Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

When it comes to the water-cooled radiator on the PC mainframe, we usually think of integrated water-cooled and split water-cooled. The biggest difference between them is the complexity of installation and cool appearance. Of course, in the eyes of live players who like to challenge extreme overclocking, there is a third cooling tool, the liquid nitrogen cannon, which can reduce the CPU temperature to below room temperature in a very short time. Unfortunately, this is not a difficult way to have hands, and it is not suitable for the vast majority of players.

But today I'm going to talk to you about a very new kind of radiator-the extremely cold MasterLiquid 360SUB-ZERO EVO semiconductor radiator. Yeah, it's kind of like the kind of cell phone radiator that people usually buy. As its name suggests, it presses the CPU to zero degrees Celsius and uses CRYO, a heat dissipation technology co-developed with Intel. Let's take a look at the actual effect.

Appearance and hardware

In terms of packaging, the EVO version has been changed from a standard white box to a dark purple box, with some decorative elements similar to paint graffiti on the package. The box is very large, with extremely cold Logo, product name and product rendering on the front.

Take out all the accessories in the package, and the 360 cold part has been installed by default. In addition to the water-cooled body, transfer / extension cord, interface protection silicone sleeve, screw group and motherboard fastening fastener, and there is a simple and quick installation manual for users to install on their own.

The ultra-cold supreme ML360 SUB-ZERO EVO semiconductor radiator continues the standard black design, but two RGB light belts and two sets of air intakes are added at the top of the cold head, as well as a set at 1/3 on the side. The overall size of the radiator is 394*119.6*27.2mm, and the surface is mainly covered with plastic and aluminum metal.

The cold part of the ultra-cold supreme ML360 SUB-ZERO EVO semiconductor radiator is no different from the traditional all-in-one water cooling in the market. the size of three Mobius 120p ARGB fans is 120*120*25mm, each with 7 blades and a transparent white surface. The fan is upgraded to the second generation on the basis of the standard version, with less noise and stronger wind, and the lamp beads can also be compatible with the lamp control software of the mainstream motherboard.

The pump part of the ultra-cold supreme ML360 SUB-ZERO EVO semiconductor radiator is installed independently, and its volume is much larger than that of the integrated water-cooled pump. The full-load power consumption of the pump is 13.8W, and the flow rate is naturally faster than that of conventional products. There is a long metal bracket on the side of the pump, which needs to be installed through the 12cm fan hole of the right size, so it will take up more space in the fuselage.

Of course, the core part is the cold head with its own TEC chip. Here to give you a little popular science, the relationship between semiconductor refrigeration and TEC chips. Semiconductor refrigeration is a technology based on thermoelectric effect, in which the shortage of electrons in P semiconductors will be vacant, while there will be excess electrons in N-type semiconductors. The Pmurn thermocouple formed by the combination of the two is the key to the action of semiconductors. These two semiconductors contain positive and negative thermoelectric potentials, respectively. Once a direct current passes through the PmurN structure, the thermoelectric potential at the junction will produce energy exchange. Thus forming a thermal conversion with the outside world.

The TEC technology is a series of thermocouples to form a thermopile, so as to improve the cooling efficiency, the full name is Thermo Electric Cooling. The advantage of TEC technology is that it has the advantages of low noise, no vibration, no refrigerant, fast cooling speed, fast cooling range, and easy to adjust temperature difference. There are many difficulties in TEC semiconductor refrigeration for PC heat dissipation, so there are few mature consumer products in the market for a long time.

Through the official standard version of the cold head explosion diagram, we can see that due to the use of semiconductor refrigeration, the internal structure of the cold head is more complex. The top part A contains the PCB of the control circuit, which can adjust the power of the TEC through the temperature sensor to avoid frosting and condensation; part B uses a large area of TEC chip and heat sink, which is also the core part; part C is not unfamiliar to everyone, it is directly touched the heat dissipation copper seat on the surface of the CPU, responsible for taking away heat. The copper seat is also equipped with temperature and humidity sensors to facilitate the feedback of the current situation of the CPU to the system, in order to accurately control the PCB and control the temperature flexibly; the bottom D part is a plastic sealing frame, which can firmly lock the top of the CPU, isolate the air flow and moisture at the low temperature, and avoid the frosting and condensation of the motherboard caused by the temperature difference, resulting in hardware damage and failure.

