Poll: The "CPU stock cooler" club

[BFG10K]

Anyone else not happy with recent cooling trends? We're moving completely backwards. Four-slot surfboard GPUs weighing 2kg. CPU tower coolers weighing 1.5kg. And we now have tower coolers and water blocks for M2 SSDs.

AMD tells us 95C sustained is "just fine"(tm) and Intel ships 300W CPU monstrosities.

ATX was never designed for any of this. But it's not ATX's problem, it's these companies redlining their parts to chase the last 5% benchmark numbers, the result of the "turbo-core-boost" trend that started years ago.

Screw that, several months ago I power-capped my CPU to 65W and replaced my 120mm tower cooler with an Intel stock cooler. Observations:

Spoiler

• ~$2, and came in a simple cardboard container with pre-applied thermal paste. Perfect.
• I paid for the cheaper plain silver one but got the better black one with braided cable. More importantly, the central slug is copper instead of aluminum.
• Pushpins are easy to install. No stupid mounting kits, backplates, washers, or screws.
• LGA1200 fits fine in my LGA1155 socket. I've seen many posts online incorrectly saying this won't work.
• It's now very easy to access anywhere around the motherboard: RAM sticks, M.2, GPU, fan headers, etc.
• Fan profile out of the box is very noisy, including my mobo's "silent" setting. But after tuning it's completely quiet and ~1300rpm adds virtually nothing to the existing low noise of my system.
• This isn't delusional "quiet" on my part, I have very low tolerance to fan noise, to the point where I consider 120mm case fans @ 800 RPM too loud, and drop them to 700RPM.
• Even under artificial heavy stress tests like Cinebench it peaked mid 80s-C, but the fan was still spinning a quiet 1300rpm. After extended looping I got it spin up a little to around 1500rpm - 1800rpm occasionally but it quickly dropped down after a few seconds.
• This was much better than my BIOS fan curve (100% at 75C) so I looked it up, and it turns out it might have a thermistor which takes ambient temperature into account.
• Gaming never reached those temperatures and topped out mid 70s-C. This wasn't much higher than my tower cooler since it's now the GPU roasting the area.
• None of my workloads were impacted by the drop from 95W to 65W, including gaming and C compiler.

TL-DNR: Intel stock cooler is usable and quiet for 65W CPUs if you tune the fan curve.

 

[In2Photos]

In 2010 I bought a Xigmatek Dark Knight CPU cooler for my i7-920. 12 years later the ID Cooling SE226 that I got for my daughter's 7600x is basically the same thing. You don't have to go crazy. Do you see OEMs putting crazy cooling on their PCs? Nope!

 

[mikeymikec]

The AMD stock cooler is fine (they don't ship their own coolers for any CPUs except the <=65W types). "Fine" in this context being, you got this cooler basically for free, and the CPU doesn't thermal shutdown due to insufficient cooling, nor does it sound like a vacuum cleaner at full tilt. If you don't like the noise level, paying £20-£30 will get you something significantly quieter.

I started a thread recently about AMD 7000 and coolers:

Question - Good reviews for cooling AMD 7000? (interested largely in 7700X)

I've been slowly part-time planning my AMD 7000 platform upgrade for some time now. I'm familiar that with recent gen CPUs (which are binned at =>105W TDP) that it seems to be these days that pretty much no matter how big a cooler you through at it, the temps are still going to get very (IMO...

forums.anandtech.com

My take-away from what I read is that you can easily get away with lower-end coolers, it's just that the more cooling you apply, the longer the CPU can turbo for.

My main concern about this whole "turbo as long as possible, yay 95C" business is the long term: while I'm sure they tested the CPUs a fair bit at these sorts of temps, what about the surrounding components.

I decided to go for a NH-D15S mainly because I do Blu-Ray ripping so therefore the CPU gets hit hard for hours on end. I think if I was just gaming then I probably would have gone with something smaller like a BQ! Shadow Rock 3.

 

[Brainonska511]

I had used the stock cooler on my wife's 2600, but changed it to a Pure Rock 2 when I upgraded to a 5600X. Could have used the included stock cooler, but I found it was just noiser overall, even with adjustments to the fan curve.

Used the same cooler in my own machine with a 12400.

Plenty of good air coolers that are not completely oversized or overpriced that provide better cooling than stock to support sustained turbo modes and are quieter.

 

[MrTeal]

The LGA1700 stock cooler is terrible, even on a 12400 or 12100 that it's perfectly capable of cooling. The pitch of the noise it makes is just unbearable to me and it's straight in the bin. Even for a cheap PC I'll drop the <$20 for a Thermalright single tower.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

I use the stock cooler that came with my 5600X. It works fine, temps are fine, and it's quiet enough - my GPU Is usually the loud part. No complaints.

