Support our extensive testing efforts & equipment purchases while getting something in return via the GN store -- like our Wireframe Mouse Mats, which are in stock and shipping now: store.gamersnexus.net/products/gn-wireframe-mouse-mat To see a cooler that’s almost the exact opposite of the NH-P1, check out our EK AIO Elite review: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-TTRFkYJMf9Y.html CPU cooler testing methods: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-fmTOJP4KOyk.html
Could you stop doing acoustics in all tests? It's wasted fucking time, it's almost as bad as how you used to take 5 minutes to slowly explain that "standardised fan testing isn't valid." Where Standardised fan tests have A LOT of merit, these noise tests are completely fucking worthless.
To be clear the fact that everybody else includes phizo, or even worse philips, head screws for a computer part in 2021 is utter horseshit. Torx just works a hell of a lot better and the smaller the screws the more relevant a torx head is due to it's massive advantage in terms of surface area for the screw driver to grip onto. I own a Fractal Design case that cost me 140$+ and has a removable tray for mounting a radiator at the top. The screws on said tray have Philips heads and are so small and screwed in so tightly from the factory that I have never been able to remove it as any attempt starts stripping the screw heads. This would have been pretty much impossible if the screws in question had a torx head.
I wonder if he could run a water cooling loop through a wall into a dust free room for the radiators. Just make sure never to let the loop fall too much under ambient temperature in either of those spaces, or there could be a condensation issues.
@@gunnar6674 That seems like 10x more effort than a simple shop-computer is really worth. Not to mention the maintenance that would probably be just as bad, if not worse than just using normal fans that require cleaning often.
It's surprising how many known brands do OEM stuff. I got a 450 MHz Pentium 3 that came with a stock Cooler Master cooler. Seasonic and FSP are some of the few companies that actually build PSUs, most others order from them and slap their own sticker on. Same for OEM motherboards.
Yeah, many thanks for that, that's always something many reviewers omit, as a result, I ended up buying a NR600 (ODD version btw, it does exist Steve!) but it won't fit my NH-D15's second fan because of ram clearance.
Sorry, but this thing is practically useless, especially at this price point. Dedicated servers have their own cooling, especially if they use multiple racks with several processors in each. For a gaming computer you would still need GPU with its own ventilator and possibly case vents. Only theoretically useful application would be some dedicated science computer with weak passively cooled graphics card, that needs to be as quiet as possible. In that case PSU would need to be cooled quietly as well.
@@aleksazunjic9672 actually this type of Cooler if PERFECT for places where a lot of dust and debris can end up clogging normal fans (happens a lot where I live where you can literally see an 2 cm dust appear in just a day on any surface) sure its weak and not useful for heavy and high end stuff but for a normal computer its perfect.
@@m-w-y7325 Frankly, 2cm of dust would appear only if you live on factory floor :) Industrial computers usually employ different strategy, strong fans that blow dust out of the PC case. They do not care much about sounds for obvious reasons. Passive coolers do not need fans, but they would be covered with dust like anything else, and that would reduce thermal convection.
It would have been kind of interesting to see it compared to a massive air cooler like the NH-D15 also run passively, just to see how much better this design is compared to something not designed to run passively.
@@simoSLJ89 A NH-D15 is more comparable in mass to the NH-P1 though and has a lot more surface area than a U12S. I'm not saying that it will do well, but when running passively, more heatpipes and more surface area makes a big difference. Open bench vs. inside a case makes a huge difference too, unless the case fans are going very fast, then it might not matter as much.
@@Nakna_ankaN thanks to your comment I realized I wrote wrong: I have a U14S. But yes, the D15 and D15S are way bigger anyway, and maybe they will be better even without a fan.
Yeah I'd love to see that. I run my NH-D15 passively most of the time, since it can keep my 1700X cool just fine under low load. (The case does have a 200mm fan exhausting out the top, which helps a lot)
@@Mostlyharmless1985 But Earth doesn't spin under its atmosphere. The atmosphere spins with it. Otherwise you'd have global storms with speeds across the ground of up to about a third faster than the speed of sound.
As an opposite point of comparison, it'd be interesting to see how some of the active coolers would fare without fans to see how much of a difference it makes to actually design for passive.
