 This right here is the Phenonic Hex 2.0 CPU cooler. And if you were to look at the performance claims alone, you'd be forgiven for thinking there's some kind of magic going on here since it seems to be able to cool much better than its relatively small size would suggest. But unfortunately for perpetual motion machine makers and this cooler alike, magic is not real. And thermodynamics is. What makes this product special is of course its use of a Peltier or thermoelectric cooler which uses electricity to move heat from one side of the device down here or up there, wherever it is, to the other. Pretty cool. But what's even cooler is this. What Alex is holding is two aquarium coolers using a similar technology which together should be able to provide 360 watts of cooling power. So we're gonna see how our two contraptions here manage against a 10 core overclocked processor in a new crazy cooling experiment series that we're calling... Bad cooling ideas? Yeah. Vincera watches is celebrating their five year anniversary. And everything on the website is on sale until August 18th, 2019. Check them out at the link in the video description. All right, so tech cooling is pretty well established at this point, but that doesn't prevent people from marketing it as basically magic. Check out this desktop cooler on Kickstarter. So the way a Peltier or tech works fundamentally is by having electrons in the form of DC current pass through two elements. In one of the elements, the electrons go from a low to a high energy state absorbed by the other. So that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna use a Peltier cooler to a high energy state absorbing heat. And in the other, they go from a high to a low energy state releasing heat. So you've got the cold side and the hot side with a maximum temperature difference of usually around 70 degrees Celsius. The cooling capabilities of a tech are directly proportional to the power consumption of the tech module. So back to that Kickstarter thing, it's not magic at all and really annoyed me when I found it in my email. So basically all it's doing is using the tech cooler to make the water in the back of it hotter. So in the end, instead of your room being cooler, which like it does a bit, you just end up with a container full of hot water. It's branded as eco-friendly, but it's using a tech cooler which are just not efficient at all. So it's using hektons of electricity and it costs $350 and it can only cool 60 Watts. A similarly priced refrigerant based cooler has literally 50 times more cooling, but it does have a Bluetooth speaker, which. I don't think that's enough to save that. My air conditioner doesn't have that. Let's get this thing on the CPU. Wait a second. They did what we tell everyone to do. They just completely ripped off Noctua's mounting mechanism. It's completely identical. Oh, yeah, yeah. I saw that. It's not quite identical. It's like a bit worse. Yeah, the back plate is like an all in one instead of having separate ones for AMD and Intel, but yeah, it's pretty solid. Yeah, good for them. At least they got one thing, right? So now that we know tech cooling is not in fact magic, let's investigate this cooler a little bit more closely. So Phenonic is not actually the first to attempt to build a Peltier into a CPU heatsink. Monsoon, Coolant, and Swift Tech all did it way back in 2007, and there may even be earlier instances. Why didn't it catch on? I don't know. Maybe it just wasn't mature enough. So let's take a closer look at this more recent attempt here. How does this go in? It just sits there? Yeah, you need to put the like that or it doesn't really go back together. That's stupid. All right, and this goes here and just kind of, really? Yeah, squeeze this together. I spent a fair bit of time figuring out how to get it back together while you were gone. Yeah. Hey. Does that screw it all the way down? Yeah, does that mount? Does that mounting pressure seem right? Oh, you put it on upside down. Now the good news is that our contact looks great between the heatsink and CPU. Oh yeah. So you've got pre-testing done on an NH-U12A, right? Yep. Now to be clear, this is a much larger heatsink with almost twice as many heat pipes, but it's 50 bucks cheaper. So these things gotta find a way to be competitive. Yeah. You've got a second power supply just for our heatsink here? Yeah, so if you were installing this in a regular computer, you would do this. We are just using a second power supply so we can find out just how much power this thing is drawing. Because of course, for a tech to work, you do need a power source for the Peltier module itself, which in the case of this cooler is embedded in the base between the heatsink fins and heat pipes up here and then