 So you got this computer that you gotta cool. This looks like a fairly simple problem to solve, right? I mean, Intel doesn't even include copper slugs in the middle of their hunk of aluminum heat sinks anymore. So why is it then that we pay actual money to cool our processors? I mean, in the case of the stock one, I guess you don't really pay for it. It comes in the box for nothing, but maybe you broke it or something. So today's mission is to build our own cooling heat sink. iBuyPower and MSI's new lineup of gaming laptops feature Intel 7th generation Core i7 processors. Check them out at the link below. So with the mission of creating our very own Linus Tech Tips heat sink, I set off for a discussion with the Linus Media Group Engineering and Stuffed Animal Taxidermy Division. They went away for a couple of days and then returned, proudly producing a hacksaw, a block of aluminum, and a stack of papers full of pictures of Elon Musk, over which in crayon it said, just raw dog it, at which point I really began to wonder what exactly it is that I paid these people for and got to work, I guess. So the basic principle of an aluminum heat sink is actually pretty straightforward. You've got this little heat generating doodad right here, and you need to take that heat and you've got to spread it out, then you've got to dissipate it to the air. So what you need is a thermally conductive material, so the engineering department did manage to get that far. We've got a hunk of aluminum which has excellent thermal conductivity, and then what you need is you have to increase its surface area. So if all we did was take this and stick it on top of a CPU, what we'd effectively do is we would spread the heat, but we would spread it throughout this block without actually achieving any of our cooling goals. So once we've got this spreading the heat, we've got to increase the surface area. And the way that apparently they intend for me to do that, I mean at least they had the decency to get a fresh blade for the hacksaw, is to throw the block in the vise and just start sawing out fins. I've been informed that this is the good one, whatever that means. So we're going to do a practice cut on this other hunk of aluminum. See just how accurate we can get here. The more fins and the thinner, the better. Okay, unless we have all the time in the world and we assign absolutely zero value to it, that's clearly not a way to go about it. So back to the engineering department, they brainstormed and came up with a new solution. Let's arm Linus with power tools. So I've never used a reciprocating saw, and it's plugged in, but it looks really fun. So, safety first, kids. Exciting WD-40 on here. Wow, we made as much progress in like four seconds as we did before. Okay, that's not so hard. Let's do the real thing. So here's my like 10 minutes of hack sawing. There's my like 10 seconds of reciprocal sawing. Okay, screw it. Yeah, okay. How many blades did you say we have? Unplugged. Change the blade. I have a lot more respect for what Cooler Master does. I think that what we really need is like a constant flow of WD-40 almost. We are definitely making faster progress now. So not having, not trying to cut the entire thing at once keeps the blade from getting so gunked up with metal. Gotta be really careful. We only have one blade left. Almost there. Just got to finish up one last one. So we found that this stuff, fluid film, actually does a better job of lubricating the blade, which would have been great to know because it's just generally a lot less nasty than WD-40. That's the stuff that smells, by the way. Almost there. Holy crap. I think the only thing more epic than the DIY heat sink we've created is the mess that we've created. I mean, this is like, I don't know if it's like a pound of aluminum, but boy howdy is it ever a lot of aluminum. I guess we better clean this up. Look at this. Oh, there's WD-40 all over it. This stuff is hard to pick up. Okay. We are actually getting pretty close to being ready to try out mounting this baby. After a little bit of washing and a little bit of filing just to take some of the really rough edges off of it so we don't hurt ourselves while we're working on it, we are going to devise some kind of mounting system. Now that's the kind of thing that you're probably thinking to yourself, D-Linus, surely you guys thought of that before you started, to which I would reply, it can't be that bad, right? Yes, my friends, it's zip tie time again. So we're going to throw on our usual icy diamond thermal compound. We are going to plunk that bad boy down on there, and we are going to figure out how to zip tie it on. You know what? Let's get some hot glue going on here too. A Linus Tech Tips project is truly not complete without hot glue. So in terms of mounting for this puppy, we're just going to kind of yolo it. I mean, were you really expecting anything else? There we go. Okay, so the hot glue fan is on. If we ran this through the holes on the fan, it was Albert Einstein who said that there's a fine line between idiot and genius. Comments are going to be full of it. He said no such thing. What the crap? What kind of cheap-ass zip tie breaks just like that? How do we get these? Oh, they're generic. So this is it. Moment of truth time. Well, it posts. That's a good sign. CPU temperature sitting at 25 degrees. We've got idle loaded up. Let's get our sensors going here. Idle temperature is not bad. And it's not like the fan is working really hard either. Check this out. Check this out. It's just barely spinning. See that? So let's go ahead and hit it with a stress test. CPU package is sitting at 74 degrees. But I think we've leveled off. Success. For $3 worth of aluminum and a fan that we found, some old 80 millimeter Silverstone fan, we were able to... Okay, hold on a minute. So it's been running for about eight minutes now. And the victory is less complete than we at first thought. So there's some good stuff to take away here. We're still running above the base speed of the i7 6700K. But we are not turbo boosting to the max anymore. So you can see we're actually getting some CPU throttling and overheating detected here. Our CPU package is up around 98 degrees Celsius. And if you put your hands on the heat sink, it is pretty toasty. But the computer doesn't turn off. It does run. So there you have it. We did what we set out to do. We made our own heat sink. Is it as good as the one that Intel puts in the box? No, but Intel doesn't put a heat sink in the box for their unlocked K-series processors anymore. So this, if you have an unlimited amount of time and enough money to buy literally a power tool just to make it, but for some reason not enough money to just buy a heat sink. Okay, we don't know what the point of it was, but it was fun, wasn't it? Even the name VPN makes browsing the internet privately and in a more open manner sound kind of like techie and difficult. But with TunnelBear, it is so easy. They've got applications for Android, iOS, Mac, PC, even a Chrome extension. And it makes it as simple as pressing one button and then boom. Your connection gets encrypted with AES 256-bit encryption. And oh, by the way, TunnelBear does not log any of your activity and it changes up the location that you appear to be browsing the internet from. So online websites and services will think you're someone else from somewhere else. But don't take my word for it. You guys can try it out for nothing by heading over to tunnelbear.com slash LTT, where when you sign up for an unlimited account, you can save 10%. Woo! So thanks for watching, guys. If you disliked this video, hit the dislike button. But if you liked it, hit the like button, get subscribed, maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured or something else at the link in the video description. Also down there is our merch store, which has shirts like this one and our community forum, which you should totally join. Now that you're done doing all that stuff, you're probably wondering what to watch next. So check out our recent video. Maybe it's recent, I don't know. YouTube kind of picks one to suggest to you. So the odds of you liking it are actually pretty good.