I think we might actually be okay here. Shoot. It's going to interfere with the RAM before I can press it all the way down. Get the RAM out. Here we go. Oh, am I going to make it over that? Yes. Okay. We have a mount. But can I get the RAM back in now? That is the question. Oh, I'm sorry G-skill. I'm sorry to subject your memory to this. Ah, there we go. Look at that. It's like it's designed for it. It sits like right there. Yeah. Yeah, boy. All right, let's turn this thing on. All right. So it's got this like, you know, orange spinning style. You know what? It actually looks pretty cool. I legitimately think it looks cooler than the stock heatsink just because of that orange fan. System's booted, so we clearly haven't outright broken anything. Oh, boy. I don't think this is a good sign. I already heard it ramp up for a second there, but let's fire this up. Oh, okay. That's all fine. This was... Okay. Here we go. Oh, oh, dang. A hundred and one degrees on the CPU package. Oh, it's painful. Look at the throttling. Look at the throttling. 19% thermal throttling. Oh, the humanity. We've already fallen from 4.5 to 4.24 gigahertz. It just can't keep up. So if the question was, could a $5 heatsink be worse than a free heatsink? The answer is in fact, yes, my friends. But does its performance hold up to what I would expect for a $5 product given that if you try and buy one of these on eBay, it'll actually cost you about $15, then yes. Yes, it holds up to what I would expect. I am shocked that we got anything for $5, even something as ineffective as this. Remember, it's rated for 65 watts, not the 95 watts we threw at it. We were just wondering if, hey, you know, maybe it was, you know, under promise over deliver and that's not what happened. Not what happened today. FreshBooks is the cloud-based accounting software that lets you take your freelance work to a whole new level. It is custom built for small business in such a way that you can be more productive, more organized, and I mean, cash flows tight sometimes. It helps you get paid more quickly. You can create and send professional looking invoices in less than 30 seconds. You can set up online payments with just a couple of clicks and get paid up to four days faster. 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