Noctua’s very good at marketing and branding, yes. AM5 measurements from multiple parties have failed to differentiate the G2 LBC’s performance distribution from other parts’ distributions, though, so a thermal engineering basis for Noctua to command a price premium is lacking.
I haven’t built a NH-D15 G2 so can’t personally comment on subjective aspects of the sound profile. The other Noctua parts I’ve measured spectrograms are outperformed by competitors costing half to a quarter as much, though, and spectrograms in reviews don’t show anything that’d lead me to expect much different from D15 G2. Audio hype’s well known to influence subjective perception in unskilled listeners, so it can be an effective marketing tactic, though. Great for getting people to overlook adequately provisioned cooling solutions mostly run quiet enough you don’t particularly notice or care about their sound profile, too.
It’s not like the D15 G2 LBC would be a bad US$ 50 dual tower cooler. It’d be fine, albeit with worst in class colorway compatibility. But it’s uncompetitive with US$ 150 AIOs, which is like how the US$ 100ish premium dual tower segment get stomped by the US$ 100ish AIO midrange, only worse. A narrow performance niche does seem exist for the G2 HBC if one’s insisting on LGA1700 air cooling and, by extension, probably also some LGA1851 mounts. I suspect RL-ILM LGA1851 would favor the standard or LBC variants, which might close the niche, but haven’t seen data.
Even with offset, on most boards dual towers with finstacks wider than ~125 mm are mechanically incompatible with taller M.2 heatsinks.
Given ~120 dual towers usually outperform ~140 towers on a noise normalized basis the D15 G2’d likely be better if it’d been a D12 G2. But Noctua’s systematically avoided that space, perhaps for marketing reasons. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Any dual-tower cooler from noctua, as well as the big tower coolers from bequiet. Cheaper alternatives are the peerless assassin 140 or coolers from scythe (if those have am5 brackets).
That’s everything Sythe makes. Fuma 3’s twice the price of Phantom Spirit here, though, and Sythe’s ongoing impeller struggles result in the performance leaving something to be desired.
Don’t know of any data on the Royal Knight 120 but, if Thermalright didn’t screw it up, it probably has a decent chance of modestly outperforming Fuma 3 for ~40% the price.
All outperformed or, best case, tied on a noise-normalized basis by lower cost 120 dual towers.
Well this might actually surprise you but for AMD in particular the way the cpu´s are designed,
the Peerless Assassin 120SE and the Phantom Spirit 120SE perform actually way better,
than the Bequiet Darkrock pro5 cooler.
Those Bequiet coolers are decent performers but mainly for intel cpu´s.
In this video Hardware Canucks tested those coolers on both intel and amd.
And as you can see the TR Peerless Assassin is the better overall cooler,
compared to the DRP5 especially for AMD AM5.
However Thermalright actually also has the Phantom Spirit 120SE cooler,
which is actually slightly better than the Peerless Assassin on AM5.
Another interesting video to checkout form Der8auer.
This video also shows some interesting options like the Silentware Titan.
So a tl/dr from how i look at it.
Absolute best performance and acoustics when price does not matter:
Deepcool Assassin IV AC Vision.
Noctua NH-D15 Gen2 LBC.
Best price to performance options.
Thermalright Phantom Spirit 120SE.
Silentware Titan.
Thermalright Peerless Assassin.
Honorable mentions if you prefer better looks.
Deepcool AK620 series.
But of course a Liquid cooler will be a better overall choice for cpu´s like a 9950X3D.
If you compare the prices of the expensive air coolers vs good aio´s.
I have a Noctua D15 (single fan) on a Zen 3 X3D and it will still hit its (intended) limit of 90 degrees.
To add to above links, Gamers Nexus had a run of cooler tests too. Nearly all good coolers converged around the same performance. This makes Peerless Assassin and the likes insanely competitive. Can we hope the companies don’t pull a switcheroo on manufacturing quality like SSDs get their parts replaced after the first batches?
Noctua offers long term support in terms of available parts, and free bracket upgrades here for proof of purchase. The build quality factors in. This is something I value and am willing to spend extra on. Not that it matters (and in part rightly so) for most intended purposes and consumers.
In the end, you’re really chasing peak turbo points there. Outside of temperature, fan noise will matter to you in the long run. I had grown used to loud fan under load, but it doesn’t have to be this way.