The new ultra cold supreme ML360 SUB-ZERO EVO version upgrades the TEC thermoelectric technology to the second generation, which can achieve better cooling effect, but the power consumption will not increase. The pump part also improves the DIY cavity structure to make the interior more compact and more dynamic.

Of course, the power of semiconductor refrigeration will be greater than the traditional integrated water cooling, extremely cold supreme ML360 SUB-ZERO EVO semiconductor radiator TEC working state full load power consumption of about 200W, need a larger wattage of power to drive, the side of the cold head is therefore equipped with an independent power supply interface, this PCI-E 8-Pin interface will occupy a graphics card power supply interface. In addition, the USB interface next to it is not for your external equipment. Connect it to the USB2.0 interface on the motherboard and send the data of the TEC sensor to the Intel Cryo Cooling software to achieve the purpose of intelligent active heat dissipation and temperature regulation.

Turn to the bottom of the cold head, because this set of Cryo heat dissipation technology of Intel requires motherboard, CPU, TEC chip / heat sink and supporting software to work together, so in the fastener design, only the LGA1700 platform is supported, and the AMD platform is not available at present. The thickening design is adopted in the copper bottom, and there is a large trapezoidal bulge in the middle area, which is in close contact with CPU as far as possible to improve the stability.

In the cold exhaust part of the last exhaust operation, compared with the previous generation, the Mobius fan has increased its speed from 1900RPM to 2400RPM, air volume from maximum 59CFM to 75.2CFM, and wind pressure from 2.0mmH20 to 3.63mmH2O. It can be said that the overall performance of the fan has improved significantly.

After installing the water-cooled hardware part of the Intel Cryo Cooling software, we entered the system normally. At this point, we need to do some preparatory work, such as installing Intel Cryo Cooling software. If Intel's Intel Cryo Cooling software is not installed, it will only run in normal water-cooled mode, and the fan will run at the maximum speed by default.

In addition, the Cryo technology of Intel also needs to cooperate with Intel Extreme Tuning Utility (XTU) software for overclocking operation, and it is more simple and convenient to adjust the CPU voltage and the frequency of a single core in the Windows system.

The Intel Cryo configuration is automatically detected when the CPU software is installed, and cannot be installed if the model is not compatible. Automatically identify the TEC radiator after installation, the software does not have a large window interface, but will only be permanently displayed in the bottom status bar or storage menu.

Three kinds of heat dissipation mode presets are provided in the software, which are:

Standby mode-TEC standby, in which semiconductor refrigeration does not work and only uses TEC water-cooled components for traditional water cooling.

Cryo mode-TEC intelligence, after selecting this mode, TEC will work together according to the motherboard sensor and water cooling sensor to obtain the current temperature, frequency, temperature, humidity and power consumption of the CPU, and then issue instructions to the TEC chip to intelligently adjust the cooling power (0-200W), which is suitable for daily use.

Unregulated mode-TEC unlimited, this mode is equivalent to turning on the full blood mode of semiconductor refrigeration, regardless of the state of cold head and CPU, TEC will directly switch to 200W maximum power for cooling, which can be used when CPU overclocking or running large 3A games.

The performance measurement on the machine then entered the formal testing stage, and we found the traditional 360 water-cooled white version of Yanshen P360, which is also extremely cold supreme, as the object of comparison. The test project is divided into three parts, namely, the CPU temperature under the three cooling modes in daily use, the FPU grill temperature of AIDA64 and the running score comparison of the theoretical performance test software. The specific test platform is shown in the following figure:

In the test of daily use, we first let PC rest in room temperature without air conditioning for 10 minutes, and then open some web pages to play videos, players to listen to music and Microsoft 365 code manuscripts to simulate daily use. Then, turn on the three cooling modes in the Intel Cryo software in turn, each mode lasts for 5 minutes and the final CPU temperature is recorded. After measuring the temperature of each mode, the cooling is turned off, the rest is left for 10 minutes to return to the pre-cooling state, and then the next mode is turned on for testing.

