Threadripper 3970x and Dark Rock Pro 4 - dangerous?

Dark rock pro 4 is 250watt, Threadripper is 280watt. I see that Windel used these two together. Is their not a danger to harming the cpu?

You might not get full performance, that’s all.

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The CPU will thermal throttle to preserve itself.

Oh boy.

TL;DR: It’s fine.

So… essentially Wattage on Coolers means whatever the manufacturer wants it to be. It doesn’t say anything about the actual performance.

250 W. At which fan speed? Which Loudness? Are we talking about 140mm fans at 200rpm or 80mm at 16k rpm? Cause you can dissipate 2x 280W + 4 Tesla cards easily with passive coolers if there’s 16k rpm fans blowing over them and sound like a jet engine.

Especially on big coolers like this the focus is on a silent operation. Whatever the manufacturer deems “silent” will be used for measuring how much heat it can dissipate at that loudness. 250W dissipation is not at 100% PWM signal.

I.e. that doesn’t mean they can’t dissipate more if the fans speed up.

On the other side of that equation: 280W CPU. Are you sure it’s 280W of heat? Because that’s not what TDP is anymore and TDP doesn’t really mean anything anymore at this point.

See also

Also even if (like… big if) the cooler wasn’t enough the CPU would just clock down and/or turn off when overheating. You can also run a CPU without a cooler at all for a short duration, e.g. when setting up stuff in the BIOS. It’s not advised to do it, but certainly possible.

Besides: The Dark Rock Pro 4 is one of the best coolers on the market. So if it wouldn’t work, it would be virtually impossible to cool the CPU.

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(jeez and here I am eagerly awaiting a delivery of Scythe Ninja5 tomorrow for a measly 50W CPU - bearings are shot on current cooler and I hate noise).

I’d love to see some flir captured numbers off of the AMD3970 , I wonder what delta T is needed to move 280W into the heatsink.

The amount of heat being moved at a constant airflow, goes up mostly linearly with the temperature differential. At same RPM and case T, your cooler fin stack temperature at 60C delta will be ~twice as efficient than at 30C delta. (e.g. 90C absolute vs. 60C)

Same is true for power transfer between heat spreader and heat sink. As your fin stack/heat spreader temperature increases, the delta T between cpu and dark rock decreases slowing down the thermal energy transfer rate / heat dissipation off the cpu.

Needless to say, you have to be able to pull all of it out if you want to sustain high clock rates, the cpu internals also change properties at different temperatures.

I’d like to be able to punch in some of these values into a spreadsheet and just compute optimal fan speeds

You don’t need to complicate things, really. Since AMD is in control of the TDP depiction of their processors, you’d expect beQuiet to follow AMD’s lead on the marketing material for the tr4 specific cooler.

It’s obvious that the cooler was “designed” for upto a 2990WX, which had a “TDP” of 250W. It might work for a 3970X, but I’m guessing the Freq boost might be below avg.

Actually that might not be the case either. Perhaps the cooler is good enough for the 3970X, but beQuiet haven’t gotten around to validating it?

It’s not complicated, just physics and marketing.

Except that the Dark Rock Pro 4 came out before the 2990WX and is nearly identical to the Dark Rock Pro 3, which is even older then that.

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