 Everything about this computer is designed to do one thing. Beat the competition, price or practicality be damned. RTX 3090 Ti, $1,200 motherboard, graphene infused liquid coolants, and the centerpiece of our so fast it's kind of stupid computer, the Intel Core i9-12900KS, a product that as far as we can tell only exists so that Intel can still say, no matter how many asterisks, they have the fastest gaming CPU. And what do you do with something like that? Well, you don't really bother to review it because it's never gonna make any sense. Instead, you take things one step further by making it even dumber. That's right, we have obtained the rocket cool copper IHS for 12th gen. This is a product that assumes you have so much disposable income, you can not only buy the fastest thing just to have the bragging rights, but you can spend more, risk destroying it, and all just to drop your CPU temps by a few degrees. Well like 15 some people say. 15 degrees? Yeah, 15. Holy crap. Well, this is gonna be fun then, isn't it? Almost as fun as telling you about our sponsor. BuildRedux. BuildRedux offers competitive pricing as compared to building a PC yourself. Their website makes it easy for you to configure your build alongside their helpful support guides. Head to buildredux.com slash Linus and start building your PC right now. Rocket Cool's claims raise a lot of questions for me. There's no doubt that copper is an excellent conductor of heat, or that the 12900KS is a hot power hungry chip that could benefit from additional cooling. But here's the issue. Integrated heat spreaders have been made of... Holy ****, is this one not copper? Ah, yes it is. Integrated heat spreaders have been made of copper basically going back as long as I've been an enthusiast. I mean this is a Pentium 4 from 2003. Of course you might say, but that copper has this other stuff on top of it. But that's the thing. That's not a problem. That's nickel plating. Nickel plating performance coolers has been common practice for over 10 years, and the layer is so thin that it's been well demonstrated that it doesn't have any impact on cooling. According to Rocket Cool, it comes down to their design, which supposedly improves surface area by 9.5%, as well as their quality. They say that their IHS is extremely flat, which we know should have a positive impact on our cooling. But here's the thing, Alex. I know that Intel is mass producing these things by literally the millions, but is it conceivable that in that mass production, they're allowing their tolerances to slip such that some random could make it more perfectly, more accurately? Yeah, I really doubt that Intel spends $33 on their IHS. I'm sure it's clear to everyone that neither of these are $33 worth of copper, and both of them had to be CNC machined. So what makes one of them more expensive to machine? The tighter your tolerances, so the flatter it is, the more expensive it gets. Why? Better machine, more time? Both. But then why wouldn't Intel just use a better machine at their scale? Well, because they're doing so much scale. They only have to make a couple of these guys. Intel is making thousands and thousands of those. That adds up fast. So they want to go fast. Yeah, they want to go fast. Could it make that much of a difference? We can actually get some idea by taking a closer look at the thermal paste pattern of our stock IHS. It looks like there's way more pressure right in the center, which is good. That's right where the die is. And then around that, not so much. So I imagine this part not doing a whole lot of cooling. But enough talk. Now it's time to perform surgery on the $800 CPU that I just bought yesterday. Can you believe Intel wouldn't send us a second sample after the review? What a bunch of jerks. I know, right? There are a few different configurations that you can get your copper IHS upgrade kit in. You can get just this, and that's $33. Or if you don't have any de-lidding tools or anything like that, you can get the full kit for $80 US, which is everything you need to take apart and reassemble your CPU. Well, there's no glue. You need to buy the glue separately. Oh, you go buy silicone glue? Oh, that's probably fine. They recommend CA actually. CA? Yeah. I would think it'd be too brittle. All right. Well, we're going to follow the instructions. Geez. Sorry. The de-lidding tool is machined Delrin. Not as fancy as Derbauer's, and you actually have to insert your CPU and then screw it shut in order to operate it, which is a little less user friendly, but it's also significantly lower cost. And they say the whole thing can be done in a few minutes. And from the look of it, I believe them. Wait, why am I using this thing when I have an LTTstore.com screwdriver? The next stage of the instructions are pretty crap. It just says set a two minute timer with a heat gun. No mention of temperatures or anything like that. Fortunately, we're fairly smart. We can figure out that we need to melt the solder that is attaching the original IHS to the die. Oh, that's actually a benefit to the Delrin. It'll sap away less heat once we clamshell it up. What are we at? Looks like we're right around 130 degrees. So that isn't hot enough to melt solder. Probably lead free around 270 degrees, but it is going to be getting softer for sure. The Delrin's at about 140 degrees right now, so probably don't touch it. We're going to want to move reasonably quickly here. This seems like a crap ton of pressure. I feel like I'm ruining it. I found on soldered