how am i gonna do this i don’t know okay well guys you might not have realized this or maybe you have but in the last couple of months i’ve been on a hell-bent mission to find the best budget air coolers now i’ve been through everything from some random aliexpress coolers to the noctua u12s redux and that’s sort of all brought me to this it’s a cooler that a lot of people are talking about but i wanted to bring one in to see how it would do on our test benches now this is the vetro v5 and the amount of pain that i went through to actually get this thing here is unbelievable i mean there’s been packages lost there’s been all sorts of stuff going on but one finally finally arrived the reason why i’m a little bit passionate about this one is because it combines so much things that people are looking for nowadays into a single cooler that cost about 30 bucks or a little bit less if you can find it on sale or with a coupon on amazon so first of all it’s got a blackout design and it’s got an rgb fan on it and yes i know rgb puke whatever but at the same time it is a selling point and let’s be honest this thing has been made super famous by jace two cents and a bunch of other youtubers but i wanted to bring one in set it up on our test bench and see how it went so we’re gonna get to that right after a message from our sponsor do you want your processor to feel immense pressure and incredible cooling gotta get the glacier one the phanteks all-in-one coolers come in 240 280 and 360 variants with the all-new acetate pump design that is powerful and quiet plus this infinity mirror cab that further muffles the pump noise and adds gorgeous argb illumination you get an easy mounting system high static pressure fans that you can daisy change for simple routing and a set of clips for tube management ooh the glacier one coolers by phanteks check them out below so the first area that i really wanted to touch on here is of course the exterior design and now this isn’t your special sort of heatsink it’s a
basic tower heatsink that’s actually pretty compact but this will fit in the vast majority of cases out there on the market as long as you’re not rocking like one of those super small itx cases but i did want to get a little bit more into the more unique properties because for the price point the vetro v5 is actually one of the first coolers that we’ve seen with five direct touch heat pipes on its base and about that base it’s not super super super well finished you never get the ultimate polished finish when you have an hdt base but at the same time it’s really well done for the price point now those heat pipes go up into a really dense fin array and that fin array has probably the most unique feature about this cooler and that is a stepped back section where some of the fins are actually wider at the top than at the lower portions now the reason for that is the fact that you’re able to mount this in east west or northwest directions on an intel system on the flip side of that you can’t do that unfortunately on the amd side due to the mounting brackets on this thing now what about that fan well that fan runs at about 1700 rpms but it’s secret and personally i think the reason why this cooler has been reviewed so well by so many other people is the fact that it has a pretty high static pressure envelope given its rpm levels now i did allude a
little bit to the installation and that’s what i want to get into right now well moving on to the installation process the first thing i wanted to cover is the installation hardware the hardware that you get is an intel back plate and thank you for not using the pushpin installation process you also get a really really small tube of thermal compound and now that thermal compound is probably good for about two applications there’s also four really small screws and guys do not lose any of these screws that’s because they are meant to attach the mounting brackets to the actual cooler itself now for the mounting brackets you get the usual amd and intel mounting brackets i’m gonna get into the rest of the installation process once i’ve actually taken care of all those screws okay so that other way the next part of the process is probably the easiest all you have to do is flip over the cooler align each of the screws with the amd installation bracket and then just screw everything down now i also wanted to mention very quickly fan clearance and because this cooler is so compact even if you have every single one of these slots populated the fans will not touch anything okay about that intel installation process and usually i don’t really cover this
because it’s pretty straightforward but vetro does need to improve this a little bit especially based on the comments that we’ve seen online and it all starts and stops with this bracket now this bracket has these little arms here that move based on your socket type so you know lga 775 is one of these notches lga 1136 is another and lga 1150 for example is the center one the problem with this is this piece of double-sided tape that vetru installed and now i’m going to explain to you at least try to explain to you here on camera what happens now if you flip over a typical intel motherboard you’re gonna see this bracket over here and the entire point of this piece of double-sided tape is so this piece of plastic doesn’t come in direct contact with this piece of metal the problem in this case is that i think it’s a little little bit too big the other thing that they did which to their credit is the double-sided tape so this bracket sort of doesn’t fall off as you manipulate your motherboard but if you’re using your motherboard box that shouldn’t be a problem to begin with now what ends up happening here is when you pop it on because of the thickness of that double-sided tape and how small these little studs are that come up you’ll actually see actually i’m going to probably fumble around a little bit over here too uh hold on a second okay after that cut you can probably understand some of the frustrations here
