Cougar Forza 85

[crazyeyesreaper]

Cougar is expanding their cooling lineup with the Forza 85. This large single-tower design features an offset, for perfect memory clearance while also maximizing thermal dissipation. On paper it seems like a sure-fire winner, lets put that to the test in our comprehensive review.

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[Chrispy_]

That MSRP is a problem, because most of the competition has cheaper MSRPs and even cheaper street prices.
Someone was asking for a cooler the other day and it turns out the Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 was on Amazon at $36.

Other, more direct competition, is stuff like the interestingly-named ID SE-226-XT with an MSRP of $30 less than the Forza 85.

 

[ARF]

The lower Intel idle temperature is because of lower idle frequency?

AMD:

Intel:

Is everyone sure that the design with heat pipes is the best and there are no better solutions to extract heat faster and more efficient?
I mean the distance that the heat must travel is too large and the material resistance is also extremely high?

Are there any coolers in which the fins are directly connected and a continuation of the base plate? No heat pipes?

 

[dj-electric]

That MSRP is a problem, because most of the competition has cheaper MSRPs and even cheaper street prices.

A word about this, If i may. I know Cougar for some many years now, ever since HEC (anyone remembers?).
Typically, if something is of unusually high price for them, they can make corrections and adjustments. It has happened to some Cougar products in the past. It might happen again

 

[Chrispy_]

Is everyone sure that the design with heat pipes is the best and there are no better solutions to extract heat faster and more efficient?
I mean the distance that the heat must travel is too large and the material resistance is also extremely high?

You need to really learn how heatpipes work I think. They're amazing because of three principles that are worth familiarising yourself with

1. Using phase-change of the fluid to leverage near-infinite heat transfer coefficients around the boiling/condensation point of water. "Latent heat" is a good place to start looking into that.
2. Using Boyle's Law to modify the boiling point of water in a sealed volume. The boiling point tracks the CPU die temperature as it's a PVT closed system where only V is fixed. Magic! (er, I mean Physics!)
3. Evaporative cooling; The actual cooling of your CPU isn't done by the cooling fins, it's done by the evaporation of a couple of drops of water. The fins are just there to condense the steam and create a loop.

It's why you can boil a pint of cold water in 2 minutes but it would take another 10 minutes to boil the kettle dry; Converting fluid to gas is molecular separation that has to break hydrogen-hydrogen bonds. Breaking and making bonds between atoms is like the universe's second biggest energy sponge, aka the chemistry of explosions. It's only one step down from nuclear bonds where you break the bonds between subatomic particles within the atomic nucleus (aka nuclear power, A-bombs, stars)

Are there any coolers in which the fins are directly connected and a continuation of the base plate? No heat pipes?

Oh yes, and they're terrible because the temperature gradient (heat transfer per distance) of solid aluminium or copper is so much worse than heatpipes. If you made a 120mm heatsink capable of dissipating a 50C temprature delta at quiet-fan speeds, you'd find that the hot end might have to be 180C to cool 250W quietly. That's obviously too hot for CPU silicon and you'd likely find that the very tips of the heatsink were still cool to the touch. For examples of these coolers you're looking for, Intel and AMD have you covered: They work fine for small scale , low-TDP applications but don't scale up beyond a fin length of more than about 40mm:

A word about this, If i may. I know Cougar for some many years now, ever since HEC (anyone remembers?).
Typically, if something is of unusually high price for them, they can make corrections and adjustments. It has happened to some Cougar products in the past. It might happen again

Honestly, MSRP is just a vague suggestion these days. What it actually sells for is all that matters. If this has a street price of $35-50 it'll be reasonable.

 

[ARF]

You need to really learn how heatpipes work I think. They're amazing because of three principles that are worth familiarising yourself with

1. Using phase-change of the fluid to leverage near-infinite heat transfer coefficients around the boiling/condensation point of water. "Latent heat" is a good place to start looking into that.
2. Using Boyle's Law to modify the boiling point of water in a sealed volume. The boiling point tracks the CPU die temperature as it's a PVT closed system where only V is fixed. Magic! (er, I mean Physics!)
3. Evaporative cooling; The actual cooling of your CPU isn't done by the cooling fins, it's done by the evaporation of a couple of drops of water. The fins are just there to condense the steam and create a loop.

