This cooler cost $17 dollars... does it actually work?

So I'm a little bored like you with a lot of the things going on in the PC industry right now, so I started scouring Amazon for weird stuff and every time I do, you guys seem to enjoy it because sometimes we find things. which we never expected as a

cooler

for gamers, a small desktop

cooler

and a $100 monitor that apparently has very good gaming specs, part of the Amazon Basics in collaboration with AOC mini PCS that

actually

have pretty decent specs that They

cost

significantly less than you would expect and a player. socks anyway that's not what we're going to talk about today these are future videos coming up but today we're going to talk about

this

this

is the Dark Rock PX4 not to be confused with the Dark Rock from Be Quiet I'm not really sure how they're getting away with the naming scheme but I digress this is a $16.98 cooler what could go wrong Hey Day d m d what do we have

work

to do yeah I'm playing World of Warships World of Warships is the free naval game game Strategy in which you command the most iconic and famous warships of World War I and World War II.

Recreate it in stunning detail and precision, build your fleet while participating in various types of gameplay while upgrading your ship's Arsenal along the way. new players who sign up using my link below we receive an exclusive starter pack to get you up and running quickly by receiving 7 days of premium time 1 million credit 300 for flowers and the tier five premium ship the exitor so, What are you waiting for to start sinking ships with world warships heading in? Check out the description below and get your freebie, so in terms of specs, although it measures 120mm by 72 x 152, so it's 152mm tall, 72mm, whatever is right for all the people who tend to worry is the height, it is

actually

72 mm thick, 120 mm. in diameter, so it's a 120mm fan that supports LGA 1700, so that was my first concern: will it

work

with the latest socket?

It also supports LGA 1200 115x so all 1150 1152 1156 amds am5 and am4 are great, it says it can handle 200 watts. of TDP, so we could start with 13900K and see how it works and then instead of switching like our real CPU, I'll probably just turn off the cores to represent other CPUs, believe it or not, it actually works pretty close that way . find out what the actual thermal capacities are, you have four pure copper heat pipes that are technically going to be face changing, all the heat pipes are face changing tubes, uh or vapor chamber, I should say um and then the fan speed says 700 to 1800 RPM and it's a 4 pin 22.3 DB pwm which is very low so I'm curious, the accessories include a 1G tube of high performance thermal paste for backplate mounting for Intel and AMD and a PX4 manual.

I am going to use the thermal paste that it comes with. The reason for this is that if you buy any name brand thermal paste it will probably

cost

you more than the cooler itself so we will see if you are on an extreme budget to see if this cooler can do the work you actually do. To be honest, it

does

n't look that bad, it actually reminds me a lot of the VR V5 cooler I made. Also if you're watching this video, let me tell you right now that I'll put the link to this down in the cart below or down in the description below if you have any interest in this cooler and it works even somewhat decently.

I recommend you buy one. No, it is not sponsored. I bought it. Well, we all know it after this video. a $30 cooler, we all know how that works, okay, it sucks. I can only make a video like this once and then the brand goes and ruins it for everyone else, and eventually the price will probably go back down, but for $16 I can. No, what is the exact amount? I know it was $16. I want to know what the change is because I don't want to randomly say a number of $159, it was actually 8% on sale, normally $17.99 at first check, really impressive performance for the price. pretty quiet and keeps mid-tier CPUs cool, they're running 12600K and it keeps it around 58c in all the stress tests of the course 58c I'm going to, in fact, I'm going to call maybe shenanigans at that temperature.

I have a 12900 K. and it cools very well I don't need a water cooler it

does

the job for me and then another says the screws are too big to fit so anyway one person is running at 12900 K so I'll start with 13900 uh K and then We'll see if I turn off the cores and do it like something like represent maybe like 13 700k or something like that we'll see what happens silica this is all that's in the box so the fan already is connected, which is nice and uses essentially identical clips to show how things are silently identical, so I'm starting to wonder if this is maybe like some sort of OEM odm rebranding, um, fans, actually , the fan actually seems decent quality.

The cage is a little thin, but it actually has rubber mounts that are anti-vibration, which would be nice. The screws to mount it are captured there with a jack clip. They are spring loaded so you may need to remove the fan, maybe I don't know, it looks like it fits the fan well, you can see it is offset, you can actually see how the pipes bend like this so the fan goes towards the side of the Ram, that way it's pushing air towards the back of the case and the rear fan could pick up that heat and just run out the back um, it's black, I don't know if it's a Sak coat, it could be a sah coat, it could be a ceramic coat for this price, it's difficult I mean, I hope it's not just paint because the paint could actually insulate and hurt its performance a little.