Man I'm still using an old Artic Cooling 64 Pro without the fan. Yes, from way back in the days of the Athlon 64s. This was a pretty cheap 35$ cooler and it's still absolutely fine for something like a "65W" CPU even without the fan. The only problem these days is that the listed CPU TDP numbers mean almost nothing with all the boosting crap so things are a little bit more confusing for consumers. Back in the day the 64 Pro was recommended for up to 125W CPUs, 160W max (I think), with the fan on of course, something like that. Taking the fan off raises temp under load by about 12 degrees Celsius, in an old Cooler Master case with 4 case fans. You can get a replacement fan to this day for like $3 if you live in Germany or you can stick an 80/90mm fan on with some wire or zip ties or something but I've given up on that. You only need to put a fan on it for "90W"ish CPUs. Oh and BTW there's a new semi-passive version of this cooler and it's also under $40. Maybe it's called the Pro Rev2 or something like that, I can't remember. So there's your answer over a year later. You don't need a giant $110 radiator for a normal CPU unless you have a case with no fans or something really weird like that and I'm rather disappointed Gamers Nexus didn't clearly mention this in the video. Now I believe them that a bigger gap between the fins is better convection, if you're not going to have a fan on at all anyway but it doesn't make that big of a difference. I'd personally rather get a new Artic cooler and just remove the fan than buy something so big and expensive as the product from Noctua. And yes, the new Artic Pro cooler also has a little more space between the fins, it's like in between the old 64 (and other normal tower coolers) and this monstrosity presented here. Lastly I'd mention that I don't care about overclocking or anything else like that these days. For me those days are in the distant past. Cheers.
this one requires time to grow to become a true noctua... after years when rust takes over it will reveal its final noctua form you can fast forward this process with some help from vinegar or saltwater
So not only do Noctua do great fans, coolers and such, they have good manuals and marketing. It is a nice change of pace to hear&see Steve&Co have a good time with a product :)
@@GamersNexus I was thinking about that case recently. Did you know that fans are frequently credited with supernatural capabilities in Korean culture? Do a search and some reading on "korean fan death" (and the proposed theories as to how fan death occurs in korea) and you'll understand the case's design, and why it is named after a pharaoh.
@@JD-tl4zs Note that part of why "fan death" was so spread was it was sometimes used to cover up less "honorable" means of dying as well. For many people, Fan Death is about equivalent to the american saying "To spend more time with my family" when talking about a politician who stepped down due to a legal or personal scandal.
There’s another reason for having a fanless system actually. In operating rooms and such the computers are required to be fanless because dust and other debris could have disastrous consequences.
Silverstone always did a good fanless cooler, pretty massive too. The HE02 is rated to 95W fanless or higher with case fans and up to 150W with a fan on the cooler itself. They made it compatible with AM4 as well through new parts. Would be nice to see a modern day comparison.
I bought one and so far loving it, being one of those people who relishes absolute silence. When the CPU is hit with some load, I sometimes do hear a metal ‘twang’ like you hear when you have a pan heating on the stove. Kind of weird and discomforting to hear inside a PC, but I think that makes it special 🙂
@@wotertool 90% of what I do on it is work, and that's when I want it to be quiet. I've got a RTX 3090 FE and the fans stay off when I'm working. When I fire up a game, of course the 3090 comes alive, though it has such big fans on it you can barely hear it, and games have sound + music so you can't hear the fans anyway.
Great to see the 3600 load testing with stock cooler and reasonable alternatives. Can make some amazing display office pc with this new passive cooler.
Thanks for mentioning the specific fin spacing for passive coolers - there are actually engineering calculations for passive cooler fin spacing (depending on heat load, overall cooler size, etc.) and this is quite common in industrial applications. Of course yeah no fan means no intake of saw dust, metal particles.. I would add that usages for totally silent PCs include sound studios, where any parasitic noise is unwelcome, test chambers, and of course quiet homes (no street noise, no A/C...) where you do hear even those Noctua fans very clearly. This would be perfect for a home theater PC as the power requirement for those is quite below the 65W limit, allowing for iGPU and passive PSU, and i'd certainly use this for a non-power user build as it means it's zero maintenance.
This is why I love to support GN. Years I lived in an open loft, with my computers needing to remain on 24/7, yet any noise needing to be bearable. In that era, Zalman was the only "creative" choice along with under-volted fans, thankfully CPUs were far less power hungry too. Then came Noctua to rule the roost. Now we have GN to do the analysis we can all trust and you can buy with confidence. Aces!
I think this makes the most sense in an airflow case where you’re not planning to watercool it, or something like Linus did with a SFF case and the side panel cut to have the fins sticking out. Strapping exhaust fans to the top of a case instead of a front to back or all positive build seems the way to go with this
I was really looking forward to this since your tease, thanks for the short wait time. I don't know why but; Mike's no no no finger for the grey stand-offs cracked me up.