Where does the water come from? Moisture/humidity in the ambient air?

You explain the so called "vapour chamber" which is again something quite mysterious and I don't understand.


lol I had always thought that the damn heat pipes are simply solid pipes of the given material, who would have thought that they are actually tubes with vacuum and water inside them lol
It's clearly misleading from the creators of the materials which have to explain. No normal peson would think that there is something in the heatpipes.
And if there is something in the heatpipes, why don't we simply use direct water coolers everywhere - it's cheaper to be made and more efficient as cooling?

 

[Chrispy_]

Where does the water come from? Moisture/humidity in the ambient air?

You explain the so called "vapour chamber" which is again something quite mysterious and I don't understand.


lol I had always thought that the damn heat pipes are simply solid pipes of the given material, who would have thought that they are actually tubes with water inside them lol

I wasn't explaining how they work, I was more explaining why they're the best. "Heatpipe" is just a vapor-chamber of a specific shape, and that shape is "pipe".

Youtube can explain how they work much more effectively than me but the basics are this:

• They are sealed so the air and water in them can't go anywhere
• There is almost no water in them. At room temperature it's only a few drops.
• They are soldered or welded shut in a partial vacuum, so the air pressure inside the heatpipe is low enough that the few drops of water boil as low as 40C or so (Boyle's Law)
• The process of boiling absorbs almost unbelievable amounts of energy (latent heat) and the steam rapidly fills the entire volume of the heatpipe, coating the entire surface
• The internal surface of the pipe is rough/sintered to increase its surface area to the steam and the hot steam can transfer its heat energy to the walls of the heatpipe
• If the walls of the heatpipe are kept cooler than the steam, (by fins with a fan on them) steam will condense on the rough/sintered walls.
• As the tiny amount of water at the hot part boils away, high steam pressure in the heatpipe tries to push condensation into an even, thin layer equally throughout the entire inner surface, which naturally forces condensed water from around the boiling area to move in and replace the water that just boiled.

So on that last point, people explaining heatpipes often use the words "condensation falls back down to the bottom" or "wicks the condensed water to the baseplate". Both of those are shitty explanations that you should ignore and here's why:

1. Heatpipes ignore gravity - there is no "falling" of the water because it's the steam pressure pushing the condensed water around, trying to make a uniform, thin film of water on the inside of the whole heatpipe. We're talking big steam pressure and tiny mass of water - so gravity has no chance to make a significant impact.
2. Wicks use capillary action which is exceptionally slow, far too slow for a heatpipe, and the mechanism of "wicking" is to do with surface tension of water and brownian motion of water molecules. As slow as it is, wicking DOES happen in a heatpipe through the sintered coating but it's not the primary reason the condensed water moves. Wicking actually happens faster at higher temperatures, but even so it's still more like 80% steam pressure moving the water around and 20% wicking. The proof of this is that heatpipes which are completely smooth internally still work just fine, even with no "wick", they're just not quite as good.

It's clearly misleading from the creators of the materials which have to explain. No normal peson would think that there is something in the heatpipes.
And if there is something in the heatpipes, why don't we simply use direct water coolers everywhere - it's cheaper to be made and more efficient as cooling?

I dunno, I think it makes sense. "pipes" carry something. Gas, fluid, or both - and when I hear "pipe" I immediately think of a hollow tube.
If they were solid, they'd be called "rods" or something.

Direct water coolers require moving parts, and don't take advantage of phase-change which is where the best magic physics happens!
Heatpipes are stupidly cheap - you take a cooper tube, pinch one end closed and put a few drops of water in it, then pinch the other end shut in a partial vacuum. Voila, heatpipe! Total cost per heatpipe is something like $0.30...

 

[lexluthermiester]

Beast of a cooler. I have to disagree with a few of the cons. The mounting bracket does seem to need improving and the noise is a bit loud. The other points though, it'll depend highly on user preference.

