 I made three critical mistakes building this computer. See look, no worky. I didn't seat my RAM correctly and I didn't flip the switch on my power supply. Oh, but wait, I said there were three errors. Well, the last one, it's not gonna prevent the system from powering on. You can see it's powering on just fine. But what it is, is a silent performance killer. I didn't peel the plastic on the bottom of my cooler. Bah! But come on, you might say. Not me. I mean, who could be that stupid? And I thought like you once, until one fateful day, even though I had years of PC building experience, I was in the middle of the build, I got distracted, pulled away doing something else, came back, carelessly put it together, and pow, plastic between my CPU and my cooler. But that raises a few questions. Just how bad is it? Is there plastic between your CPU and your cooler right now without you knowing it? And who's our sponsor for this video? Ridge Wallet has redefined the wallet with their compact frames and RFID blocking plates. Get yours today at the link below using offer code LINUS to get free worldwide shipping and 10% off. For the best possible performance, every heat sink or water block is finished with a smooth, flat surface. This is to ensure that there's as much contact area as possible. Any small imperfection in this surface could easily impact the cooler's performance or even cause the system to thermal throttle. So that's why many manufacturers of cooling solutions include plastic covers or at the very least stickers to prevent this sensitive area from being damaged in shipping or by the technician who's building your computer. So some, for example, will have a hard plastic shell. This is particularly common on coolers that have pre-applied thermal compound like this water cooler from NZXT, I think. Yes. One nice thing about this approach is that because it's so bulky, it would be pretty hard to accidentally install the cooler unless you've removed it, though I'm pretty sure that has been done. Most coolers use something more like this Hyper 212 Evo, though they've got like a thin film type sticker that usually, if the manufacturer is smart, has a warning that looks a little something like this. Please peel off label B before you use it. Warning. Nice little tab. Of course, I'm not gonna pull on that tab today because what we wanna know is what happens if you don't peel it. Our first victor participant is gonna be an Intel Core i3-8100, and this is for a couple of reasons. Number one is that this is a relatively inexpensive chip and I don't know what's going to happen. I don't think that it's going to be able to fry itself, but it is possible that this plastic could melt and render the chip inoperable that way. Number two is that this is an entirely realistic scenario. I mean, someone could easily be kinda half asleep on the assembly line at a computer maker like Acer or Dell, and it's possible that it could make it all the way past QC into the box and to your front door. Where is it? I almost forgot to put thermal paste on it. Oh my goodness, this feels so wrong. While we boot up is a perfect time to stay hydrated. Lttstore.com. Oh yeah, t-shirts too. We have mystery shirts now. What's a mystery shirt you might ask? It's a mystery, obviously. Now, Brandon, don't give away the mystery. Right out of the gate, I can launch programs, browse the web, everything is like perfectly responsive. There is nothing to indicate that something's wrong. In fact, okay, this sort of spoiled the big reveal. I've even got Counter-Strike running in the background here at anywhere from 100 to 150 frames per second. Now, that's not a lot for an RTX 2080 Super, but that is a lot for a Core i3-8100. It's the craziest thing. There's nothing about this experience to indicate that anything is the matter with this computer. Now, sometimes you'll have 200 FPS, but you'll feel inconsistencies or stutters or hitches. That's not, oh, hi. That's not the experience at all here. We've been playing the game for a while and blah, blah, blah, blah, lots of FPS, et cetera. Check this out. Hardware info, casual 45 degrees Celsius, maximum 54 while gaming. If every CPU ran at 45 to 55 degrees Celsius, the world would be a cooler place. Of course, it's a well-known fact that games, particularly older ones, aren't capable of fully utilizing a multi-core CPU. So we fired up Cinematech R23 and we're gonna let this run for a while to see if we manage to overwhelm our plastic-coated cooler. A few moments later. With a maximum of 68 degrees, I feel like I have to prove to you guys. I'm just gonna, I'm gonna turn it off. You're gonna see that this is in fact the system I'm running. I'm gonna pop this cooler off. I swear to you, the plastic is on it. That's a completely serviceable operating temperature. I wouldn't even, I could own this computer for years and never realized that there was any kind of problem. And the craziest part is we actually turned on multi-core enhancement in the BIOS. So this thing is turboing to the greatest possible extent that it can, even with an enthusiast class motherboard. Come on over here, Mark. I gotta prove this. We're doing this as a one take. Plastic, baby. And get this, there was no effect to the chip physically whatsoever. So that means I am ready to take things to another level. Because the thing is, acceptable performance doesn't equal optimal performance. And surely if it didn't make any difference whatsoever, Cooler Master wouldn't bother with this fancy little, hey, peel this thing off warning. So to take things to the next level, we're gonna go with an Intel Core i9-9900K. This is an