How are you planning to measure heat output?
I am curious as to what metric one uses?
Most reviews simply graph a line-up of coolers versus each other based on a standard system, ie a single CPU overclocked to a certain GHz level.
It would be interesting to change that up by looking at AIO versus custom loops as well.
I think "The Real RedRaider used to do that as well as measure the heat created by the CPU.....it was pretty scientific, if I recall.
Quite frankly, heat output will not be 100% scientific - I'm going by total system power as provided by a Kill-a-watt. It stands to reason that when idle is ~100w and max OC under load is ~600w, that we're somewhere in the ballpark of 500w of power likely going into the CPU (sure, memory/SSD/board will be drawing some of it, but not a material amount).
After working with two different AIOs and seeing what they could do, I settled on 5 tests to be performed at 3 different frequencies. Specifically:
Frequencies (approx total system draw):
- Stock/3.8Ghz All Core/Default Voltage (300w)
- Low OC/4.3GHz All Core/1.15v (450w)
- Max OC/4.7GHz All Core/1.25v (600w)
For each of the frequencies, I've run the following tests:
- Max Fans, Max Pump Speed
- 1500 RPM Fans, Max Pump Speed
- 1000 RPM Fans, Max Pump Speed
- 600 RPM Fans, Max Pump Speed
- 600 RPM Fans, 50% Pump speed
If a test in the above order fails (thermal throttling kicks in - as indicated by tracking core clocks and the bright red light that turns on from the board), then the quieter settings will get skipped (i.e. if it throttles at 1500RPM, I'm not testing 1000RPM). The initial approach was to only do stock at max OC, but let's just say not much data got collected as a result
.
The differentiation that we will have here is that our "standard" system is capable of putting far more wattage into a cooler than just about any other that I've seen. When I've looked around, I've seen the other cooler reviews using 8700K, 9700K, Ryzen 7 chips and so on. While those represent a real world workload for a majority of users, it doesn't test the claims made by some of the marketing materials.
I'm not familiar with the "Real RedRaider", but I did consider building a custom rig that uses the hot side of a pelt to allow for dialing in a specific amount of wattage. It really wouldn't be that expensive to build (maybe a couple hundred bucks), but then it comes back to how to measure the relative performance - how could I consistently measure how the unit performed when attached? About the only possibility would be sandwiching a probe between the pelt and block, but that would cause mating issues... End of the day, I need to get some form of content moving, but I'm not opposed to revisiting this concept and adding it into the mix...