 

[catulitechup]

very good cooler, i think about this cooler when buy my scythe mugen 5 black edition but dont appear some test like techpower for compare but mugen 5 black edition according tests runs similar in various conditions

 

[mechtech]

Cooling fins kinda look a bit tightly spaced.

I wasn't explaining how they work, I was more explaining why they're the best. "Heatpipe" is just a vapor-chamber of a specific shape, and that shape is "pipe".

Youtube can explain how they work much more effectively than me but the basics are this:

• They are sealed so the air and water in them can't go anywhere
• There is almost no water in them. At room temperature it's only a few drops.
• They are soldered or welded shut in a partial vacuum, so the air pressure inside the heatpipe is low enough that the few drops of water boil as low as 40C or so (Boyle's Law)
• The process of boiling absorbs almost unbelievable amounts of energy (latent heat) and the steam rapidly fills the entire volume of the heatpipe, coating the entire surface
• The internal surface of the pipe is rough/sintered to increase its surface area to the steam and the hot steam can transfer its heat energy to the walls of the heatpipe
• If the walls of the heatpipe are kept cooler than the steam, (by fins with a fan on them) steam will condense on the rough/sintered walls.
• As the tiny amount of water at the hot part boils away, high steam pressure in the heatpipe tries to push condensation into an even, thin layer equally throughout the entire inner surface, which naturally forces condensed water from around the boiling area to move in and replace the water that just boiled.

So on that last point, people explaining heatpipes often use the words "condensation falls back down to the bottom" or "wicks the condensed water to the baseplate". Both of those are shitty explanations that you should ignore and here's why:

1. Heatpipes ignore gravity - there is no "falling" of the water because it's the steam pressure pushing the condensed water around, trying to make a uniform, thin film of water on the inside of the whole heatpipe. We're talking big steam pressure and tiny mass of water - so gravity has no chance to make a significant impact.
2. Wicks use capillary action which is exceptionally slow, far too slow for a heatpipe, and the mechanism of "wicking" is to do with surface tension of water and brownian motion of water molecules. As slow as it is, wicking DOES happen in a heatpipe through the sintered coating but it's not the primary reason the condensed water moves. Wicking actually happens faster at higher temperatures, but even so it's still more like 80% steam pressure moving the water around and 20% wicking. The proof of this is that heatpipes which are completely smooth internally still work just fine, even with no "wick", they're just not quite as good.

I dunno, I think it makes sense. "pipes" carry something. Gas, fluid, or both - and when I hear "pipe" I immediately think of a hollow tube.
If they were solid, they'd be called "rods" or something.

Direct water coolers require moving parts, and don't take advantage of phase-change which is where the best magic physics happens!
Heatpipes are stupidly cheap - you take a cooper tube, pinch one end closed and put a few drops of water in it, then pinch the other end shut in a partial vacuum. Voila, heatpipe! Total cost per heatpipe is something like $0.30...

External heat pipe……..cooling tower well not quite. But yes. Phase change best way to transfer heat. And one of the reasons hot water under pressure so dangerous……tank let’s go and it flashes to steam or worse super heated steam and that’s worse than a natural gas explosion. So much energy in water.
For when you gots to dissipate the watts

 

[Garrus]

bad fan for a high price, no thank you

 

[usiname]

So big and expensive chunk of metal just to performa worse than CM 212...

 

[Icon Charlie]

So big and expensive chunk of metal just to performa worse than CM 212...

What really pisses me off is that there is no real mechanical increase nor advantage over similar products created before January 1, 2020.

This is when the entire tech industry gave the customers the royal shaft. And please don't give me the nonsense of about product delays due to shipping and yadayadayada excuses for those price hikes. It was waaay before the coof when the price gouging began.

AGAIN I saw the entire tech industry jack up prices to DOUBLE in January 1, 2020 and IMHO that was because they all wanted the piece of the action of crytpo. I saw PSU's double in cost across the board Video Cards taking off in price. Ram, cases Coolers doubling in price and CPU fans up 60% than in 2019.