Actually, you can see right there. We have the four copper heat pipes that are exposed copper and they're shaved and then you have. sort of an intermediate heat sink that is welded in between the heat pipes to help dissipate heat through the IHS into the cooler past that in the mounting hardware I already talked about what it supports, these spacers are like a baby. The blue ones are interesting, normally these are just black clips, um extra, so if you want to set it up as a push group, that might help. If the fan moves enough air, the cooler is not thick or dense enough to necessarily need Push Pull.

I don't think adding Push Pull will really increase your cooling capabilities but you never know here are the 115x am these are the Intel 11700 these are the Intel brackets and then obviously we have pretty standard stuff like I've seen on these exact brackets a Lots of other cooler boxes like this look identical to the uh, shut up one, so I'm starting to wonder if this is literally a knockoff of some kind of deal like a Dark Rock mini. These are our Intel AMD brackets, so this one. it's what actually mounts to the motherboard and then you can see how they have these bolts, not this bolt here, they have these bolts, which is what these threads screw into and they also give you 1 G of thermal paste, there's no a lot. here so get it right the first time because everyone knows that on 12th gen and above CPUs the IHS is quite large and you can tell by how much the plunger sticks out compared to the length of the actual tube which is less than half of that is full, so nowadays you need more than an average P size or a grain of rice to clean and cover an IHS.

They also give you a spatula that way, you can spread the paste. Yes, we will be, maybe I'll show you. guys, once the thermal paste is on the CPU before applying the cooler, how much was there before installation, so here is the hardware installed, everything clear so far, at least on our motherboard, this is a crowded board with the block and stuff. here, um, so you can see it all fits together nicely, it doesn't affect any of our matchups or not, but our caps here should spread really well, it's actually a good amount of paste, so you'll definitely get an application for don't do it. although that's for sure because there isn't much left in there and this may seem like a lot of thermal paste, believe it or not, for a 12300, it's actually not much now, when it comes to spreading it on, it definitely feels like a thick cake. frosting, but there's a lot of it here and yeah, it may not look like it's going all the way to the edges or anything, but it will still spread once it's under tension and I still have a little bit on the spatula there in the At the same time, when As it warms, it will turn liquid and then fill the spaces a little better.

What I'm going to do is put another little drop right in the center because there's still some left. and that will help promote that some of the spread thermal paste applications are not as sensitive as people would like to try to make them look, so the orientation that you're in is not necessarily locked, you could rotate it, um, if you wanted that out as long as the boss, as you can see, there's a boss here to allow for the AMD sockets as well if you want to rotate them, so let's say you have a case that you need to run out of the top or something, um you might have some problems of clearance with the extra width hitting something like here or maybe even interfering with that internal ram bar so I only used two ram bars on any of my systems so it wasn't a problem for this build as well you can see I'm going to have actually I'm going to have some interference right here, I actually played the beat a little bit but it hits the fan hits right here the cooler clears it but the fan is actually hitting it now you see. how the fan protrudes down at the bottom, I can actually just undo these clamps, these clips and then I can move the fan up maybe so it's a little bit more flush with the bottom, so now we should clarify that It seems a little stupid. hanging from the top but this is what is very tight with this particular type of heatsink for the vrms so now we are down so I just wanted to show there that this is the kind of thing I think about when you read reviews . like on Amazon and stuff like that, maybe less experienced builders might say oh my gosh it hits and then that's it, they don't realize that they can adjust the height of the fan and this is true for almost any refrigerator of this type. of the motherboard, its angles are very unflattering, it comes up when you reach for the power button, it's installed, you can see it clears the GPU and everything is fine, let me try to rotate it at an angle that you can see, so that's one of the things that some of the large coolers have a problem with because they are so wide that they interfere with the GPU cooler or the GPU if you have a top slot that is very close to the CPU, this particular board has like kind of a half slot because of the screen between the cooler, which helps.

I wish the cooler was a little higher before the main heat signal started because then we wouldn't have problems with it hitting the vrm and stuff like that, but once I mounted the cooler down I was able to turn the fan down a bit so now you can see we don't have as much hanging off the top. I wanted as much air as possible to pass through the fins. Now one thing I've noticed is that just handling it trying to mount it down and everything else, the fins are very thin so it's easy to bend them like I folded them here, as you can see the middle is pushed down a little bit, it definitely feels like you're getting what you want. paid, so I feel like if this is a copy of a silent cooler, they just took the design and applied a cheaper material to it, which I'm going to do now too because I want to know what the maximum cooling capacity is. "I'm going to start by setting the fan profile to Turbo and then if that's not enough, we might end up going full speed all the time.

