 Okay, so the traditional way of building a CPU cooler, you take a big ol' hunk of metal, you take a plastic fan and you slap it on there, in hopes that the raging inferno of a Pentium D processor you've got will stay alive long enough to become a weird curiosity for the employees you hire ten years down the line who were still in diapers when you started building computers. But not Thermaltake. No, Thermaltake took a metal heat sink, okay, I'm with you so far, slapped a metal fan onto it, because YOLO, in an attempt to cool down a modern CPU in one of the smallest form factor coolers that I've ever seen. But does it work? So if you were just here to find out if a metal fan would work, then you'll be sorely disappointed because I'm also gonna bore you with some science and history. The Sandia cooler concept, with its metal spinning top and static metal base, first showed up on the scene in 2012, and it's been a long time since the last time a metal fan was built. The static metal base first showed up on the scene in 2012, with this video gaining considerable attention among PC enthusiasts due to its promises of vastly improved efficiency, smaller size, and quieter operation compared to more traditional heat sink designs. Then, there was no news, until Cooler Master showed up at CES 2015 with a couple kind of ugly prototypes that featured grooves between the spinning top and the base, presumably to improve heat transfer, and an outer heat sink to further improve cooling performance. Fast forward to today, and this tech is finally on the market. The fundamental idea here is pretty simple. Theoretically, when the air gap between the fixed grooved metal base and the spinning grooved metal impeller is small enough, heat transfer can still occur as though they were connected. In practice, this was pretty difficult to pull off, but through a combination of patience, and apparently balancing the impeller like the wheel on a car, Thermaltake was the first one to do it. To test how effective the Engine 27 was, we gathered up a bunch of other small form factor coolers from reputable brands, and a stock Intel heat sink, since if it doesn't offer a compelling improvement over that, you're clearly better off saving your money. We used an Asus Z170i Pro gaming motherboard, thanks bros, and a Core i7 6700K with an NZXT Grid 2.0 for fan control. For each test, we used a pea-sized amount of IC Diamond thermal compound, and we analyzed the results two different ways. First, we looked at what we could expect from each cooler out of the box, using the silent mode curve in NZXT's CAM software. The Engine 27 was the worst performing cooler in this test, at about 10 degrees higher than the nearest aftermarket competitor under load, and all of this while managing to be louder than the Intel box cooler, as measured by our XTAC 407 750 digital sound level meter. The second method of analysis was to introduce a noise ceiling, limiting the maximum RPM of each cooler to the speed at which it reaches 45 decibels, the same as the stock cooler. So performing worse than the stock cooler, or thermal throttling, would result in a fail grade for this test. All of them passed. But CPU cooling isn't the be-all and end-all, and maintaining enough airflow to the components nearby is of critical importance. The good news is that all of our coolers performed similarly, with the C7 only pulling ahead when we allowed it to get a little noisy. Leading us finally to the reason, presumably, that Thermaltake's engineers thought the Engine 27 deserved to exist. Its size. It's not the top performer in any category but this one. At a full centimeter shorter than the nearest competitor from Noctua, and less than half the height of the top performing ARO 6 from Silverstone, the Engine 27 is compatible with any case that's wide enough to fit a memory stick. So with form factor as a consideration, I'll be giving a few awards here today. The ARO 6 gets my big and beautiful award for being the best performer, if a little top heavy. The Noctua NH-L9i takes home the middle child award for being so ugly only its own mother could love it, but otherwise a solid, compact choice. And the Thermaltake Engine 27 gets my better than nothing award for working better than I expected given its size, making it a great option if you don't have anything else that will fit. So congrats to the winners, thanks for watching, and good night. And I've got another award! This time for one of our lucky viewers. We are hooking one of you up with the SSD2GO PKT from Angelbird. They set us up with these bad boys for CES 2017. You can check them out in our gear bag video over here. And they gave us an extra one with a silk-screened LTT super fan, like logo thing on it and everything. It's a 256GB portable SSD drive. It's super tiny. It's USB 3.1 with either a Type A or a Type C connection to your computer, and it can handle up to 560MBps transfer speeds. So all you gotta do to enter to win is check out the link in the video description. Whoo! So thanks again for watching, guys. If you disliked, dislike. If you liked, then like. If you really liked, then maybe check out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link to Amazon in the video description. You can also join our community forum, and I'm pretty sure there's something else down there. Right, cool t-shirts like the one that I am wearing. I think that's pretty much it. Subscribe, blah blah blah blah. Right, check out our other videos, like that one.