 NOOOOOOOOOOOOO my god! If you want to tame the hottest gaming CPUs, the marketing says that you want water cooling. But I'm gonna let you in on a little secret. That's not actually true. This is a thermosiphon and it is not your grandma's air cooler. Unless your grandma is a physicist, and rides a badass motorcycle. And reads you awesome bedtime stories about our sponsor. War Thunder. War Thunder is an online military vehicle combat game that's free to play and lots of fun. Learn more at the end of this video or try for free with a special signup bonus at the link below. The problem is that Intel's top of the line gaming CPU, the Core i9-12900K runs so hot that even the legendary NH-D15, the king of air coolers, can't keep up with it. I mean, you could turn off performance mode or multi-core enhancement, but at that point, why did you pay $600 US for a processor only to leave performance on the table? Oh, and did I mention you'll still be maxing out at 95 degrees on an open air test bench? That means you're probably thermal throttling the second you close your side panel. Water cooling has advanced to help us tackle these ever hotter CPUs in a number of ways. Stronger pumps, more efficient cold plate designs, larger radiators, and by mounting them to the intake of a case, we get to use the coolest air available to tackle the hottest parts of our machines. But compared to traditional heat sinks, even all-in-one water coolers like this one are more challenging to install, expensive, and they have more points of failure. Oh, right, leaks are rare these days, but a failed pump could easily put you out of commission for a while. The good news is that while water cooling has been stealing all the headlines, air cooling has been quietly improving in the background. Ice Giant's first product, the ProSiphon Elite, blew us away by outperforming both this guy and 240 millimeter AIO liquid coolers. It works by using heat from the CPU to boil fluid inside the evaporator here. That vapor makes its way to the condenser, this large, thinned heat sink array up here, where it cools, liquefies, and then falls back down to the evaporator, creating a cooling loop with no moving parts. The principle is actually similar to a heat pipe, but almost simpler in a way. Because the liquid is moved back to the heat source by gravity rather than by capillary action, thermosiphons must be mounted in the correct orientation, but the upside is that they are not nearly as easily overwhelmed by a strong heat source. Enough about the old though. Where'd it go? Oh, here it is. Let's talk about what's new. Ice Giant just sent over a prototype thermosiphon Elite with some really exciting upgrades. The most obvious one is right here. Goodbye, aluminum. Hello, copper. That was a good idea. Someone suggest that to them? Could be. Anyway, this was done to improve heat conduction from the CPU into the thermosiphon. But even more important are the boiling enhancements that they've made to the evaporator. They've completely changed the layout of the fins inside here to create more surface area. And they've added tiny pieces of sintered copper there as well. Not only do these also create more surface area for nucleation sites, but these particles act as a wick to help distribute condensed liquid on the return trip. Sounds pretty cool, but I wouldn't recommend buying one. And certainly wouldn't recommend investing in Ice Giant, apparently is undergoing a funding round right now, until I have validated it for myself. So we grabbed this, a high-end test bench, our frame from Thermal Grizzly, more on that later. And we slapped on all of our coolers, testing them at around the same noise levels of a maxed out, though still very quiet, NHD 15. That's roughly 47 decibels. Our OG aluminum prosiphon Elite was, unfortunately, the only cooler to thermal throttle in our 2000 sample classroom blender test, disqualifying it outright. But as you can see here, our copper unit comes out on top, beating Noctua's best by a whopping five degrees. It was also the only cooler in our test that brought our 12900K below 90 degrees under load. Admittedly, this is on an open test bench where it doesn't have to contend with heat from other components swirling around it, but it's still impressive. However, cranking things up a notch by enabling performance mode on our motherboard caused our CPU to draw another 20 to 30 Watts, resulting in a fail result for all three of our coolers. To be fair, 250 Watts is a lot of power. And if you want that kind of performance, it's fair to say that you might have to make some sacrifices, namely noise. In an attempt to tame the beast, we unlocked our EK AIO and our copper prototype, allowing their fans to ramp up to around 2100 RPM. And then we reran our tests in both default and performance mode. It cost us about 10 decibels in both cases, but at Intel's stock power limit, the copper prototype thermosiphon pulled ahead even further with a maximum package temperature of just 85 degrees Celsius. That's downright reasonable. Unfortunately, it's still thermal throttled in performance mode. But as our friend Slave pointed out to us, performance mode is a pretty ham-fisted way of optimizing your CPU. By tuning the 12900K's operating voltage, load line calibration, and turbo ratios, he managed to use the extra thermal headroom of the copper prototype to squeeze out even better performance than performance mode and without any thermal throttling. Now, full disclosure, Slave is invested as a partner with Ice Giant, but that also kind of speaks volumes, doesn't it? If it's