CPUs, if it doesn't feel quite right when it starts moving in one direction, like it doesn't pop off, if you flip it and then push it the other way, you can kind of just strain fatigue it. Well, it's moving freely now. So that's cool. Boop! Look at that. Beautiful. And not even that burny. The next step is to scrape it then, right? What are you scraping? I'm going to scrape the solder. OK, well first we need to get rid of the black crap. One step at a time. I told you to include a scraping tool. I can't believe that we bought this yesterday and we are already doing this to it. This is an abuse for making it faster. Scraping tool. Just feels like just the right hardness. Sorry, how exactly does this tape gun work? The blade is recessed. You just push the thing. When you have a box, you know, it goes over, you push it, it comes out. Oh, that's actually quite clever, which is good because I think I paid a lot for this thing, like way back in the day. It's taped down. Now what? This is the cool part. I really like how they've done this. Instead of, you know, sometimes you have to use like a razor to get the solder off. And it's just terrible. Here, you just use chemicals. I believe this is indium and it eats away the solder. So you just apply it. Shut up. Spread it around and it gets rid of it. Wah! OK, that's pretty neat. No, you don't want to get that in your eyes. But the other way to do this apparently is mercury. And that's a lot worse. That's true. And one, two, three. Got to say, the little tissues I dispose of usually don't look like this. Ah. The next bit is you just want to give it a little polish. OK. A little dab of this on some paper towel. Oh, I thought this said Flitz Polish, like from Poland. Oh! Yeah, if you kind of look at how they did it here, they just do a little bit of the corner. Uh-huh, yeah. Yeah. Don't mind me, I'm just polishing my CPU here. That's probably good. Ooh. Hi, Brandon, how you doing? I am really glad that I did an accurate job of that taping because that ended up being quite messy. To be clear, I don't think the process has to be that messy. That's what she said. Look at that! It's gorgeous. Oh, balls. Oh, it's everywhere. Oh, it's all over my hands. I guess this is a situation where having a Delrin thing would be good. That would be eating into aluminum right now. OK, I'm just getting more liquid metal on this by touching it because my hands are covered in liquid metal. At any rate, there's a 12th gen thing here. OK, go ahead. We put our CPU in. Whoop. We're going to put this here. Oh, God! Oh, God! Jesus Christ. OK. Where'd our liquid metal go? Oh, here it is. Whoa, no, that's too much. Stop, stop, stop, stop. Come back. Oh, my God. I might have put on too much, hey, Alex? No, that seems good. Unlike applying thermal compound to your heat spreader, here it's important to have complete coverage of the dye because every part of it has the potential to get extremely hot. And any part of it that doesn't have thermal compound coverage is a disaster. Oh, man, this is what a ride. I feel like we've waited so long to unbox this now. Look at that. You can actually see the tooling marks in the top. It's kind of hard to catch, but they kind of go this way. That's not necessarily a bad thing. That doesn't mean that it's not flat. It just means that you can see the marks a little bit. Oh, I see. So it is a little bit bigger. Yeah, I see that. Wow, Alex, I see what you mean. Like this yellow rectangle isn't even... It's like they didn't even try to center it. Why? Rocket Cool includes a nice little guide here to show you where to apply just a little bit of liquid metal to the underside of the IHS. Not going to lie, this looks sick. OK. Wait, we didn't put glue on. Oh, my God, that is a giant thing of CA. How are we applying this? I have an idea. Ready? For our CA, I'm just going to make a puddle of CA. Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. We go ahead and just drop it into place. And here we go. Does this feel like absolute madness or what? I don't know. That seems fine. Like Intel making the CPU is the madness. In fairness, it does, what is it, 5.5 on... Two cores? Two cores. Fast. It's really fast. In my testing that I did, it was doing 5.2 all core all day. Pretty great. Wow, OK. Oh, did you CA glue to the thing? No. Oh, there it goes. What's that? Liquid metal. Sh**. Why don't you handle the CPU from now on? Fun fact, alcohol not only dries quickly, but it's a drying agent. Don't do that. You want to get old sandpaper wank later. That's how you do it. OK, that's pretty cool. And the cooler we're going to put on it is about as good as it gets until you get into Peltier or phase change cooling. It's a fully custom loop with ample radiator space for this heat. And that bit about graphene infused coolant, we did a whole video about it. It actually does drop the temps a couple of degrees. So this is as good as it gets. Man, this is way more extreme than just buying the highest end parts and throwing them together. We are trying to shave every degree off of this CPU. Moment of truth. Hey, there we go. Do you believe this will have worked? 