The Tech industry and their excuses for higher prices. I am not paying 70 bucks when components such as this should be in the 30 to 40 range on the average. Anything higher is just price gouging.

And you then wonder why people, who are going through some hard times not buying their products.

To be blunt I have the money to spend on things like this. But I've been in this sector of the industry for far too long to not notice the low quality of components being made (YEA NGREEDIA AND YOUR CABLES as an example) by tech companies during the past few years.

 

[ARF]

I wasn't explaining how they work, I was more explaining why they're the best. "Heatpipe" is just a vapor-chamber of a specific shape, and that shape is "pipe".

Youtube can explain how they work much more effectively than me but the basics are this:

• They are sealed so the air and water in them can't go anywhere
• There is almost no water in them. At room temperature it's only a few drops.
• They are soldered or welded shut in a partial vacuum, so the air pressure inside the heatpipe is low enough that the few drops of water boil as low as 40C or so (Boyle's Law)
• The process of boiling absorbs almost unbelievable amounts of energy (latent heat) and the steam rapidly fills the entire volume of the heatpipe, coating the entire surface
• The internal surface of the pipe is rough/sintered to increase its surface area to the steam and the hot steam can transfer its heat energy to the walls of the heatpipe
• If the walls of the heatpipe are kept cooler than the steam, (by fins with a fan on them) steam will condense on the rough/sintered walls.
• As the tiny amount of water at the hot part boils away, high steam pressure in the heatpipe tries to push condensation into an even, thin layer equally throughout the entire inner surface, which naturally forces condensed water from around the boiling area to move in and replace the water that just boiled.

So on that last point, people explaining heatpipes often use the words "condensation falls back down to the bottom" or "wicks the condensed water to the baseplate". Both of those are shitty explanations that you should ignore and here's why:

1. Heatpipes ignore gravity - there is no "falling" of the water because it's the steam pressure pushing the condensed water around, trying to make a uniform, thin film of water on the inside of the whole heatpipe. We're talking big steam pressure and tiny mass of water - so gravity has no chance to make a significant impact.
2. Wicks use capillary action which is exceptionally slow, far too slow for a heatpipe, and the mechanism of "wicking" is to do with surface tension of water and brownian motion of water molecules. As slow as it is, wicking DOES happen in a heatpipe through the sintered coating but it's not the primary reason the condensed water moves. Wicking actually happens faster at higher temperatures, but even so it's still more like 80% steam pressure moving the water around and 20% wicking. The proof of this is that heatpipes which are completely smooth internally still work just fine, even with no "wick", they're just not quite as good.

I dunno, I think it makes sense. "pipes" carry something. Gas, fluid, or both - and when I hear "pipe" I immediately think of a hollow tube.
If they were solid, they'd be called "rods" or something.

Direct water coolers require moving parts, and don't take advantage of phase-change which is where the best magic physics happens!
Heatpipes are stupidly cheap - you take a cooper tube, pinch one end closed and put a few drops of water in it, then pinch the other end shut in a partial vacuum. Voila, heatpipe! Total cost per heatpipe is something like $0.30...

Thank you for the detailed description.

But I still don't trust these so called "heatpipes". You praise them as if they are the greatest invention ever but they are low-performing and show terrible real-world results:

Is this because they are also limited?

 

[Chrispy_]

Thank you for the detailed description.

But I still don't trust these so called "heatpipes". You praise them as if they are the greatest invention ever but they are low-performing and show terrible real-world results:

Is this because they are also limited?

View attachment 268253

That's mostly unfit design for the application in question. I'm assuming this is the noise-normalised AIDA64 FPU power virus test with an overclock? That's using a R9 3900X with a 4GHz all-core at 1.2V+ and honestly, it's a 200-250W load, and the failures in that chart are because the single-fan coolers targeting 100-150W TDPs at full fan speed are having their fans limited to a slower speed for the test. Any racehorse is going to perform 'badly' if you blindfold it and chop off a leg.