another piece of copper. Now theoretically, the bottom of this thing should be quite chilly. It's hard to feel it though. I don't know, right now it's only drawing four watts, so it might need some input from the fan header to really turn on. Interesting. I'm having fun. Are you guys having fun? This is probably the coolest thing I've ever done. Hey! I love that merch product placement. Was that you or David? I don't know. Is that just Andy's water bottle? Oh, it could be. Yeah, Andy just left his water bottle here. We all have the same water bottle, so like. So we're just doing the good old blender BMW, seeing what the max temperature is at the end of it. We're idling at around 30 low. Okay. 30 mid. Yeah. Cool. 30 low to 30 mid. So what we're trying to beat is a maximum core temperature of 68 degrees and an overall average across all 10 cores of 64.9. Okay. You think we're gonna do it? No. Oh, wrong window active. Here we go. How's our power draw over there? Three watts right now. 14, 30, 40. Oh, so it kicked in. Interesting. So that's fairly sophisticated. It keeps the tech idle unless there's an actual heat load, which is really good because otherwise you would actually end up with your CPU reaching sub ambient temperatures, which could cause condensation and shorting. Yeah. Up to 40 watts. 42 is the highest that I've seen. One of my cores is at 65 already. Okay. That's not too bad though. Okay. We're almost done. So our maximum core managed to reach 70 degrees. We've got another one at 69, another one at 68, 68, 67. Yeah. I mean, he's coming back with his trusty calculator, but I think I've already determined that we're higher. Science says it's worse. Yep. Two and a half degrees worse. Yep. Bummer. This situation could only get better though, right? Should we turn on the overclock? Yes. So one of the special things about techs is that from my understanding, if you overwhelm them, so you have like too much heat, they actually eventually become an insulator. I'm hoping that doesn't happen, but what are our CPU temps look like? We're at 104 right now. 105. 106. Hey, it's trying hard. Yeah. I wonder how it's looking there. I don't know if this is accurate because I don't know if it's just bouncing around, but that looks like 50 degrees on top of the CPU there. Oh, we're at a hundred. Oh, it's hit the thermal max. I'm guessing that it's down clocked now. Oh, it hasn't yet. Yeah. It's down clocking now. Everything's at like 110 degrees. Fortunately, we always had a backup plan. Just shutting it down. Okay. So while we were removing this, this is absolutely fascinating. Now, what I was expecting was for all of our heat sinks and heat pipes over here to be cooling the hot side of the tech, but Alex pointed out that it actually works a little bit differently than that. Yeah. It looks like this entire side is just working like a regular air cooler and whatever's left over after those heat pipes is then being cooled by the tech, which is putting all that heat into the other side. Right. So our tech is actually sitting in between two quad heat pipes, single tower coolers. So effectively, this one is cooling the hot side of our tech and this one is just cooling the CPU directly with the cold side of the tech also cooling this plate from right here in the middle. Yeah. I feel like they were just concerned that your average CPU would overwhelm the tech, which makes sense because it's only 40 Watts. Right. And that would explain why it didn't just completely blow up. Yeah. And movie magic. Everything is different. So we have a whole water cooling loop just on the table here. 360 rad costs about the same as their two Peltier units. It's already been pre-tested. We have a new overclock that pushes this to its limits. Nice. And it's all tested. So that's the same price as this, which means that these two have to keep up with that. Correct. And like the RGB is included in the price. So yeah. The first thing I notice about these is that while they are fairly pre-done as a solution for the user, they don't have connectors on them. Beautiful. Okay. Snip me. Like my doctor did it. Okay. We need to rethink this. Everyone's just shocked that doing things the correct way is easier. I'm shocked. Yeah. This is- You know, after the crap you gave me about my soldering, that is really not a lot better. Yeah. It's not heating up the way that I would like it to. Want some electrical tape? Yep. I mean, once you wrap it in enough electrical tape, no one can tell how good your soldering job was. Okay. In all seriousness though, guys, yes, this is really jank. And no, neither Alex nor I would ever deploy something like this in like a 24 seven application. But this will run for quite literally five to 10 minutes. And we have a fire extinguisher right there. Okay. Wow. That immediately got really cold. Wow. 18, 15, 13, 11. That's chilly. That's really cold. We're going to be below zero very soon. Yep. We're below zero degrees. So- This could be a bad idea to keep my finger on here. Yeah. What's it like on the bottom? 