good enough for him, it's probably good enough for me. And so is our new short circuit hoodie. Check it out at lttstore.com. Side conversation here though, copper thermosiphon, very legal and very cool. Hopefully it makes it to market without costing too much more than the old aluminum one. But I feel like there's an elephant in the room. What is going on with computer chips right now? AMD is jacking up their power targets for AM5, Nvidia is rumored to be hitting 600 to 800 Watts on their upcoming 4000 series, and Intel is already shipping consumer products that are basically uncoolable unless you resort to this. But you just cooled it Linus, with that you might say. Well, yeah, but I used a prototype cooler on an open test bench and I did a bunch of other stuff that's not reasonable for the average consumer. Okay, first up, I'm using top of the line thermal grizzly thermal paste. And second, I have likely voided the warranty on both my motherboard and my CPU by installing thermal grizzlies CPU contact frame, that thing I alluded to before. In a nutshell, it's a modification to the LGA 1700 socket that ensures even retention pressure on the CPU for better thermal contact. We'd like to do a dedicated video on it at some point, but the short version is that without it, we'd likely be running five or so degrees hotter during all of our tests. That means thermal throttling on the 12900K right out of the box. But hold on Linus, you might say. There are better water coolers out there that surely would handle the 12900K without any of this nonsense. Everyone knows that 240 millimeter rads like this one are weak sauce now. Well, to that I would respond, A, no one says weak sauce anymore, come on. And B, we actually pulled out an EK-AIO Elite 360 for our comparison as well, and found that it performed no better than our thermal siphon. A little worse actually. I've never seen that before. I tried to pull it off the thing, but instead of unplugging, it ripped right out of the fan. Do you need to run any more tests with this? I don't think so, but yeah, we can fix it. I know we can fix it, it's just the five thing. God. Now, all of this modification nonsense might be a price that you're willing to pay. But frankly, I'm getting kind of sick of hardware manufacturers redlining their gear out of the box to the point where we're forced to buy and install exotic modifications just to get the performance that we saw in a review. I mean, Intel can hide behind their default turbo behavior, which does consume a lot less power. But the truth is that all performance mode is doing is allowing these unlocked 12 series chips to turbo at around 240 Watts forever, which is a behavior that Intel enables. One behavior I'm okay with by the way, is signing up at floatplane.com for exclusive videos and behind the scenes like the extended cut of our Call Me Chris collab. Back to Intel 12th gen though, you shouldn't have to spend an extra several hundred dollars just to keep your $600 CPU at a reasonable temperature under load. But since you do, it's still too early to say how much the copper thermal siphon will cost, but the original was around 170. So expecting a small increase from there, it's actually looking like a pretty darn good solution, but it's not perfect. RAM clearance is pretty good, but it's gonna cover up any RGB modules you might have. And you can forget about installing this over top of Corsair dominator style dims. We've also complained to their team about their smooth standoffs and they're considering adding some knurling or striping to help install or remove stuck bits now that motherboards are getting so crowded around the CPU socket area. Another annoyance, we really had to screw this thing down tight to ensure good contact. That's even with the updated bracket and with the frame, though it's a pretty easy to use mounting solution otherwise. And finally, we're hoping that the team at Ice Giant can sneak, I don't know what to call it, but a bit more tolerance for user error into the design before it starts shipping worldwide. It can be a little bit finicky to get a perfect mount. On that subject, I would strongly recommend against shipping your system with one of these already installed in it. That is a key benefit of AIO liquid coolers that can't be ignored. Not nearly as much weight on the socket. You know what else you can't ignore? Our sponsor. War Thunder. War Thunder is a free to play online military vehicle combat game available on Windows, Mac, Linux, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, all with cross play. It features 10 playable nations and an incredible arsenal of more than 2000 historically accurate playable tanks, aircrafts and ships from the 1910s to vehicles still in service today. You'll compete in massive combined arms battles on over a hundred major battlefields from World War II to modern equivalents and War Thunder's vehicles are implemented with a high level of authenticity and details. So their speed, armor, firepower and model are as close to real life as possible without compromising on gameplay. Their damage models are realistic and dynamic, adding a huge amount of depth that's rarely matched by other free to play games. So head to the link below and start playing War Thunder for free. You'll also get a free bonus premium vehicle just for signing up. If you guys enjoyed this video, make sure to check out the 6.9 gigahertz CPU video that Slave helped us out with. That was a lot of fun. Hopefully it makes it to market without costing too much more than the old aluminum. I'm gonna just snap one day.