Heatpipes can work fantastically. Look at all the air-cooled RTX 4090 cards sucking down 500-700W and not throttling using nothing but heatpipes. The fault with cheap tower coolers is one of two things - either cheap inadequate design for higher TDP processors - they're using small, heatpipes and fin stacks and fans optimised for typical 100-150W loads. Any headroom in the design is often spent on making the fan quieter, not towards higher heat dissipation.

The other issue is that heatpipes struggle to cover extremely high heat density seen with modern CPUs which push something like 200W+ out of a tiny patch that's only 150mm^2 or something like that. you can only make direct contact with that hotspot with a couple of heatpipes so for a lot of the really high-TDP tower-cooler failures where they're throttling, it's simply a case of extra heatpipes being wasted because the 1 or 2 pipes contacting the die are being overwhelmed.

The solution to this is vapor chambers, which are the pancake variant - to evenly spread the heat from the die hotspot over a wider area, and then heatpipes to evenly share the load over that wider area covered by more of the heatpipes. GPU vendors already do this. CPU heatsink manufacturers are just lazy and haven't really bothered yet, which is a shame, since CPUs have more power output per mm^2 than GPUs so they'd benefit from a vapor-chamber on the base far more than GPUs do.

 

[ARF]

Yes, I think they must redesign the legacy tower coolers to add:
1. vapour chamber;
2. hybrid heatsink - direct contact of fins radiator to the base plate with vapour chamber and array of heatpipes that also must be rearranged/reconfigured in more optimal positions;
3. optimise the air flow to hit directly the vapour chamber, not to blow only on the distant fins (you said 4 cm is the max length of the fins to transfer heat);
4. optimise for 400-500-watt heat and insure CPU temperatures of max 70°C.

 

[80-watt Hamster]

Breaking and making bonds between atoms is like the universe's second biggest energy sponge, aka the chemistry of explosions.

Molecules in this example. Liquid water to water vapor is still H20 --> H20.

That's mostly unfit design for the application in question. I'm assuming this is the noise-normalised AIDA64 FPU power virus test with an overclock? That's using a R9 3900X with a 4GHz all-core at 1.2V+ and honestly, it's a 200-250W load, and the failures in that chart are because the single-fan coolers targeting 100-150W TDPs at full fan speed are having their fans limited to a slower speed for the test. Any racehorse is going to perform 'badly' if you blindfold it and chop off a leg.

Heatpipes can work fantastically. Look at all the air-cooled RTX 4090 cards sucking down 500-700W and not throttling using nothing but heatpipes. The fault with cheap tower coolers is one of two things - either cheap inadequate design for higher TDP processors - they're using small, heatpipes and fin stacks and fans optimised for typical 100-150W loads. Any headroom in the design is often spent on making the fan quieter, not towards higher heat dissipation.

The other issue is that heatpipes struggle to cover extremely high heat density seen with modern CPUs which push something like 200W+ out of a tiny patch that's only 150mm^2 or something like that. you can only make direct contact with that hotspot with a couple of heatpipes so for a lot of the really high-TDP tower-cooler failures where they're throttling, it's simply a case of extra heatpipes being wasted because the 1 or 2 pipes contacting the die are being overwhelmed.

The solution to this is vapor chambers, which are the pancake variant - to evenly spread the heat from the die hotspot over a wider area, and then heatpipes to evenly share the load over that wider area covered by more of the heatpipes. GPU vendors already do this. CPU heatsink manufacturers are just lazy and haven't really bothered yet, which is a shame, since CPUs have more power output per mm^2 than GPUs so they'd benefit from a vapor-chamber on the base far more than GPUs do.

It's probably not laziness, but practicality. High-performing air coolers already cost almost or as much as a good AIO. A vapor chamber to kick up the performance may also kick up the price into the region where your target buyer is just going to get an AIO, which will still have better sustained capacity due to more heat exchange area. I feel like this is a case of if there were a significant benefit, somebody would have done it, particularly since air coolers have largely plateaued.

 

[Chrispy_]

Molecules in this example. Liquid water to water vapor is still H20 --> H20.

