 So I did say that with proper fans and I would define NFF-12s from Noctua to be about as proper fans as you can get for heatsink and radiator applications. These are directed flow fans that are optimized for static pressure, optimized for silence. You can see they have rubber isolating mounts. I mean honestly just the build quality of these is just outstanding. I've unboxed this fan before so you probably already know what I think about it if you saw that. But if you haven't seen that, it's friggin' awesome. Basically it's like the best fan. Where was I going with this? Ah yes, so without the adapter it runs at 1500 RPM. Personally I'm going to turn these bad boys down so I'm going to use the low noise adapter because I'm a bit of a silence freak. This is going to be my standardized test bench. But before I get started with my heatsink and radiator test bench, I wanted to do a quick test because I had some people asking me, well you say there's not much difference between just pull and push pull as long as you're using good quality fans. What do you mean? Are you sure? Are you sure Linus? Are you sure? So that's what I'm going to be doing. I'm going to be taking these fans with their low noise adapters, I'm going to be running them in just pull on an H100i and then I'm going to be running them in push pull on an H100i to see with a pressure optimized fan just how much of a difference there is so I will be back. Alright guys, this video is going to serve a couple of purposes. So number one, it will answer once and for all that question that people keep sending me, what should I get to cool my CPU? And I'm talking like extreme, like not the hyper 212 users out there, I mean that's a good heatsink and all that, but we're talking performance options here. So we have the H100i from Corsair right there representing the dual radiator pre-done liquid cooling class of products. We have the Silver Arrow Extreme representing extremely high end air cooling, see dual towers, like eight heat pipes, whatever else is going on in there. Don't worry, I'm not using these fans. And we have the H80i representing thick single radiators. Oh, I guess I should go find a thin single red. Hold on just a sec. Actually forget it, I said this was for performance options so we're doing performance options here. Now I want to talk a little bit about my standardized test bench here. This is a Corsair C70 Vengeance case. I'm going to be running it with the stock fans in the front. I'm going to be running it with this fan in the back regardless of whatever else is going on that is a Noctua NF-F12, my favorite fan. And whatever cooler I put in it is getting more Noctua NF-F12s. These are going to be run with their low noise adapters because I personally don't think even for the highest performance gaming rig these days that there's any excuse for it to be loud. So that's a 3930K in there that's going to be overclocked and overvolted. That's a GTX 580. We're going to close up the side panel because that's enough of CPU coolers being tested on open test benches. I know it's not realistic so I'm not going to be lazy about it anymore guys. We're testing all CPU coolers in a closed case without perfect cable management just like they're going to be run in the real world. So we're going to take idle and load temperatures of each of these setups. We are only using Noctua NF-F12 fans. We're replacing whatever comes on whatever coolers we use in the event that a cooler must use a larger than 120 millimeter fan. We have A15s so we can use those instead. Those are 140 mil fans. So let's get started. Oh right. One more thing. We're using the same fans on every cooler because the stock fans that are included with most coolers are rubbish anyway. So again we're talking performance options. You should be buying your own fan that's better. Also I'm using aftermarket thermal compound on all of them. I'm using IC Diamond thermal compound. So there you go. I've had a lot of people talk about IC7 versus IC24. Guys it's the same stuff. The 7 and 24 are for carrots. Carrots are just weight. They're not purity. Right. So yeah. Consistency. So that way we are going to have a consistent sort of overall noise level to the system because we're going to be running good quality fans and we're going to get a consistent experience with fans that are correctly optimized for whatever kind of cooler we're using because these are correctly optimized for any heat sink or radiator because they're awesome. High pressure, focused flow. Just good good good good fans. Tip one clean the existing thermal goop and any residue off of both surfaces. So clean CPU is needed. Clean bottom of the heat sink is also needed. Guys when applying thermal compound less really is more. Remember this is a 2011 chip. So that's how much goop it takes for that. For an 1155 it will be much less. For this next shot prepare for your mind to be blown. I'm going to turn around my shotgun mic. There we go get that pointed out the computer so you guys can hear what a gaming machine sounds like when it's correctly optimized. Oh oh it's silent. Linus why do you care so much about the silence of your gaming rig? Well because it doesn't have to be loud. Hold on turn my mic back around. It's unnecessary. It's just ridiculous. If you want a loud gaming rig then why invest in these elegant cooling solutions that do such a good job? Why not just use a stock cooler and why don't you get an Xbox while you're at it you want a loud gaming machine. I've explained this before in a previous video but I just want to go through my methodology again really quick guys. So basically I'm using real temp GT to take temperatures. I am recording idle temperatures after about five minutes just idling at the desktop. I am recording ambient temperatures using my multi logger thermometer right here with a I forget something T type K type K type sensor. There it is with a K type sensor right at the intake for the case. So remember guys the front is the only intake that we're using here so the air is basically coming from there so that gives us