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this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2023
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you're not wrong, but why not do it if you're going to review anyway? Otherwise, what's the point of "best of" lists?
Well, the point of such lists, as well as any testing, should in theory be about judging products on being fit for purpose. What specific metrics you choose, how you weight them and how they are presented are all critically important. Especially if what you search for is not strictly the best possible performance and instead want a product that strikes a good balance between its various functional aspects as well as price.
For coolers you typically see them arranged mostly by temperature they reach under power virus workloads. Which IMHO is just fucking useless in light of how modern CPUs behave. Such metric will struggle in differentiating between multiple coolers that technically cause some thermal throttling as it doesn't account for how much they actually throttle.
On the other end you have the option to just ignore temperature and instead measure performance impacts on actual workloads. Which is far more relevant to actual use cases and it allows for good differentiation between non-overkill coolers. But the cooler makers might not like that when it shows no difference between a $50 and $300 cooling solution.
That's fair, I do think modern testing for coolers do need some kind of overhaul in terms of what metrics are prioritized.
Indeed. Current testing that measures just the temperature is basically the same as 20 years ago - when we had recent innovations like CPU shutting down the system when overheated instead of just frying itself. For the longest time when thermal throttling was introduced it was also very rudimentary - basically a binary situation between 100% performance or going down to like 25% when overheated with nothing in-between.
With modern CPUs pushing tons of extra watts for sake of marginal performance gains as well as precisely surfing the line of extracting vast majority of possible performance in given conditions it's just terribly inadequate.