Breaking bonds between atoms (exactly as I wrote) is a molecular bond, yes.

Atomic bonding is what you misinterpreted me as writing, I think. I was careful not to write 'atomic bonding' because that's the bonding of protons and neutrons of the atomic nucleus and getting even further off-topic into particle physics

It's probably not laziness, but practicality. High-performing air coolers already cost almost or as much as a good AIO. A vapor chamber to kick up the performance may also kick up the price into the region where your target buyer is just going to get an AIO, which will still have better sustained capacity due to more heat exchange area. I feel like this is a case of if there were a significant benefit, somebody would have done it, particularly since air coolers have largely plateaued.

Perhaps, yes. There comes a point where a tower cooler is simply too large to hang off the socket. I feel that "high end air coolers" in the dual-tower, 6-heatpipe catergory really should have vapor chambers. Perhaps then they'd outperform 240mm AIOs with similar surface area and match much larger, more expensive AIOs. Phase change really is a huge advantage that water cooling doesn't leverage. It brute-forces the issue with complexity and cost. The fact that AIOs are so cheap is likely economies of scale and if the same economies of scale were applied to dual-tower, 6-heatpipe coolers with a vapor-chamber, they'd be a lot cheaper than they are. High-end air is becoming a niche market where your $80+ air cooler doesn't really do an awful lot more than a cheap $30 model.

 

[ARF]

It's probably not laziness, but practicality. High-performing air coolers already cost almost or as much as a good AIO. A vapor chamber to kick up the performance may also kick up the price into the region where your target buyer is just going to get an AIO, which will still have better sustained capacity due to more heat exchange area. I feel like this is a case of if there were a significant benefit, somebody would have done it, particularly since air coolers have largely plateaued.

Perhaps, yes. There comes a point where a tower cooler is simply too large to hang off the socket. I feel that "high end air coolers" in the dual-tower, 6-heatpipe catergory really should have vapor chambers. Perhaps then they'd outperform 240mm AIOs with similar surface area and match much larger, more expensive AIOs. Phase change really is a huge advantage that water cooling doesn't leverage. It brute-forces the issue with complexity and cost. The fact that AIOs are so cheap is likely economies of scale and if the same economies of scale were applied to dual-tower, 6-heatpipe coolers with a vapor-chamber, they'd be a lot cheaper than they are. High-end air is becoming a niche market where your $80+ air cooler doesn't really do an awful lot more than a cheap $30 model.

The new CPUs such as AMD Ryzen 9 7900X, Ryzen 9 7950X, and Intel Core i9-12900K and Core i9-13900K require a new type of tower air coolers because obviously since they are overclocked beyond any sane reason, the legacy coolers struggle and are simply not good enough anymore.

Of course, people can still use this fine for something up to a 105-watt Ryzen 9 5900X but after this it's too much heat.

 

[80-watt Hamster]

Breaking bonds between atoms (exactly as I wrote) is a molecular bond, yes. The thing that sticks water molecules together is two hydrogen atoms from different water molecules sharing electron covalency. It's a true covalent H=H bond:

View attachment 268281
Atomic bonding is what you misinterpreted me as writing, I think. I was careful not to write 'atomic bonding' because that's the bonding of protons and neutrons of the atomic nucleus and getting even further off-topic into particle physics

That's almost correct. The bond is between H and O atoms from different molecules (source). Beyond that, it does look like we're trying to say the same thing.

The new CPUs such as AMD Ryzen 9 7900X, Ryzen 9 7950X, and Intel Core i9-12900K and Core i9-13900K require a new type of tower air coolers because obviously since they are overclocked beyond any sane reason, the legacy coolers struggle and are simply not good enough anymore.

Of course, people can still use this fine for something up to a 105-watt Ryzen 9 5900X but after this it's too much heat.

