i think we're wasting money on CPU coolers especially if you're a creator when it comes to CPU cooling oh my goodness are the choices endless not just between AIO's or air coolers but because you've got multiple versions of the same air cooler i know these are deep cool CPU coolers in here that's not just deep call everybody does it and the price difference can be massive and when you're building a PC you're actually wondering how do I actually know which one to buy am I overspending let's talk about [Music] it it's so annoying i don't want to pay hundreds of dollars to just change my Windows wallpaper just cuz my Windows isn't licensed well why don't you try Hookies that's a ton cheaper and if you use the Kot and 20 you get it even cheaper what do you mean how do I get it and how is it possible well see this video here or the one you're watching click in the link on the video description add the Windows 11 CD product to the cart proceed to check out add the quality and 20 for the extra discount so what the Windows 11 Pro OEM key is just $23.22 yeah choose the preferred payment option and complete the purchase the key will be available on the purchased orders in a few moments copy the key and paste it into your Windows activation settings and you're all done well that was easy is that Ryan Gosling uh um no anyway by the way the same discount code also works websitewide so go check out other products maybe like Microsoft Office there are a few extra angles that they don't show you on Instagram and social media when showcasing really cool CPUs so firstly let's talk about what is the actual difference between an AIO or an air cooler there's two ways how you can cool your CPU number one air cooling which is pretty simple you've just got some kind of a tower just like this and what happens here is you've got heat pipes and this bottom plate makes contact with the CPU and then the heat transfers on these heat pipes all the way to the tower and then this tower gets the fans to blow cool air through it and then the towers cool it down and then the process repeats itself basically we get CPU cooling and that's very normal CPU cooling like a radiator in your house except it works the other way that uh it kind of heats up your room rather than cools down your room but it's basically a radiator now this air cooling setup is very very simple there is really no moving components that can break it's often chosen by a lot of the SI who want to make professional workstations because it's just so simple and very very affordable very cheap you just blow air through you're utilizing air these heat pipes or these radiators they don't really break only thing that can break is this fan but if it does break that's an extra $5 to $10 on Amazon and you're back on the road the other option of cooling is what I have over here and if you can see on the screen we've been running this test already for about 18 minutes and I'm going to let it go a little longer but basically we have an AIO here all in one cooling that means that we've got a radiator in the back in here and there's some fans on that side and they blow air through similar way like we had in there but instead of the heat pipes we have water running through this radiator that gets cooled down and pumped back to this CPU block which is that one there these tubes here one of them is warmer than the other one so the bottom one here is actually warmer so that means that the warm air goes out in here goes into the radiator goes on the bottom of the radiator goes all the way around in the top there and then comes back from the top pipe now back to the CPU is a lot cooler and then cools the CPU down here's a few issues that AIO's have there's a lot of different moving components number one you've got the pump inside there is a pump that actually pumps the water around if that breaks that's you know bad secondly there's water in round around these tubes now that water can sometimes leak it's not actually water sometimes it's kind of a solution in there you know some cooling solution but water is usually the best because water can absorb a lot of heat and energy now if it leaks it's actually uh deadly to the other components in your system thirdly that water in time eventually evaporates tiny little bit of the water will get out and if you don't have enough water in your system it's also bad which means your cooling performance massively reduces and then finally you've got your fans on top of it so when they break it's not as bad but still you have an extra components there that can fail then we have the price between the AIOS and the air coolers and if you haven't got it already the price of the air cooler is a lot cheaper now doesn't necessarily have to because there are some very high-end AIOs that can go very expensive and then there's some cheap ones and then there's some very cheap air coolers like the AK 620 from deep gold the normal one this is very very affordable but then you can get the digital pro version which we actually used in a build recently the AMD powerhouse where you can see all sorts of stats on the screen and in essence it's just the same cool as this one but just a lot of bling blank And you know now when you're looking at the AIO's they go from all sorts of ranges if you type in 360 mm AIO what I have in here what we're testing firstly you can see some Arctic liquid freezer coolers and they are very very good i've mentioned them on the channel before they're amazing they also have now the pro version where they upgraded the fans for even better cooling but right now this deal in fact is amazing i don't know if this is on when you've got it on but this is $83 for this it's ridiculous performance for that but the thing is there's all sorts of different price ranges for this you can roughly get an 360 mm AIO for $100 everyone uses different components then there's Thermmorite who has absolutely low price point and just lowballs everybody on the market for $55 then there's NZXT who offers same kind of cooling 360 mm cooler for $260 that's five times more expensive than this thermal right what exactly are we paying extra for the AIO's well there's a few things number one the quality of the components if you go to the thermal right site and you search for warranty on that page it actually doesn't even come up it's never mentioned okay but if you do some further googling you can see that it's got 5 years of warranty which is actually not bad how can they afford that for such a cheap cooler no idea now the NZXT warranty here for these high-end coolers Kraken Elite ones they go for 6 years so it's a little bit longer interestingly in this particular setup the AK620 has half of the warranty only 3 years even though it's got a lot less movable components why is the warranty only half of it because there's not actually anything that can go wrong with this cooler so how much are you actually paying in terms of air coolers this AK620 the silver one I think it starts around $60 than the black version which we're going to test in a minute goes a little bit higher even though when I'm looking around here I can see that the Zero Dark one is actually cheaper in the UK than the normal one uh in scan it was I think $60 but right now the black version is 55 sorry pound dollars wherever you're watching this from if that makes sense yeah there we go look at that £60 whereas the Zero Dark is actually cheaper right now so just have a look at the different deals on you might get one with a screen and so on but the biggest question in here is what about performance now a lot of the time the AIO's can be louder in your system than the air coolers because they've got pump noise they've got more fans if you got 360 mm AIO that means a lot more components that make noise what about performance though this right there is the Ryzen 9 9950X 3D it's top-of-the-line AMD CPU and it's pulling 200 W right now from the socket it's been doing that for the last almost 30 minutes and the maximum temperature we've reached is 73.2° C there is 27° right now in this room in terms of temperature that's quite warm is the air cooler actually able to keep it up with this 360 mm AIO the one I have in there is actually uh the ROG one from Asus 360 mm AIO i've upgraded the fans to Fantex T30 fans so they're pushing a lot of air through and this setup can cost you roughly around $200 something like that which is ridiculous now can we get similar scores with this air cooler is it possible to keep up with that that's exactly what we're going to be doing just now we've got 2 minutes to go so I'm going to get these ready we're going to see the score in the end and then see how we go the thing is our AIO actually has an advantage why because the system was cool when I started the test the room was actually cooler so now the air cooler the cheaper variant has worse of a case uh what's going on can it keep up i don't know so as you can see right now in there we're just finishing the last uh rendering run right now and we've done 13 passes as you can see on the bottom just over there this is past 13 this is over 30 minutes now and I'm going to write down the average and the highest score and everything so we can see how well have we actually done okay 69.7 average minimum 52.2C and the score we got was 2,289 points we're going to X that off turn the PC off now you might be wondering what's this PC behind me in there we've got a Thread Ripper system and that is pulling 350 W it's almost double what we're getting in this system here and when you go with a Thread Ripper you're in the workstation area and there cooling is very very important and even in there if you buy an SI system whether from Puget Systems or most of the Thread Ripper systems they don't actually give you an AIO they give you air cooling now the AIO's have improved a lot in the Thread Ripper system one of my biggest recommendations is this 360 mm silent loop or 420 mm silent loop cooler it's really really good in there but when it comes to just normal proumer platform like we have in here we're dealing with a lot smaller temperatures and is not going to be that important this is very important that you remove this otherwise it's not going to work okay now that's on all we have to do is fire it up both are on oh they're quite quiet now every single setting is exactly the same on this system all we did was change the cooler i'm going to hit 30 minutes go and stop this and then let's see what happens as you can see we are also pulling 200 W we have gone instantly a little bit warmer 72.9° but I would like to argue it's a lot quieter than what we had on the AIO i guess we'll leave it for 30 minutes and then see what the results are it just completed and um you know I have the results in here but actually I do need to go to pictures before because I was on the phone when it actually finished so I made sure that it starts you know when just when it hits zero i have this screenshot when it hits zero so we can actually see some of the averages and then write down what actually changed if we're looking at this uh screenshot firstly looking at the current CPU temperature it just finished so I literally hit off when it was there what I can see that the average is 76.7° i think it's a little bit warmer in the house the whole system is more heated the maximum was 78.4° C and then the minimum was around 54 but I hit kind of start logging when it was already heating up so the previous one probably was a little bit better so minimum 54.2C plus we got 2,328 points what's the conclusion first of all the final score let's look at that one because that's the most important thing if we were a little bit hotter or a little bit cooler if we got the main work done how much work did we get done and what we measured here is actually we got faster scores with the air cooler believe it or not 2328 compared to 2289 so roughly around 39 points higher which is small margin but there is a higher score with this now is it a higher score or not well it's kind of the same score that's the point here but if you wanted to split the hair here the air cooler got a higher score which is very impressive second thing that I noticed is that the air cooler was actually quieter than the AIO believe it or not were we higher temperatures than the AIO yes the AIO was able to keep it cooler and it probably had more cooling capacity because it is a lot more powerful one but the actual performance hey there is no difference now I tested the dark one because I think it looks pretty cool but you could get the silver one in there which would perform exactly the same and you might be able to save even more now if we got the digital pro one it would still perform exactly the same because we're using exactly the same tower system you just got a screen slapped up on the top so what that means is don't underestimate the air cooling air cooling is absolute beast and you might not need it these days you see everyone building with airs including me because it seems cool but you don't need it you don't need an AIO for your actual system you can get away with air cooling absolutely no problems is it a little bit hotter yeah could be but at the same time I would argue that your VRM and MOSFETs around would be a little bit cooler because you get better air flow over those which you don't get with an AIO if you're looking at the average the average on the air cooler was roughly around 7° warmer the maximum temperature was around 5° warmer 5.2° warmer so yes we did hit a little bit there but 85° is roughly when it gets really really hot we're still way below that and the room temperature is rather warm as well based on that I would say air cooling is very very impressive and I like that even within the air cooling system I can go cheap if I wanted to get it cool or even more cooler now when you see the AMD CPUs or Intel CPUs you don't necessarily need an air cooler i think I've said that already but why this is surprising is because if you remember 13 and 14th gen of Intel CPUs they had a lot of power in one spot on the CPU and it was impossible to cool but now with AMD obviously we're able to cool it no problem but secondly even Intel's Core Ultra CPUs they've spread the heat across the cores so it's not so concentrated in one spot which means it's a lot easier to cool and air coolers are back in the game if you want to pick any of these up check them out in the video description below I'll leave some links for some of my favorite ones also if you do want to reach out to me I'll always get back to my MC messages and uh I'll see you next time god bless bye-bye