what ends up happening right here you can see is that some of these studs they come up through the motherboard without a problem like these two right over here but then in some cases right here they actually won’t come through now visually you might actually see that yes this is totally okay to screw down but it’s not if you start screwing this down with those screws that vetru gives to you what’ll end up happening is that there’s gonna be a ton of pressure on this part of the motherboard and the pcb may crack or you might get a short now is there a way to go around this and the answer to that is yes number one i wish veteran would have given you a little little bit higher studs on the other side what i would actually recommend is removing this piece of tape it really doesn’t serve too much of a purpose we’ve actually seen these brackets like i said from other manufacturers without this and this piece of plastic will not have any trouble on this bracket so anyways look overall the installation process is actually quite well done but there’s a couple of areas that veteran needs to improve this so i guess with that out of the way we can really get to those benchmarks and see how this thing performs if it performs up to the expectations that it seems like everybody has alright so now before getting into the actual
performance of this cooler anybody who already has it or at least wants to buy it might want to know how to line up the decibel readings with our fan speed rpm settings so this is the chart and if you want to replicate these results this is probably your best bet for reference we consider anything over 41 decibels to be overly loud for an air cooler because that reading is really really noticeable regardless of which case you have so our first stop in this journey is literally going to cover a lot of you since you’re probably rocking a little bit lower wattage cpu and that’s why i’ve got this test here right out of the gate the retro v5 really really impressed me like like a lot at the very lowest noise levels it falls right between the legendary u12s and the super cheap snowman mt6s i reviewed a few weeks ago and i was really impressed by that one too actually from there it continues pretty strong until higher rpm levels where it sort of falls behind a lot of the other coolers but looking at a more static chart at a nominal 38 decibels and the v5 is right in the thick of things battling it out with some of the best budget coolers i’ve tested so far and that’s a really really good start to testing now moving on to 125 watts and this covers a lot of mid to higher end processors from both intel and amd through a bunch of different
generations and the vetro v5 posts absolutely amazing results here too at low noise levels and only ends up getting beat by the noctua at 38 decibels and higher but i also want to mention that as we go through these reviews especially for the budget heat sinks it’s looking like at lower heat loads at least those hdt bases can become a really favorable quality that helps lower end coolers get a lot better performance at lower rpm levels and you can actually see this a little bit clearer here since instead of all the coolers being clustered together the better ones are starting to pull ahead just by a little bit but if i had a choice i’d have absolutely no problem recommending the vet true over pretty much everything else we’ve tested so far at least at this heat load and at 150 watts for the most part we really have to remember that budget air coolers tend to fail pretty hard in this test but there are some exceptions to that so far there’s two of them the u12 s and the really inexpensive snowman mt6 did actually pass a couple of levels here and add the vector to that it actually starts pulling some really respectable performance numbers as long as you go over the 39 decibel mark and yes over the 39 decibels it does start getting a little bit louder but at the same time it progressively gets lower and lower temperatures as fan speeds
increase i can’t stress this enough this is really really impressive considering the 30 price point here but would i recommend it in this situation and the answer to that is not really since it needs to get loud in order to put up acceptable numbers or at least numbers that we deem acceptable i mean if you already have one at least you don’t have to worry about throttling at higher rpm levels if you upgrade your cpu all right so i guess with all of that done i really have to sum this all up and before i do that i need to be really honest with you guys i actually went into this review and we all went into testing really hoping to prove some of those positive reviews wrong and we actually didn’t we actually proved that this is a better cooler than even i was expecting it to be and actually a better cooler than some of the other reviews made it out to be so from low wattage to high wattage this thing impressed right across the board and for 30 bucks that’s an absolutely phenomenal value but are there some caveats and the answer to that is absolutely first of all the intel installation package that needs absolutely some revisions the veteran needs to go back to the table make just a couple of little tweaks and it would be absolutely perfect and the fact that they’re not using using push pins or they’re using some other wonky method that’s to their credit especially in the budget cooler space but speaking of budget coolers we actually have a surprise coming up for you because number one this cooler will probably be the last single budget cooler review that we do
because we’ve been reading those comments and i know that some of you are commenting right now we want to see this cooler we want to see that cooler and they’re all coming other than the ones that we’ve already tested we also have and the cameraman is going to start yelling at me at this point in time because i’m going off camera we have the arctic freezer 34 co we have ah the pure rock 2 and i’m going to try not to drop any of these we have the se224xt we have whoa the gammaxx 400 v2 we have uh which one is this one the freezer 34 esports and finally the new boy on the block that would be the tough air 310. all of these i know right nice nice pitches you didn’t even hit the lighting good job snows all right so all of these are going to be as part of a roundup so we have almost like a compendium of all of the best cpu coolers on the market in the sub 40 price range so that is coming really really soon and i can’t wait to see you guys in that one i’m mike and i’ll see you soon i’m snows and i’ll hear you soon no no no snows maybe you can do that anyway i can’t it’s like it’s like talking yourself in the mirror while brushing your teeth the two things don’t go together please hold what okay how am i gonna do this i don’t know i can’t say rpms okay you .
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