That depends on your expectations. If one is looking for the processor to run full tilt for extended periods, current air solutions aren't going to cut it. But if your workloads don't pull full load all the time, big air can absorb those high-power excursions for a little while before the fin stack heat soaks. I think that (heat soak) is why we haven't seen vapor chambers on air coolers yet. Solid cold plates or direct-contact heat pipes do have trouble pulling all that heat from the tiny die area of modern processors, but the fin stacks probably can't dissipate the heat they're getting any faster than they already are. So a vapor chamber would pull heat from the die more effectively, but that heat wouldn't really have anywhere to go. Hypothetically speaking.

 

[Chrispy_]

That's almost correct. The bond is between H and O atoms from different molecules (source). Beyond that, it does look like we're trying to say the same thing.

Water's special

intermolecular bonding - hydrogen bonds

Explains the origin of hydrogen bonding with a range of examples

www.chemguide.co.uk

The lone-pair of electrons on the oxygen atom cause the crooked, asymettrical shape that's responsible for weirdness like ice having a lower density than liquid water, and surface tension - but that is polar bonding, and is NOT the strongest bond between molecules in liquid water.

 

[80-watt Hamster]

Water's special

intermolecular bonding - hydrogen bonds

Explains the origin of hydrogen bonding with a range of examples

www.chemguide.co.uk

The lone-pair of electrons on the oxygen atom cause the crooked, asymettrical shape that's responsible for weirdness like ice having a lower density than liquid water, and surface tension - but that is polar bonding, and is NOT the strongest bond between molecules in liquid water.

Everything I've read this morning (example) trying to bone up on this, including your link, seems to say that it is. What am i missing?

EDIT: spelling

 

[ARF]

That depends on your expectations. If one is looking for the processor to run full tilt for extended periods, current air solutions aren't going to cut it.

Since when have my "personal expectations" mattered for launching new products that actually comply with some quality, standards, laws and requirements?
My expectations are irrelevant here. What is important is that the manufacturer specifies what works, under what conditions, so the users know what can fit or what cannot fit in their system.

 

[Chrispy_]

Everything I've read this morning (example) trying to bone up on this, including your link, seems to say that is is. What am i missing?

The intermolecular hydrogen bonds you're thinking of are the ones responsible for holding molecules together as a crystal structure in ice. That's the bond that's broken from solid to liquid, I think:

and

Water is at its most dense at 4C which is presumably when all of the hexagonal structures caused by water's intermolecular hydrogen bonding are broken

So beyond 4C (and at the boiling point, obviously) other forces are being broken. The next two most prominent Van Der Waals forces in play after the intermolecular hydrogen bonds are broken - are the Keesom forces (elecrostatic charge attraction between dipoles), and I guess finally London forces which are barely relevant to water molecules as permanent dipoles.

Honestly, there's diddly squat on the web about which exact bonds are being broken at boiling point. All I'm certain about is that the 4C max density of water is due to the complete elimination of the crystal structures, since the crystal structures pictured above take up more space than other possible structures water molecules can make. That makes me think that it's got to be other bonds broken once water is above 4C. Presumably water's Keesom forces are quite strong given the relatively high latent heat of boiling water. Possibly it's the disproportional charge strength of the lone electron pair around the oxygen atoms, four of it's eight electrons are lone pairs which is half of its entire atomic charge.

 

[80-watt Hamster]

Since when have my "personal expectations" mattered for launching new products that actually comply with some quality, standards, laws and requirements?
My expectations are irrelevant here. What is important is that the manufacturer specifies what works, under what conditions, so the users know what can fit or what cannot fit in their system.

I should have said "one's expectations", as I wasn't referring to you, ARF, specifically.

You're making the common mistake of considering people like us that assemble our own PCs as users. I mean, we are in the sense that we use our systems when built, but the more important role when talking coolers is that of builder. As system designers, its our responsibility to spec a cooling system that will allow the CPU to operate within our desired parameters. The thermal load is known. Cooler capacities are known. The choice of cooling solution must be made within those bounds. I don't see how quality, standards, laws and requirements would help here. Are you implying that there is, or should be, statute that either enforces existence of air cooling solutions that can cool all MSDT processors in all configurations of consumer hardware, or that CPU thermal output be limited to what commercially available air coolers can handle?