I can feel the airflow all the way up here, though it's okay then." We are stock with out-of-the-box configurations with this. GPU I just popped up here and you can see the hottest core we got to so far was 68 uh hit 68 there also 60 on that's not a very multithreaded task obviously I'm going to go ahead and just start with C bench hope this is a disaster. I also want C bench to heat up that paste and blend it really fast so it spreads well, then we'll look at real real world scenarios from similar games and things like that and just navigate to see what the CPU temperature looks like because the bench cin It's not the real world, it's an intentional stress test that will push your CPU harder than any average consumer sitting at home playing games browsing the internet doing documents taxes writing doing homeworkanything browse browse receive emails you will never see your CPU being pushed like a movie bench if you are a professional you could do it but you also won't buy this cooler if you are a professional because you already know that it is better not to spend so little on a cooler so Let's go ahead and just start with the multicore system and see what happens.

Here we are looking here. This is what we are seeing. I expect to see 100 C instantly there it is 100 C. instantly on the package our clock speeds are slowing down because of that we are actually at 51 allore I mean 5'4 allcore is the max I think 54 is the maximum we expect to see maybe 55 uh with aios and so on. already dropped to 5,000 but still gave us a 36.6 A7, now it has affected our performance a bit due to the fact that the 100 C consumed 323 Watts meaning this motherboard also keeps pushing the CPU further than which is assumed because 253 watts is where we are supposed to max out, which means that the default values ​​optimized for this motherboard are already affecting our performance and that is a major complaint we have about the way motherboard manufacturers motherboardsImplement your own bio settings in addition to the one recommended by Intel, so what I'm going to do is go back to the BIOS.

I'm going to put in the Intel limits and see that there are 236 252. Look at that 8991 90. so technically we're not even speeding up, we're at 51 gigs, which is now realistically in, so people see the until and they start to go oh well, I'm not getting 5.5 like I said in the up out of the but that's 5.5 based on some very specific criteria that also includes a ridiculous cooldown. If you can keep it at 60° under load, like a crazy water cooling setup or something, and set the voltage just right, you could probably get that 5.5. This is cooler, but even the fact that we saw 5.1 at all, uh allcore, and we hit 100 C right towards the end, but look, we got 37.9, so it's still below 30. 13900 K should reach, should land around 39,000 or so. but again, we're on a $17 refrigerator, let's keep that in mind real quick.

I'm going to make some voltage adjustments on this just to see if I can keep us on the highest boost. The clocks now adjust the voltage again. problems with the platform it's not the cooler okay so here we go let's look at the 85c 5.3 GHz with all cores right there 5.2 GHz on the efficiency core this is more in line with I hope to see 97 which it's like right there 99 none of the cores got to 37408 right let's do something now like cyberpunk so it was like a hard crash when starting cyberpunk which means I have to increase the voltage a little bit but again my voltage and it just did a hard reset of the system with the voltage I set.

It was really for a movie table. I didn't think I couldn't run even a single 13900 K, even at the standard speed it's -125 or 115, so I'm surprised that the highest I went was around 100 I. I'll probably go like -90 right now for see because I think it will still be fine for things like games and stuff so I use my Fleer camera here while I wait for the system to reboot because it crashed again it's being really stupid for me right now I wanted to show how the heat dissipation here through the heat pipes so you can see clearly, looking down it's a little hard to see the heat but if you look straight you can actually see the heat pipes for sure and you'll be able to see how hot it is. it is towards the bottom versus how cold it is towards the top, so you'll notice that a lot of that heat starts to not radiate through the fins themselves, so we come to the Signal where you can see that it's actually dissipating heat, like this which this is basically where the cooling efficiency in the cooler here in the bottom half really has to do most of the work when it comes to a heatsink so this is why large heatsinks are important because you have more surface area and more cooling in that confined area.

When you get to the top of the refrigerator, there isn't much heat there for it to dissipate, so it's really only half of the refrigerator. it's doing the job to be honest, but that's where a small cooler like this definitely and with less fins, definitely starts to show some of its limitations, okay, we went back and I threw the 4080 in here because I went, you know what would happen if Come on to do this, let's do it right, we need to add as many frames as possible 152.5 170 watts 175 watts CP is at 80c 82 81 88 now there is a turbo fan profile applied to the fan, it is not running 100% so it will respond apart from that use.

Look at the temperature C 70s 60s on the E cores, but we're still getting the full 5.5 on all cores. Remember that the acceleration is at 100 C, so we are 20° below that level. now and please ignore how terrible the game looks right now due to the fact that it's 1080p, what I'm looking for is any kind of fluctuation in temperatures here. Keep in mind that this is also an outdoor testbed, so if you have a chassis that doesn't have good cooling or heat exchange, then it's something that uh, why is that guy trying to kill me? So it will obviously raise your temperatures and remember I have this thing on low voltage so it would probably do that right out of the box.