The schlieren photography is so cool! i'd probably blow away so much time just messing with cooler and fan configurations just to see what happens. Thanks for including it in video.
My father is a over the road trucker and has recently gone Owner/Operator if I ever build a tiny computer for him this is going to be one of the key components. With all the road vibrations everything that can be solid state and otherwise not moving must be in order to last.
It's not like this product has much competition, also it doesn't have much to prove. All it has to do is properly cool low end CPUs and it achieves it's goal/purpose. My question would be the price, quite expensive, considering what, extra aluminum but cutting the fan. Wonder the margins.
@@bluelabel222 I thought about that, and still. Like it was already known that you need less fins but them thicker and better spaced out. It's sad it took so many years for such a product but it's noctua, it's taken them years to make a black version of their fan.
kudos on them for making something with such a limited market i guess? Hopefully they can use what they learned during R&D to benefit their other product lines.
You should do a test where you remove the fan from the active coolers, effectively making them passive, just to show exactly why the NH-P1 is designed the way it is.
Here's the result of that test: all heatsinks will fail at cooling the CPUs without a fan. Some heatsinks will work with Intel T models at the cost of low performance.
@@Z4KIUS I doubt it. 60W generates a lot of heat and if the fins are close together, without forced airflow even a big heatsink gets saturated quickly. Also most CPUs with a TDP of 60W use a more power than 60W under stress.
@@Z4KIUS SilverStone HE02 > Ninja, just not sure if you can still buy it. I've had both and while Ninja (3) did pretty good passively (used it on A10 APU), HE02 is in a different class. P1 is definitely my next cooler, though.
@@quintoblanco8746 I never did proper testing of my Ninja in passive to be exactly sure but it definitely can handle more than just a T, and if you're not going for sustained load it'll work flawlessly too, though I definitely don't recommend that
@@hansdietrich83 you don’t need crazy amounts of processing power to record or even master music. Also you don’t need dedicated graphics as well cutting you’re moving components down even further.
25:02 "What do they mean "not suitable for passive cooling", adding a passive cooler to case that comes with 12 fans preinstalled is a brilliant idea!" -The designer of the Ramesses 780, after spending the night inside his case and suffering from asphyxiation-induced brain damage
Steve! Just gotta say thank you guys so much. Just got my wire frame mouse mat, and I feel like it's one of the best things I've ever spent money on PC wise! Absolutely love it. Great job!!!
y'know, I think it would be really neat if another company were to roll with this and try to make a really artsy lookin' passive cooler. Not like plastic shrouds and RGB LED nonsense, I mean crazy heatpipe bends and fancy shiny fins. Kinda like how coolers in the early 2000s got all whacky with their designs to draw eyes. Make a showpiece out'a the thing. It'd more than likely be a market failure, but it sure would be neat
I built a computer once where I reduced my pc noise by building an air duct from the rear fan to the cpu heat sink using nashua tape (the metal tape usually used on furnace heat ducts). I made the duct by screwing four long bolts into the back of the fan and wrapping the tape around it. As luck had it, the heat sink was at the same level as the fan so the duct pointed right to it. Another advantage is no vibration on the heat sink.
Great rundown! I think something like this would be ideal for people who do a ton of audio recording and are using sensitive condenser mics in cramped situations.
I've always wondered how heavy a cooler could be before it puts so much stress on the motherboard that it just slowly breaks all the traces inside the board over time with its sheer girth.
"you'll see how heat rises... which is a known thing" but seems to be unknown for most of case manufacturers, and I guess whoever designed ATX standard too
AT and ATX standards were designed around desktop computers, not tower cases. It would be hugely rare to see a motherboard on its side at that time. 10 years later, sure that would be the norm.
ATX is ancient, PCs had like 60mm fans at the time and, as someone pointed out, true desktops were more popular back then. BTX tried to address cooling but failed horribly. These days it doesn't really matter since cases allow you send air straight up if you want.
@@MiGujack3 barely any cases do and most active coolers are designed for horizontal airflow, and that's not even weird seeing how all the expansion cards block convection anyway
I'm a huge fan of this .......... despite it having no fans .. it would be very useful in warehousing or workshop environment where dust and crap is prevalent I have been witness to huge money losing breakdowns which have been caused by heavy dust ingress into computers as well as metallic dust that has caused shorts on systems I know there are systems made for these environments but I think for smaller companies that can't afford to buy build specific systems this would be a great solution. great coverage as always fellas.
