Hello Level1 lads & lasses … I’ve come seeking your counsel. My situation is thus …
Back in November I was able to snag myself a Ryzen 5 3600 at a really great price. I also picked up a new CPU cooler for myself - a Thermalright Le Grand Macho RT, which I’d been eyeballing for quite a while because I wanted something that cools well and is quiet. I’ve socketed the CPU into my Gigabyte B450 Aorus M inside of a Thermaltake Core V21 case. Fan setup is currently 1x 140mm intake fan in the front, 2x 120mm intake blowing at my GPU (Radeon RX 590), 1x 120mm intake set “in front” of the CPU cooler on what would typically be the “top” of the case, 1x 120mm exhaust. Fans other than the front intake are connected to a 4 port PWM hub and in bios are set to a silent fan curve. Front intake is on a “normal” fan curve as is the CPU cooler. Power supply is 600W from Corsair. I currently have voltage for the CPU and SOC at Auto. Bios is fully updated to the latest as of this post. Operating system is Manjaro - Kernel 5.4.
I’ve done some reading already before posting and understand that Zen2’s boost behavior makes it like to spike the frequency frequently and in doing so it also spikes the temperatures. The problem, for me, is when the temperature spikes all the time it causes the fan to spin up / spin down which even for a quiet cooler creates noise. I’m VERY sensitive to noise. While I’m sensitive to noise, I prefer not to run my PC in a hot box, which is part of why I went with the case that I’m using as it isn’t at a loss for ventillation - fans can run slower & quieter. Gamers Nexus did a great video on this, actually.
I currently have PBO turned off because the problem isn’t nearly as bad with it disabled, however, this doesn’t fully resolve my issue. In order to keep things so that the fans are tamed during “normal” desktop use, I have to adjust the Linux CPU frequency scaling to “power saving” instead of “on demand” which caps the CPU clock to 2.2GHz. Worth noting - with PBO enabled and the scaling to “on demand” I see idle temps in the 50C+ range. I’ve even tried picking up a 120mm Noctua fan for the CPU cooler in hopes that it would make some kind of noticeable difference, but it has not.
So my questions then would be …
Do you have any suggestions on how to help resolve this problem with the current equipment that I have? Perhaps a change to voltage settings? I’ve not got any experience w/ offset voltages and not much with the Gigabyte bios so I haven’t messed with those settings at all. Is there a way to control the fan behavior to make it less likely to spin up in response to spikes? I thought about trying a custom fan curve but I figured that will just cause the CPU to get hotter before it then MUST spin the fan up to deal with it and not really solve the problem. Is the problem something perhaps related to my motherboard? Would switching to a better board - perhaps a X570 board - help resolve some of these issues?
I’m open to suggestions / discussion. For most tasks the mitigations I have in place for now work fine, but there are times where it becomes a bit of a problem - watching YouTube videos, for example, can stutter depending on the video. Gamers Nexus videos, for example, always have issues with stuttering w/o the extra clock speed.
