Spoiler: Except! Except Corsair were completely wrong, radiator stacking is a normal and real thing. As long as the temperature of the air passing through the radiator is lower than the water in the radiator there will be a net cooling effect. You set up a radiator stack so that the hottest radiator (first after the heat source) is the last in the stack, whilst the coldest radiator (furthest from heat source) is the intake. If you can't provide every radiator with a cold intake it's the most efficient set up. Even if you were to set the stack up backwards by mistake the air coming through the radiators isn't going to get heated to the same temperatures as the water. It will still provide cooling just less efficiently. I would love to see what data Corsair fed into their simulation to come to that conclusion.
hmmm. Wonder if this could be the thing that kicks off the "interesting **** DevDoge wants to do" series I'm thinking of doing on the site.
I'd suggest it came from the rear end of a male cow. Stuff like this does boil my wee. Like, all of a sudden Corsair are experts in water cooling, yet they can't even make a GPU block that doesn't leak. Doge - please do.
I think, as they alluded to in the video, Corsair assumed that the only air intake is through the first radiator and that the rest of the case is a completely air-tight box with no other openings. I wonder as well whether Corsair assumed that the radiator was 100% efficient, so that the air coming out of the radiator would be at the same temperature as the water going through the radiator.
I think they massively overestimated the efficiency of the radiators too. Erm, are you accusing me of kicking dogs?
From the corsair wire model, it appeared to have been a simulation of a box with a front to back airflow and no other perforation (totally unrepresentative of a PC case) but would probably prove their modelled data... The only things I can think of that's even remotely close are rack-mounted configs, but even they have some ventilation top, side or both. I don't see why they decided to pipe up about this, all of a sudden? Bit of an ill-thought move in a market that they're looking to gain traction in...
So, LTT have just posted a follow-up: This is still a flawed test - yes, the results back up Corsair's research, but it still assumes that PCs cases are completely air-tight - which they're not - and nobody would stack rads like that in a normal case. Linus does allude to these flaws later on in the video, but he kind of glosses over it. I wonder how heavily Corsair leant on LTT to post this video?