a pretty good idea of what temperature the air cooling the CPU heat sink is and then I am taking low temperatures after about five minutes for air coolers. I don't need to wait quite as long but for liquid coolers you have to wait for the liquid temperature itself to equalize and then I am recording everything here so I no longer need these noise notes unless a water cooler has a pump noise because remember guys with water coolers you have whatever fans are running on it plus a pump. Every mechanical thing you add to a cooler is A another point of failure and B another potential noise source and I want to explain again how I am correcting for idle ambient temperatures so I am going to correct to 20 degrees. I had people debating me about this last time please go find a physics professor or something and ask them if this is how it works. If the temperature were to go up to 20 degrees it would scale by 11.8 degrees. That's just how it works it's not something that I want to debate about so I will be correcting all temperatures and reporting them as if the room was at 20 degrees not as if it's at 9.2 degrees because I am in Canada in my garage. And another thing for low temperature testing I will be running the GPU at full load as well as the CPU at full load just to simulate again a closed case environment where the system is being taxed and a worst case scenario for an actual real system that's actually been built. So let's go ahead and take our low temperature so I am taking the second hottest core which looks like it's at about 61 degrees. And guys this isn't like the super scientific way to do this so 61 and a 10 degree ambient there we go. Alright it looks like the temperatures haven't gone up since I did my H100i load test. So here's H80i and I've been saying for a long time and I was never quite sure how right I was that single 120mm rad solutions are not even close to a dual 120mm rad so you can look at there's our idle temperature. It's around 29 on the second hottest core which gives us a difference between an H100i and an H80i of like 15 almost 15 degrees at idle. So let's see how that gets changed under load. Alright so here's the H80 with one fan but I am going to give the H80 the benefit of two fans since it comes with two fans so we'll test it that way as well. It looks like our load temperature is 85 degrees and our intake is 10.1. Well I was a little surprised at how much of a difference it made to switch to a push whoops 10.8 there we go to switch to push pull on the H80i. I guess it shouldn't surprise me that much because it is a thicker radiator. I know on the H100 it doesn't make that much of a difference but there you go. Our corrected temperatures at idle show about a 3 degree improvement over just a single pull fan and then at load it's about a 10 degree difference however it's still nowhere near the performance of the H100i. Or rather sorry hold on here's our corrected one so yeah about 10 degrees delta and then our difference between them and still 13 degrees worse than an H100i. Well it's time to measure the contender. It should be noted guys that there is more to CPU cooling solutions than just performance I mean for example these coarse air coolers do come with the link software which allows you to set up things like fan curve profiles and cool stuff like that whereas I mean in my experiment I'm limiting the factors as much as possible so I'm keeping all the fans at a constant rpm but that's something you have to bear in mind. Also installation for the water coolers is much easier than these huge bulky air coolers however bling-tastic they might look with their multiple fans on them. You can see the configuration is still standard. Also with big air coolers you can see there's very little clearance between that low profile DIMM and the fan itself so you're really limited in terms of what memory you can install. More wires actually not necessarily more wires especially with that USB cable that runs to the HI series. So let's find out how this does. Booter up. Alright so idle temperatures are 26 degrees for our silver arrow extreme and ambience have gone up a little bit since we started here to 11.1 degrees. Well there you have it guys the H100i even with all other factors being the same is the ruler of the roost so our ambience are still 11.1 degrees and with the whoops sorry with the silver arrow extreme we are at 67 degrees whoops sorry about that we are at 67 degrees on the second hottest core. So let's go ahead and fill out those temperatures. 1.1 67 so you can see that it per whoops Freudian slip there so it's 67 degrees under load so that corrects to about 75 degrees under load so there you go. So there's the H100i there's the H80i with dual fans there is the silver arrow extreme with the same fan so you can see the silver a high-end air cooler so remember guys something like an NH-D14 will be quite similar to this in terms of performance destroys something like a thick single radiator even in push-pull with highly optimized pressure optimized fans whereas the H100i especially under heavy loads really pulls away from those other solutions. See at idle these I mean even these two look very similar but you can see how under load the silver arrow extreme really pulls away now that really demonstrates that as the heat goes up so to speak the men separate themselves from the boys in a test like this I mean even this is only a three degree difference that's why I don't like the way that Corsair does the packaging on these products at least the way they used to with the H100 where they would compare it yeah see they still do this it's just goofy they compare it against an Intel box cooler showing well okay now they don't even try to show a proper temperature but they used to and it didn't show that much of a difference because it's not until you overclock that it really makes a big difference so thank you for checking out this video on Linus Tech Tips demonstrating that the H100i is the ruler of the roost don't forget to subscribe for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos.