3900x to 5950x? Asking for opinions

Yeah, that looks fine. I mean, yes, I’ve been down this road; spent a solid few days re-pasting, testin,etc when I initially got my 5950x. Trust me, you’ll tear your hair out focusing on this and trying to understand and control the boosting algorithm.

It’s why people generally say not to really bother trying to OC or anything.

~65-75c is what it should be targeting by default

EDIT:

Repeated tests will result in lower scores/speeds because the temps are already high and heat soak has started to take effect. It’s why people suggest repeated tests / ‘burning in’ the CPU to get an idea of the actual sustained performance; not just peak

50-60c is generally what you’ll see it idle at

65-75c is what it tries to target to boost out the box

90c is when it will throttle

Spitting numbers by memory, so could be a little off on the 65-75c part, but I know that it will generally avoid actually stressing itself all the way to 90c since it’s uneeded

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The weird thing is, it seems to throttle around 65 or 70c.
I should also mention that my experience with CPU cooling has always been with heat sinks and fans. But because my D-15 Noctua was so large, I had trouble mounting the 6900xt vertical. And as the 6900xt lc is liquid cooled, I figured, I would do the same for the CPU. Now I have the room needed to actually access the parts if I needed to change something without also reapplying thermal paste on the CPU (everytime).
I am mentioning this, as water cooling temps seem to behave “differently” then using a heat sink, but I don’t think I will put the D-15 cooler back on just to get a proper comparison using it on the same CPU. Now using a Corsair 115i AIO, and getting idle temps around 40 to 45c, and seems to peak out around 70 but drops to 65 after a few moments where it generally holds. (not exact numbers) And D-15 also worked great. From what I remember around the same temps on the 3900x, but would slowly rise in temp and then hold at the high temp. Not quickly drop. I thought water would largely do that same because of how much heat it would absorb.
One thing to note. Idle water temp on the 3900x was mid ~20s, and idle water on 5950x is around 30c if I keep all fans and pump running low for both CPUs. Thermal paste used for th 3900x was stock for the AIO, and Noctua H-2 for the 5950x.

Only that you have higher ability to soak heat and greater volume to disipate it over.

It’s also faster to remove heat.

I mean, seems normal to me; voltage spike causes heat levels to rise quickly, coolant takes heat away, and eventually it levels out at 65c.

Sounds like you werw just expecting the actual sustained temp in a stress load to be higher, but…you generally water cool for lower temps :wink:

edit:

You’re idles are good; means you actually have a nice flat, even spread of heat dissipitation.

50sh is what one would expect on air, which is what I assumed you were using here.

You can see that one of my dies idles at sub-40; I’d have to remount to fix the other lol

edit:

one thing you can do here is just watch the HWINFO64 sensors and take note if the throttle flag is actually thrown

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I’m planning to jump on either 3000 or 5000 series soon (most likely 5000 as they’re basically same price)… from a 2700x.

I upgraded to an X570s (from x470) board last week as I had another CPU sitting there needing an AM4 board.

Whilst AM4 is a “dead platform” it is at this point fairly well sorted. Jumping on the next socket/platform you’re going to be an early adopter for a while and who knows what weird and wonderful crap we’re going to find is broken in the x670 (or whatever) chipset when it drops.

As mentioned above, the performance benefits of DDR5 aren’t there just yet. Yes, early days and it WILL come, but if you need/want an upgrade today - what’s available next 3-6 months, year, etc. is irrelevant.

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Lol this thread has caused me to re-evaluate my loop. Guess I have a mini project for later in the month or next.

I’ve known my CPU mount is non-optimal for a while, but damn was it a pain in the ass to both put this thing together and drain it. Sigh.

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I get roughly equivalent temps on my 5950x but I am using an Ice Giant ProSiphon Elite (it’s an air cooler). I typically idle around 32c-38c under light loads, and when i’m really pushing the processor it will top around 70 and then settles into the 60’s. I use Arctic Silver MX-5 and it has had plenty of time to settle in, been in the system over a year now. In the summer I don’t have AC in my house, and even on very hot days (over 100f ambient temp in the shade), the cpu temps never go above 75c. Thermo Siphon tech is pretty great, it is more commonly seen in industrial applications where there are truly crazy amounts of heat being generated. Up until recently PC’s haven’t been hot enough to even be able to use it.

Wendel did a video about it.

Linus did too

The Ice Giant is a pretty insane air cooler though, most cases it might not even fit inside.

I’ve got pictures of my build here.

I do not suggest putting the Ice Giant on anything less than a 5950x though, the heat sink is designed to cool big processors, and if you don’t have enough hot die-space and lots of cores to cool, it will not perform well on normal consumer grade CPU’s because their die’s are so tiny.

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Thats funny… Cooler that is. I remember watching the videos a while back. Pretty cool. ( :sunglasses:). In my case ( :laughing:) I get the mentioned idle temps with the fans slow, and assume your heatsink/fan is the same (crazy cool tech you have). And can get cooler if I want to max out the fans (and wait a few minutes). I have done this before running time spy a few times and do see more consistent lower temps overall.
I also wanted more room and the only reason why I even replace my D15. The IceGiant cooler would be awesome but not great for my mid tower case. (its huge :mammoth:)
What computer case are you using?

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The thing with big air coolers is that they’re a pain in the ass to work with for anything else on your motherboard, particularly RAM slots, GPUs, M.2 slots, etc.

A radiator is mostly out of the way of all that stuff.

They’re also not really significantly cheaper than an AIO, especially not a major change to BOM cost of the entire system for a more painful experience imho.

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The case is the coolermaster haf xb evo. It is still available for sale around the web. I am very happy with it because it fits quite a lot of hardware in a small package, it also mounts the motherboard horizontal instead of vertical which means there is no gpu sag to worry about.

I used to love tower cases, but after spending many years with both tower and desktop styles, i’m pretty sure i prefer desktop case styles that mount the motherboard horizontally.

I have the fans set at around 74% for the whole system, they never really speed up much, except during very hot days in the summer while I am stressing the system, and even then they never go to max speed. Overall the pc is pretty quiet. There are a LOT of fans in that case however, so you will want to fiddle with the fan curves till you get them where you are happy with them. Since I wear closed-back style headphones all the time, I never really notice fan noise even when they speed up. All the case fans are Noctua fans, and I picked the ones that advertised quiet operation.

If you want to see how the whole thing fits together, check out the pictures I linked to at the bottom of my earlier post.


It is true, the heat sink is very large and blocks certain things, (mostly ram slots) So if I wanted to replace the ram I would have to take off the heat sink. That’s why I got 64gb to begin with. I strongly doubt i’ll ever want to replace the ram. Also i wanted 3600 cl16,16,16, 36 memory - to sync up with the 5950x for maximum performance. There are no kits available that run at that speed in larger kit sizes. So if I did replace the ram, I would be losing processor performance from being required to use a slower speed kit.

There is a whole ‘thing’ with the 5000 series of the zen processors, they really do get a decent performance bump from being matched with specific ram speeds. 3600 cl 16, 16, 16, 36 is one of those ‘sweet spots’. - as long as you remember to turn DOCP on (that’s the amd version of XMP). - there are some 3600 cl 16 kits in larger sizes, but they are not the cl 16, 16, 16, 36 that i was looking for… yeah I might have been overly picky. But I can say the system is very very fast.

What I really like about Air Coolers is they don’t require regular maintenance. I like to build my pc’s so I don’t have to fiddle with them much. Likely I could leave that pc alone for 10 years and it will still be chugging along just fine. Might need to blow the dust out after that, but it would still work.

Sadly - water cooling setups need regular maintenance, even in an entirely closed system, the water can sublimate through the walls of plastic and rubber-style pipes, eventually drying out, among other things, and that requires monitoring the pc, and possibly pulling it apart every few years to jiggery pokey the water system.

Air coolers are more ‘fire and forget’. They just keep working unless the fan dies, and even then you are likely still fine. Less potential points of failure on a big finned block of metal.

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They still require fan maintenance and blowing dust out, but that’s fair enough - they’re LESS maintenance and less likely to need full replacement than an AIO.

AIOs are pretty set and forget until they die. I tend to rebuild/replace every 3-5 years (and don’t overclock the snot out of things so am not pushing the pump into temperatures it is not rated for) so haven’t had an issue yet.

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I love that coolermaster haf xb evo case, I’ve never seen one like that before. I have a ridiculously big full tower on my desk now and want to go smaller on my next build. That case would fit perfect on my desk. It looks like an older case so it’s lacking things like USB-C connectors on the front. Is anyone aware of a newer version of this case or another one similar?

The best solution I have for you is use one of the 5&1/4 bays on the front to add in the extra ports you might want.

I did a decent amount of searching for a case that is similar, and although I found many horizontal style cases, all of them were either much smaller, and/or did not have the USB C ports you were after.

Did Wendell ever make the Curve Optimizer video for the 5000x CPUs? I can’t find it, but in his 5950x review video, he said he will make a seperate video.

that one? Not that I know of. . I remember waiting for that video too, but I never saw one pop up =/.

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Yes.
:thinking:. Thanks

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If you happen across it let me know! I would love to check it out too =)

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Have some data to show my concerns about temps with an AIO.
Computer on for about 10 min, and maybe a minute into running CPU-Z Stress test.

About 30 min into the stress test. Temps slowing but still rising.

CPU temp is always ~30c above water. I have never had an AIO before, but assumed the temps would be a lot closer. Obviously I am wrong. Can someone correct my expectations, and confirm this is normal?
Thanks!

I don’t use an aio either but 64C ish after 30 minutes of,
stress testing a 5950x looks pretty good to me.

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The stress tests that target cpu’s are a lot harder to run than pretty much anything else your cpu will ever experience. around 64c is fine, don’t stress over that one =) it’s a good number.

As for coolant temp over cpu temp, i’m not familiar enough with water cooled systems to be able to delve into the science of why that might be the case. But the overall temp of the CPU seems fine.

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