Hardware stub

Ask GN 44: Thermals, Liquid & Air Cooling, & NZXT Surprise

Posted on February 14, 2017

This episode of Ask GN focuses on addressing questions about temperatures, liquid cooling, and air cooling, though does include one question about multi-channel platforms for memory. For something different, the beginning of the episode features a surprise package from NZXT, who’ve lately set to antagonizing us with pucks, and the episode concludes with video clips from our convention adventures.

There’s a of fun stuff in this episode, but as always, we’re not able to really get into the weeds with each individual topic. We go fairly deep on some of the thermal stuff, but there’s a lot more that could be discussed. The multi-channel question, for example, doesn’t account for changes in the world of DDR4 and new platforms. We’ll have to test that at some point.

Timestamps after the embedded video.

0:00 – A Valentine’s Gift from NZXT

3:00 Gibson DK: "Hey GN, great content as always. I have a question about radiator placement, I have my Corsair H60 front mounted with push pull fans (seems logical that cold air to the rad would be best), but I see a lot of people mounting their rads to the top or rear in exhaust. Do you have a preference and does it make enough difference either way to have to worry about it anyways? Thanks as always for the videos, looking forward to next week :)"

6:20 d no: Cooling question .... I have a Corsair H110i GTX. I have it setup in my case with a push/pull setup. But I have it an intake at the top. I know most people would use this as an exhaust. My question is how much if any does it matter ? For good measure, I have 2 Corsair SP140 fans running as intake from The front, a AF140 fan in the back as an exhaust. My GPU is a 950 FTW and I am cooling a 5820K OC to 4.5 on an Asus X99 Pro 3.1."

9:50 Crimson Sunrise: "Since cooling is your specialty, does rigid tubbing make any difference temperature-wise in a water-cooling loop or is the difference purely cosmetic?"

12: 30 Quetzalcoalt: "Hey Steve, does the thermal paste between the CPU die and the IHS when it gets older it lower the heat dissipation ? I have an old 2500k and it's on 4.4 on 1.3v from 3 years now, because the first 2 years it was sitting on 4.5 with 1.33v as i remember and temperatures got higher than my comfort zone for 24/7 OC i'm using a Noctua dh-d14 and i think the temperature is a bit higher from before a few years back, i change my thermal paste every 6 months and clean the cooler every month, with deep cleaning every 6 months because i change the paste and take it off the board."

15:15 James Stewart: "I've noticed that motherboards are being shipped without VRM heatsinks now. I've always been under the impression that VRMs need some kind of cooling. Should I be concerned when buying a motherboard without VRM heatsinks?"

17:50 Louis Kleiman: "Any comments on the possibility of testing CPU and/or GPU coolers using a controllable heat source rather than trying to control all the variables when using a CPU?  I put in a question last week that got a few comments.  A cheap immersion coffee warmer hooked up to a controllable power supply seems like an interesting start."

21:40 Abec777 Hondatech: "Hey Steve i have a question about VRAM thats bothering me some time, lets say you have a GTX 1080 but the game uses 4 GB of vram.How these 4 gb are allocated? Is it programmed that this 4 gb of data  will be split to all 8 modules or fill 4 of them to full and have the other 4 modules empty? If its the first does it actually makes a card with higher VRAM capacity, even if the half is unused, faster? Cheers"

23:15 FloopyFlip: "i have a qeustion steve about RAM. What is the difference between 1x8gb vs 2x4gb vs 2x8gb running at same speed configs have effects on gaming or normal usage. What happens if the games uses more RAM the pc have? What kind of data is stored on RAM and VRAM?"

26:50 Fran Tastic: "Hey Steve, I wanted to ask if you do have time for gaming at all? I always wondered if creating content for a site/channel targeted at gamers (obviously not exclusively but the site is called "Gamers Nexus" after all) is so time consuming that you either do not have enough free time for gaming or rather just want to do something completely different in your free time? If you are actually gaming (and not just benchmarking) what are your current/2016/alltime favorites? Keep up the good work and your scientific approach to testing. Greetings from Germany."

Host: Steve Burke
Video: Andrew Coleman