60, 60, 70, something like that. Not bad. It feels fine. So guys, what we're looking at here is a much more powerful Peltier module. You can see it has just larger gauge wires going into it. It does seem to be a bit bigger than the one that was built into the heat sink. And what it's doing is it's got its hot side over here, which is being cooled by this double tower cooler with 392 millimeter fans. And then it's got its cold side over here with just this rudimentary water block that is really quite frosty. You can actually see there's frost forming on it and I'm leaving fingerprints behind. So that's going to chill our water. And this is going to dissipate the heat of our Peltier module and our CPU to the surrounding air. Also, it's currently drawing 301 Watts. Not bad. Yeah. Instead of necessarily trying to have it at the highest point and like minimize water loss that way, what if we just cut the tube and then I just jam this on there? Like this is a quick connect. Sure. Okay. So actually, oh, pinch it, pinch it. Wait, wait, wait, wait, don't lift that up. Not too high. This is not half inch tubing. Okay. Okay, let's keep that. Oh, ow. That is not coming off. So here's an idea. Yeah. Let's just get this out of here. What's attached? Okay, now that looked really jank, but that's how much water we lost. We're basically pros at this now. Also this. But that was intentional. So how proud are we right now? We basically invented a coolant Boreas. Not very. Now our idle temps are looking pretty fine. 26, 27, 27. So- Actually it is lower now, it's 23. Oh, wow. Actually it's dropping really fast. Yeah. Our lowest core is at 22 already. All right, F12. Yep. Here it goes. So we're looking at a maximum temperature of 84 to beat. 80.7 is our average on all cores. Remember there's two chillers in series here. So we want this one versus this one. So this one's like 26. And this guy. Come on. It's like 26 also. Well, it's trying. They're trying there, bud. Oh, our render's done. So our maximum on the hottest core was 80. However, that doesn't tell the whole story because we actually started with our water chilled to subambient and we could see as the test ran that it was definitely heating up. So we need to do a longer test. Yeah. So how'd we do? Oh. Yeah, we had to beat 84 degrees and we hit what? 94. 94. That's so, that's not great. So all that's left after of course, zipping up my stealth hoodie and telling you guys it's available on lttstore.com is to walk through why this is a bad idea. So there's a couple of things. Number one, it actually isn't any more compact even though the Peltier module itself is quite small because you've got to cool all that extra heat. Number two is the extra heat and therefore noise. Number three is the cost. For the same price, we were able to get this radiator along with like RGB fans and stuff. And number four is of course the power consumption. This at full blast consumes about 10 Watts while this consumes about 300 Watts. So the thing with techs is that yeah, it's cool that you can reach sub ambient temperatures as long as there's not much heat load. But if as soon as you fire up something intensive like a render, your temperatures go higher than just with a traditional water cooling radiator, then that's kind of a bummer. But guys, make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss this video because that doesn't mean that Peltiers are necessarily a bad idea the way that they were in this video. Now, the way we used to do it in the old days was we'd take a Peltier and put it directly between the CPU block and the CPU, taking the cooling right where it's needed. Now the problem was that CPUs outpaced Peltiers in terms of how much heat they were outputting and what kind of Peltiers you could get. So it became just impractical. But Alex found... Oh yeah, we found one that's 545 Watts and draws 32 amps. So that's on its way from eBay. That's gonna be a future video. Subscribe, hit that bell so you don't miss it and we will see you there in maybe bad cooling ideas episode two. Yeah. But maybe a good idea. And maybe soon and maybe not because eBay shipping. Speaking of eBay shipping, I'm bringing this sponsor segue right to you right now, faster than eBay shipping. This video is brought to you by... If you wanna protect yourself online and browse anonymously with a hidden IP address, private internet access is an affordable way to do just that. 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