eight core processor rated at 95 watts TDP, which on paper doesn't actually sound like that much more than 65 watts. But in practice, Intel's TDPs are more like pirate code guidelines. And this 65 watt chip, there's no way it actually consumes 65 watts. Meanwhile, this 95 watt chip, especially if you enable multi-core enhancement, is gonna consume way more than 95 watts. And here it is, absolutely disgusting. Let's give it a chance. Let's go with the CPU's default behavior and see what happens. And once again, no obvious problem. We're anywhere from 350 to 250 frames per second. Like obviously that's easily playable and it's smooth. This is with a Core i9. Pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew. Wow, there are a lot of bullet holes in the wall behind his head. How is my aim so bad? Aha, but while we were gaming, we hit a maximum of 91 degrees. And yes, we did in fact thermal throttle. And this is before we even ran an intensive all core load like Cinebench. Let's see what happens when we do that. And start. I'm expecting this to be pretty rough. Ooh, 100 degrees instantly. And check this out. This heat sink is cool to the touch. So what the heck is going on here? There are actually a few factors at play here, starting with, bam, surprise math lesson. This is normal. You've got your CPU and you've got your heat sink. You want all the heat to go from here to here where it can be dissipated to the air around it. But there are a couple of different paths it can take. It can either travel from metal to metal. Cause remember on a microscopic level, metal is gonna be textured no matter how much you try to polish it. So they might meet up kind of like this. Where those atoms are touching, that's where you're gonna get the best possible thermal transfer. For everywhere else, well, of course, there's thermal compound to fill in those gaps. That's gonna be R2. Now heat is kind of like electricity in that it wants to take the path of least resistance. So these paths can be considered to be in parallel with as much heat as possible being transferred to our heat sink. This is where our plastic comes in. Now we've got this original resistance equation, except kind of there is no R1 because there is no metal to metal contact and therefore no optimal route. And then we actually have to add the thermal resistance of our plastic, which is gonna be a function of how thermally conductive our plastic is, hint not very, and how thick it is, hint not very, but that's still really bad because the thermal resistance of plastic is so freaking high. So what that means in practice is that with a very high thermal resistance, the difference in temperature between the CPU and the heat sink needs to be really, really high as the wattage goes up, right? So the more watts we're trying to move, the more heat we're trying to move between the CPU and the heat sink, the more that resistance hurts us. But I did say there was more than one factor at play, didn't I? You might've noticed the computer is still running. That's because any modern CPU, whether it's from AMD or Intel is gonna be equipped with a thermal sensor, or in many cases, a suite of them, along with the ability to dynamically scale its own frequency. And working together, those two features are called thermal throttling. So what they allow the chip to do is say, hey, if we reach this predetermined temperature that the manufacturer has deemed unsafe, you need to dynamically scale down the frequency until we're not drawing any more power and therefore putting out any more heat than the thermal solution can deal with. So you can see here that while the chip is absolutely running, it's getting a much lower score in Cinebench than a normal Core i9-9900K would. And that's because we don't have enough cooling. And finally, there's how you actually use your computer. We saw a significant difference in throttling behavior between CSGO and the heavily multi-threaded workload like Cinebench R23. So the answer to our original question, just how bad is it? Is it depends. If you have a low powered CPU, or if all you do is game, it's possible you've been running plastic on your CPU for years. And the worst effect you might notice is the odd stutter or hitch as your thermal throttling kicks in and drops your CPU frequency. Or if you're a heavy user, it's likely you're leaving a significant amount of performance on the table. Or as a worst case scenario, your chip could even die a premature death. Because as we all know, the cooler you can keep your CPU, the longer it should last. The good news though, is that if you screw up and you accidentally put the plastic on and go, oh no, my temperatures are bad, and check it and fix it, the odds are that it's not gonna kill anything. Not like my killer segues to our sponsors, sponsors like Redux. Redux offers PCs with no markup pricing. That means you pay what you would pay if you bought the hardware from a store and just a $75 build fee on top. You get a two year warranty on parts and labor, and you can use their online builder to customize what's going inside based on the games you wanna play and the performance you wanna get. Redux believes in bringing PC gaming to the masses, even folks who don't feel comfortable building a PC cause they think they might put the thermal compound on the plastic. And that is why they only charge a small build fee and they won't cut corners on quality. So click the link below and create your dream PC today. If you guys enjoyed this video, you might enjoy another kind of investigation into screwing up in our, is your rig bottlenecked video? We're gonna have that linked down below.