Thermalright already did something more or less equivalent with their bearing downgrade. But it’s not apparent to me Peerless Assassin and Phantom Spirit tower construction’s been downgraded. The lack of current gen data (Royal Knight, Royal Pretor, Frost Vortex, TL-H12 and such) is curious, though, and it’s unclear what’s happening with the Royal Pretor Ultra.
For now, AM4 and AM5 are Thermalright’s to lose. If they screw up or enshittify too much they might hand the sockets to ID-Cooling.
In my experience it’s preferable to buy multiples of competitors’ coolers. Paying 2-4x more is steep for a “free” bracket and brackets can’t adjust base curvature or heatpipe vapor pressures to a new socket. While we haven’t had failures like threads stripping out, if we do, it’ll probably be because hardware quality on the Noctua parts we have is so much worse than Thermalright.
Also FWIW, when Noctua support’s sent us parts (instead of just foot dragging like they usually do) we’ve had 0% success getting the correct ones.
Yeah. Some of them are public, though, like the TF8 downgrade.
Which, while Thermalright ships coolers with TF7, reminds me I should probably mention a couple weeks ago I was going through the accumulation of TF7 tubes that’d come with various Phantom Spirits. Two of them had no usable paste in them at all and a third had the usual consistency but was colored quite a different grey. There’s a small chance the stock got messed up but I’ll have to add at least syringe volume to our parts acceptance checklist.
Jeisus Howar- I got one of them tubes, with my LP X67 recently
That dogTURD, refused to leave the tube, until coming out- if experiencing constipation
I just went right back, to my large tube of AC Ceramique, after clearing off that grey cylinder
I’ve got most of a later 2024 tube of TF8 left from just before the downgrade. Good stuff, stupid of Thermalright to kill it. But the 2023 bearing thing was stupid too. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Frost X45 is a decent bit better in Igor’s tests and costs less than TF8 and GX-14’s not much more. So I’ll try those when the TF8 runs out.
Air cooling for 9950X3D – ID-COOLING FROZN A720 BLACK vs Thermalright Peerless Assassin 140
I’m building a system with the Ryzen 9 9950X3D and looking for a solid air cooling solution.
Right now I’m considering two options: ID-COOLING FROZN A720 BLACK and Thermalright Peerless Assassin 140 White.
Has anyone tested either of these coolers with high-end CPUs? I’m especially interested in thermals, noise levels, and overall performance.
Open to other suggestions as well if there’s something better out there.
I would go with the air cooler. My deepcool ak620 can dissipate 180W without issue with my 9950x.
Also I have a 360mm AIO in my other rig, it performs slightly better before the water temperature is saturated. There is more to concern with the AIO, such as case compatibility, air flow to minimize dusts buildup.
just an FYI, i just got a 9950x3d the other day, got rid of my liquid cooler after the d5 pumps kept taking a dump and on my 5950x just used the Noctua NH-D15 chromax.Black. Didnt find much info on youtube or see much using the air cooler, its all AIO’s etc.
My setup is:
9950x3d
MSI MAG b850 Max Wifi
64GB 6400 CL32 ram (2 sticks)
4070 Super
2x NVMEs
Running the bios PBO Auto, and AXMP (6400 cl32)
The images show max temps after/during the cinebench r23 10 minute run
You can see its running a constant 200 watts got to 80 degrees pretty quick, then at the end, 82.5, so thats acceptable for me.
My NH-D15 Chromax could handle a sustained 260W at a +50C delta in a sub 20C room, with two NF-A14s running at about 2300rpm. I think anything more than that was either causing turbulence or reaching the little limits of the heat pipes themselves.
But that was a 10th gen 14nm(+++🙄) and a monolith die configuration
Those are the stock “150mm” round fans that use 120mm mounting holes (not sure about the G2). You need to message customer service and do anything simple to verify you have their product and they will send you a set of three pairs of 140mm mounting clips for use with their big industrial 3000rpm fans (or any fan including the new “A14x25s”).
I had three 140s as front intake, three on the D15 and behind it as exhaust, and a couple top intake and exhaust 120s. The tops fans did little to nothing and it was just as efficient blocking off the top entirely.
Ah okay Noctua did not include it in the box but you could order it separately at Noctua.
It is basically an offset mounting kit for the NH-D15 gen1 specially designed for Ryzen 7000 and 9000 series cpu´s.
But as i can see you already get pretty reasonable temps with the stock mounting kit.
So maybe it´s not worth it bothering about the offset mounting kit that Noctua provides.
The NH-D15 Gen2 can be bought in three different configurations for that matter.
Because of differences in cpu designs between AMD an Intel.
