One of the areas that we’ve been working on behind the scenes to refresh and get moving has been for CPU cooler testing. We’ve had a few AIOs (All-In-One) coolers in the backlog for a bit and as I stared at the boxes I saw one that claimed that it could dissipate “500+ W” of heat. Thinking about this a bit it dawned on me that an overclocked Ryzen 1700 has exactly zero chance of testing that claim.

I didn’t know exactly what that change would end up being, but the puzzle pieces started to come together when I saw the powerful (pun intended) potential that lay in the Intel 10980XE chip, especially when overclocked. This was put into the back of my mind until a few months ago when I was looking for cases available on Fry’s Electronic’s website and it said that my local store had a single Thermaltake Core P5 in stock.