After measurement, in the first Standby mode, the CPU temperature is stable at about 40 degrees. Because the semiconductor refrigeration is not turned on at this time, the temperature value will fluctuate between 39 and 43 degrees.

After turning on the second Cryo mode, the CPU temperature continued to drop and finally stabilized at 23-24 degrees, the performance was very stable.

When we turn on the Unregulated mode, the temperature drops very quickly and finally falls directly to 0 degrees. In fact, the temperature at this time is already negative, but the lowest temperature shown by the software is 0 degrees. This value is not accurate, but at least it can reflect that in unlimited mode, this water cooling can really keep CPU below 0 degrees.

Next is the baking machine, where we bake the ultra-cold Yansen P360 water-cooled and ultra-cold supreme ML360 SUB-ZERO EVO semiconductor radiators separately for 15 minutes under the same set of hardware configuration. The Yansen P360 water cooling will eventually stabilize the CPU at 300W with a temperature of 100C, while the extremely cold ML360 SUB-ZERO EVO will initially make the CPU reach 300W, then gradually fall back to around 270W and stabilize the temperature at 109C. It seems that under the extreme load, the semiconductor water cooling can not completely tame the i9-13900K CPU.

But don't worry, because when you actually use a computer, it's hard to reach the ultimate load. In most cases, people are concerned about the addition of low temperature to CPU performance, or the impact on the game experience. First of all, we noticed that the ultra-cold supreme ML360 SUB-ZERO EVO semiconductor radiator has a certain improvement on the overall performance of CPU at high frequency. For example, when two water-cooled CineBench R23 tests are run at the same time, the single-thread performance is exactly the same, but the multi-thread performance of semiconductor cooling is 2297 points higher, leading by about 5.9%, so low temperature is very helpful for maximizing core performance benefits.

In the 3DMARK Fire Strike Extreme test, which represents the DX11 2K resolution game, on the physical score, the ultra-cold supreme ML360 SUB-ZERO EVO semiconductor radiator with TEC heat dissipation also ran 2051 points higher, leading by about 4%.

Finally, let's take a look at the performance in the actual game. Here I directly use the table to list the temperature comparison of the two radiators when the five mainstream 3A masterpieces are running at 4K resolution. This performance is a bit unexpected, with the exception of cyberpunk, the average temperature of several other games has dropped by half compared with the regular 360 water cooling. Even the most performance-eating cyber punk has a temperature difference of 26 degrees, and the performance of the ultra-cold supreme ML360 SUB-ZERO EVO semiconductor radiator can be said to be a complete victory.

In summary, after experiencing this semiconductor radiator, I have a new understanding of the TEC technology jointly launched by Intel and Cryogenic Supreme. On smart phones, in order to solve the problem of game experience caused by small internal space and high processor power consumption, accessories manufacturers have launched semiconductor heat dissipation back clips, which almost crush the traditional air-cooled experience. But in the field of PC cooling, the answer given by the ultra-cold MasterLiquid MasterLiquid SUB-ZERO EVO semiconductor radiator is not exactly the same.

It is not good at absolute temperature control under extreme load, but it opens the gap with traditional water cooling in daily use and game experience. Specifically, semiconductor heat dissipation technology for PC cooling, the greatest significance is in low temperature and low power consumption, so that CPU can maintain a higher frequency and more stable performance. It may not be the first choice for ordinary users at this stage, but as the first crab-eating manufacturers, Cool Supreme and Intel are like opening the door to a new world. Although the TEC semiconductor refrigeration technology has been very mature, the active heat dissipation mode using the cooperation of CPU and radiator may be a new direction of PC heat dissipation in the future.

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.