I'd be really curious to see how this passive cooler would hold in a "true tower" type case where air intake would be at the bottom and exhaust at the top if such a case exists on the market of course. I'd argue that it would do pretty well as it could use the full extent of heat movement physics.
www.kickstarter.com/projects/1489140137/nsg-s0-worlds-first-fanless-chassis-for-high-perfo/posts/3171901 The project has taken over three years I think, and still no actual cases. But the company is legit in the server cooling space, so it's not a scam. It's just taking years of delays. The design has changed a few times as well.
I'd love to use it on a classy, open case, noiseless office PC. I tend to work in silence when I really need to focus and this product would be awesome with an APU.
I’m going to be installing on of these passive coolers for my friend, he’s a police officer though he can be a bit too political correct sometimes. When I install this PC in his PC he’s going to be one happy PC, PC.
Noctua NH-P1 passive cooler is designed for liquid immersion cooling that will function adequately in non immersion cooling environments. It's mostly targeted at prototypes rather than dense immersion cooled servers racks.
Noctua is one of my favorite if not the favorite IT related brand. Well made, good quality and the price/quality is a win. And on top they have great customer service, if you bought a cooler with mounting for X and then later wanna use it for Y they will send you a mounting kit for free. I had a early Core i7-920 which I changed into a AMD 3600 keeping only the case and the CPU cooler, despite it being like 8 years old I was able to get a AM4 mounting kit from Noctua for 0$. That is good service and it minimizes eWaste.
We can try to get one in to test it out! Looks like that one can't be oriented any direction, unlike Noctua's. We could test vertical and horizontal on it.
2 remarks: 1) your testbed has no case, and in that sense, I think it's not a good testbed. I assume it's not the first time you hear that, and you put some thought into why you don't use cases. I'd be happy to hear! [P.S.: Ok, just watching your RTFM on how you test, and I take the above back. You are doing much more homework than I would have dreamed of. Well done!] 2)another argument for Noctua Kit is that they sell socket upgrade kit. Not sure about the other vendors. Though, I was very impressed when I could bring my 10 year old NH-C12P from 1156 to the AM4 socket with an 8 EUR (9 US$) mounting kit (+ shipping). That is so cool! Maybe this thing will get 15 or even 20 years of service life. Do other vendors provide that? [P.P.S.: I just saw that you actually appreciate so many aspects of this, e.g. in your air vs liquid cooler vid. I appreciate your channel. Really great stuff! Considering patreon now. ;-) ]
Even if this is not a high end super performing product, steve seems so happy presenting it. He just loves good engineering and of course playing with his ett's (expensive testing toys).
How does this perform in an actual case, however? I have doubts that the air movement created by convection is strong enough to overcome dust filters for example. So the hot air would have to pass its heat on to the case surface, which would itself be cooled by convection with the ambient air? Or am I missing something?
Like every cooler, performace scales with the temperature differential. That said, dust filters pose no big resistance to slow moving air, it's the turbulence at higher airspeeds that creates most of the resistance. Lastly, with such a cooler you'd need next to no dust filtering in many environments, this thing won't ever clog up.
@@GFFrankJaeger if you consider quality, price is adequate TBH. What is better, buy one more expensive cooler for 10+ years with possibility to buy extra mounts if necessary, or buy cheaper and worse without that possibility? But I am not saying that N is cheap, I myself buy something bit cheaper, and almost that good.
@@slizgi86 i would say price is bad, but think of the reliability. and its good. leave it running for 10 years straight and dont think you will have issues. and that is the thing that costs. same for business and enterprise things, yes there are cheaper and better things, but you need to have it and leave it running for maby 10 years, and you expect it to run it. as for home use stuff. 5 years if you are lucky
If I break out my old heat transfer book a passive cooler is a type of "Free convection" type cooler. Free or natural convection is when a body force acts on a fluid where there is a density gradient. The net effect is a buoyancy force which induces a free convection current and the body force is due to gravity.
I really appreciate the testing of the stock coolers. One of the most common questions is "Do I really need an aftermarket cooler". The normal answer for an AMD CPU is "no, but aftermarket will be quieter". Nice to have some actual data.
Nice product from noctua, lets hope we see more of these. Like that one big-massive cooler that goes to the opposite side of the motherboard, and can work passive
@@ferdinandbardamu3945 I have no interest in Gaming, my use case is a general purpose / video streaming / HTPC. I'm looking at the Silverstone FARA H1M case as it has good airflow, fits a 160mm CPU cooler and fits in the furniture under my TV.
@@Richies_Beer_n_Gear If you want to go ITX, I suggest the Silverstone LD03. The case structure is well suited for convection cooling with a heatsink like this NH-P1.