15 degrees is a bold claim for $33. I mean, you could spend 33 more dollars on a cooler and it wouldn't drop your CPU temps 15 degrees. Well, this cooler will do that. Anyway, I think it'll be around 10. I've seen a lot of people comment that it's like a 10 degree drop. Which is crazy. That's also really impressive. And it booted, which is good. We managed to not kill it. Really, Alex, Windows 11? You know, the people are going to be mad, right? Prime 95? Yep. Small, small FFT? Blend. Wait, this thing hit 100 degrees in a blend test? After like nine minutes or something, yeah. Really? Yeah. On custom water cooling? Well, it's like 240 watts sustained. Out of the box? Yeah. Wow, actually, two of the cores are at 5.5. Yeah. Just like they said. Now, before we actually put the processor under load, is a perfect time to have a look at all of our temperature sensors and make sure that none of them are a huge outlier, which could indicate that we didn't have adequate coverage of our liquid metal. And it looks like this is all in OK shape and we're ready to press go. I mean, we're going to know almost immediately if this worked at all. Wow. To be clear, it did take eight minutes for a thermal throttle last time, but... I don't think we're going to get there. Yeah, we haven't hit 60 yet. This is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, we can see why it's best not to use Prime95 Blend for a stress test. That's OK. But as long as we do it both times, that's kind of flipping incredible. It's not 15 degrees incredible, but it's a lot better than a kick in the teeth. It's in the neighborhood of just shy of 10. Nine degrees while consuming 20 more watts is really impressive. Remember, that extra power consumption means that our cores are boosting higher and for longer. This is great, right? Yeah. I mean, I'm pretty stoked. You know what's even more impressive? When we went for lunch, we forgot to stop it. Yeah, it's still fine. Under 90. It's been running for an hour now. And before, after like 10 minutes, it was thermal throttling. Now it's what? 85 degrees? It's amazing. 90 on the hottest PCOR. I can really feel the heat coming off it though. Oh, yeah. It doesn't feel like that's just a CPU worth of heat. I mean, that's what, holy s***, 300 watts? Yeah. That's crazy. How can you have a CPU pulling through? Ow, the freaking VRM heatsink. Where's my thermal camera? I guess there's no fans pointed at that because it's just a test bench. Yeah, well, I didn't think it was going to be pushing 300 flipping watts. Those poor VRMs are putting like 250 amps through them right now. The PCB is at 72 degrees. What? What are you? Oh, network switch. UPS, a power brick. I need to take this thing home and just like play with it with my kids. This thing is so cool. All right, do you want to run a couple more tests? I'd love to. BMW is a pretty short Blender render though, hey? Yeah, but it allows us to see if it runs faster in like thermal velocity boost range. Right. So one minute, 28 to beat. And the maximum temp was 95 degrees. It's really fast. Yeah, it's really fast. So that is about 10 degrees better. Oh, yeah, I guess that's a good point, Brendan. That actually is 10 degrees better as advertised. Here it is. 75 versus 82 degrees. Okay, only eight degrees. But that's that higher power draw. So wait, if it's higher power draw, was the result even any different though? It was one second better. One second faster. But then by the time you're spending $800 on your CPU, you're probably spending a total of around 3,300,000 on the whole machine. What's another 40 bucks for one second better? And you could overclock it now. Like there's enough headroom that if we want. Do we go for 5.6? Honestly, why not? Do we have XTU on here? Yeah, of course we do. XTU shows us just how good this CPU is binned. I have the same profile. That's pretty much exactly the same clocks as this was stock. And that was pulling about 350, 400 watts. Should I just push everything up 100 megahertz and see what happens? Yeah. Current limited. So we're going to need to up our voltage a bit. Let's do 0.1. That's pretty safe. It's amazing how close to the sun Intel is flying with this thing. I just want to see if it actually hits that frequency. No, it's slower. OK, definitely going to take some fine tuning to get this thing to run any faster than stock. But it's cooler. All right, you want to do a game test? Yeah. For our tests, I chose Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Forza, just because they give you what the CPU is outputting, because the CPU is so fast that everything's GPU bound pretty much. That is some killer coil line on this 3090 Ti. I mean, that's what happens when we have 450 watt or it's rumored they could be even higher for the next gen GPUs. This computer legitimately, if you have like bad, not up to code wiring in your house, it might burn down. But look at these reflections. 110 FPS. That's exactly the same as before, but it's GPU bound. We actually got five more FPS on the CPU. That's a win. If we had a faster GPU, we'd get five more FPS. Yeah. And 378. We'll worry about CPU gain. And 237. That's seven FPS higher. And the average FPS is exactly the same again. So there you have it. If you want every last little bit of performance, you can buy one of these. Or if you want almost as good, you could spend way less. Oh, and you can check out our sponsor, Ting Mobile. Do you like saving money? Ting Mobile is a low cost carrier with rates to help you do just that. Almost every phone on the market will work with Ting Mobile. And they have the perfect plan for everybody, no matter what your needs are. Start with the unlimited talk and text with their flex plans charging just $5 per gigabyte. Their set 12 plan with 12 gigs of data is only $35 a month. And if you need it, unlimited data plans are $45 a month. 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