I've been optimizing the auto BIOS, it definitely would have been running probably in the 90s, maybe close to 100° okay, so now you can see what the games look like in the real world. Let me set this now to 1440p and I want to see if by reducing it. the frame rate if we get a reduction in temperatures or if this is just the amount of stuff it has to do around the world, oh yeah look there's 75 77 73 74 79 so now we can see we go down like 40 watts. around 40 watts just by increasing our resolution, so we were definitely limited to the CPU, which is one of the things that led to our higher temperature, so it's good for you to know that if you're running a high resolution graphics card now you can see that your temperatures are uniform. lower oh there's 85 for a second so I must have loaded something in the background and now our wat uses backup a bit so we upped the temp a bit by going to a higher resolution and being less linked to the CPU, so Basically, I've created a 13600 here, so my ratio limit was set to 5GHz for the P cores and the cor was set to 3.7.

I also have a power limit of 154 watts, which is what the 13600 is, so essentially I just created like an i5 with a lot of cash, but we don't care about the cash right now, we just care about using the core and stuff. I don't have a core voltage offset setting at the moment so I'm curious what it's going to try to run on because it certainly shouldn't try to run on 1.3 or anything stupid like that. I think I might have looked here in the preview, but that's okay. I know where it is on the hardware monitor and I'm more versed in this, so yeah, 1.25 2 volts, that's completely unnecessary, so let's see what it looks like, it's at 1.99 1.54, so it reduced the voltage based on the core count.

We look at this 79c 80 1C here. 154 watts, our limit, so it's over the top. at about 5 watts, but ADC we are getting our full core clock of 5 GHz and 3.7 82c Max. The cores are where are my core temperatures? They're here, so my cores run at 70 degrees, low 80s and mid 60s on the E cores. That gave us a 22.7. I'm going to look up the 13600 cinebench R23 score right now. I'm just curious if it actually landed where it should. I see people complaining about about 13600 K with a score of 21,000 on R23, so apparently I'm doing it right, let's increase the core ratio a little bit, let's go to 5.2 and 3.9, see what happens there 92 93 that's because our voltage probably too increased significantly, uh oh 1.225 on the 22866, not much of an improvement, I'm going to get down to -50 real quick and then I think we're going to call it a day because I think we've proven that this cooler is more than capable of run a mid-range CPU.

Core temps are in the high 70s, low 80s, mid to low 60s in the eour, yeah temp looks great I mean 84C 82C remember 100C is where we accelerate like if full throttle it would actually start more like 95 to 100, but 84 C is our maximum, right there my voltage. it's running at 1.54, there's 22,000 551's, so we barely lost score, a little bit of score going down 100 MHz, okay check it out, 60 to mid 60's, it's only drawing 105 watts, 107 watts, so one thing What I want to point out is The reason it was above 154 is due to the fact that my short or long term turbo timer was actually set to 4000 watts or something so I had to set that as well to like the 154, but a real 13600 box The maximum load TDP is 181 watts, so we stay within that, we are getting 5.1 GHz, all cores, 3.9 GHz, EC core, it only consumes 104 watts and look this 66c while you run, there you go, there's a pretty obvious, uh, pretty obvious shock.

I didn't really expect the cooler to look good, all black rubber on the corners of the fan and stuff, but just because it looks good doesn't mean it works well, but here you go, this is a perfect example of if you wouldn't want to run like a stupid little piece of aluminum case cooler that could come with your Ryzen CPU or your AMD or Intel CPU for now before the brand starts raising the price, which I guarantee you they will. Do it after this video, you can spend $17 with free shipping. By the way, I got that free shipping with Prime, so if you have Prime, it was free even without hitting the $35 minimum because it was free shipping on the item, that's crazy if you don't do it.

I don't have Prime so I don't know what the shipping would have been honestly, I don't know and I received it the next day. I ordered it yesterday. Okay, so it's crazy that we have a $17 cooler. It's also crazy that they're probably If you're going to increase the price of this cooler to about 30 bucks at that point, it won't be worth it because you'll find other coolers like the V2 V5 and stuff that actually performs better for that price so if you're on a hard press budget buy it now there's a link in the description below it's an amazon affiliate link help the channel but go and buy it now for $17 and while you're at it, we've got it.

I don't know, maybe you need the toe socks. I don't know about the little cooler for games or anything like that. I don't know where I'm going to do that stuff, but I just bought it because I think this is stupid. I'm sharing my video from the other day where I think they'd put the word game on anything to get people to buy it, so we'll see, thanks for watching guys. $17 fridge, it's absolutely crazy, this is the cheapest fridge I've ever seen. reviewed and is probably the best performing refrigerator for its price. I can't imagine anything better than this to be honest, alright guys, thanks for watching, see you in the next one.