TL;DR DDR5 (at least 96gb sticks) is really hard to cool and a major bottleneck.
Was pretty underwhelmed going from a 5975WX to 7980X even after what I thought was sufficient cooling mods.
For public benchmarks like blender, cinebench, and geekbench, was getting scores close to reviews, but had lots of issues with my actual workflows around data processing (custom and spark). Our pipelines were designed to scale well with cores given parallel batches and we hadn’t ran into memory or disk bottlenecks before.
Processing 8 batches, saw expected 20% improvements given single core changes. However, going to 64 and 128 batches, actually saw 30% slower times initially.
Thought this might’ve been a bottleneck going from 8 channel to 4 channel and less ram (8x64 DDR3400 to 4x96 DDR5600) impacting things like linux buffer cache. However, theoretical bandwidth should actually be a little higher.
Played around with SMT with slight improvements, but saw major improvements with NS04 where the 128 batch run went from 1,883s to 1,119s for 20% faster (vs 30% slower) than TR5000 at 1,429s. Thought this was the key until cinebench runs with NS04 produced significantly worse results. Saw that NS04 hammered a single ram slot vs all 4 and caused it to thermal throttle (perhaps it actually reduced load in our workloads reducing thermal throttling?).
Ended up switching to the SilverStone XE360-TR5 AIO and a 140mm fan zip tied directly over the ram slots. Ran it through ycruncher at 50B digits to verify the memory no longer thermal throttled. This also reduced the 128 batch times to 829s which was now much closer to the 2x performance given 2x the cores.
I bought shity thermal lake watercooler. One fan failed really quickly. I replaced it with some artic’s. The two fans that where still ok. I mounted them as a intake. and blowing just blowing air acros everything.
I’m thinking of that but with mixing i want my outboard gear near my pc. when recording i want it far away. I think just somthing n100 just for recording audio
just about anything “modern” would work great if passively cooled… or your could watercool your whole rig and have the pumps/radiator/fans in another room
Ya, those might fit since they specifically mention a pocket for PMIC.
I actually bought some cheap aluminum ones so I could cut out areas for the PMIC. When all 4 were installed, they did help with a slowing the rise in temps during ycruncher, however they all reached a higher temp and eventually throttled.
The 4 sticks also cooled unevenly. When I had the noctua air cooler, the top 2 slots were the hottest and throttled. With the AIO this was reversed with temps being (starting at the top): 60c, 67c, 74c, 71c.
I ended up keeping a heatsink on just the second to last (you can kinda see this in the photo) to normalize it with the last stick. Having them on both restricted airflow enough that both did worse.
It might be different with the copper ones but I think the sticks are too closely spaced for proper airflow with them on.
Here’s the final run with some fan curve tweaks with the ram SPD Hub temps in slot order.