 

[Hotrod2go]

Effectiveness of stock coolers is influenced by system placement, if its in a case - the design of that case & of course ambient temperatures. Several factors affecting this.

 

[DeathReborn]

I use 2x AIO's 4770K & 5900X, 3x 3rd Party Towers 3600X, 2x Epyc 7543 & 4x Stock cooler 1x 9400F, 1x Athlon II X4 620 & 2x Pentium 3 Slot1 866MHz.

 

[mikeymikec]

I thought I'd revisit this thread re AMD stock coolers.

I've just built a PC with an AMD 4600G for a customer with the stock cooler (Wraith Stealth) and initially I was wondering if I had installed the heatsink correctly (it was sturdily installed, no wobble/play) because the idle noise level of the PC is higher than expected. Not loads higher, just unexpectedly on par with Intel stock cooler level when I'm used to the Wraith Stealth being quieter, currently it's spinning at 1500RPM while the CPU is idle (also a bit higher than expected).

The idle temp is reasonable IMO: it's dropped back to 30.0C after a stress test, but during the stress test it quickly got to ~70C then crept up to 87.8C before I stopped the test. Max temp according to AMD is 95C, but it was evident that despite the fan going at full tilt, the CPU temp was still creeping upwards. I gave the CPU stress test about ten minutes.

I'm going to double-check the BIOS settings because while I've got XMP enabled (3200MHz RAM), I haven't explicitly tried to OC the CPU and yet the max frequency was 4.3GHz in comparison to the specs saying it should turbo to 4.2.

Overall I think that maybe for Ryzen 5 type CPUs the Wraith Stealth should be regarded as borderline dubiously enough; while I'm sure that given enough time the CPU would have clocked back its turbo (I think it had begun to by about 100MHz by the time I stopped the test), I just think for such a low-end CPU it shouldn't have to throttle with the stock heatsink, but maybe I'm judging by pre "turbo the hell out of CPUs" era standards.

 

[Hotrod2go]

I thought I'd revisit this thread re AMD stock coolers.

I've just built a PC with an AMD 4600G for a customer with the stock cooler (Wraith Stealth) and initially I was wondering if I had installed the heatsink correctly (it was sturdily installed, no wobble/play) because the idle noise level of the PC is higher than expected. Not loads higher, just unexpectedly on par with Intel stock cooler level when I'm used to the Wraith Stealth being quieter, currently it's spinning at 1500RPM while the CPU is idle (also a bit higher than expected).

The idle temp is reasonable IMO: it's dropped back to 30.0C after a stress test, but during the stress test it quickly got to ~70C then crept up to 87.8C before I stopped the test. Max temp according to AMD is 95C, but it was evident that despite the fan going at full tilt, the CPU temp was still creeping upwards. I gave the CPU stress test about ten minutes.

I'm going to double-check the BIOS settings because while I've got XMP enabled (3200MHz RAM), I haven't explicitly tried to OC the CPU and yet the max frequency was 4.3GHz in comparison to the specs saying it should turbo to 4.2.

Overall I think that maybe for Ryzen 5 type CPUs the Wraith Stealth should be regarded as borderline dubiously enough; while I'm sure that given enough time the CPU would have clocked back its turbo (I think it had begun to by about 100MHz by the time I stopped the test), I just think for such a low-end CPU it shouldn't have to throttle with the stock heatsink, but maybe I'm judging by pre "turbo the hell out of CPUs" era standards.

What ambient temps were in the vicinity of the PC & background activity in the OS can prompt the cpu to work a bit harder than idle, this could explain why the 1500rpm was active at the time? Apart from that I haven't used stock coolers with AM4 chips only on AM5 have I had that experience with 65w TDP CPUs.
At the moment the Ryzen 5 8600G I'm using is the bottom of the pile in stock coolers but it performs admirably in a case with excellent ventilation - that is without a dGPU inside the case. Keeping in mind the extra think IHS on AM5 cpus, this is a good product AMD have made when that is taken into consideration.

 

[mikeymikec]

@Hotrod2go in the UK, I'm not seeing heatwave weather (by UK standards) any more, it's settled to being about 20C here. Most of my builds tend to be with 4300G CPUs (with the stock cooler) and admittedly my feelings about the noise level from this latest build might be affected by the fact that the previous build was a 4300G but also with an aftermarket cooler. Having said that I've done a 4300G with stock cooler build within the last three weeks and it seemed as nice and quiet as usual.

 

[MrPickins]

For my 5700G I used the Wraith Stealth when it was briefly in my daughter's pc. But when I put in in the HTPC, it was too noisy, so I ditched it for another stock cooler ... from a socket 754 Athlon64



I dropped on the biggest, slowest fan that would fit, and it's cooler and quieter now. Those were some really well built coolers.

 

[mikeymikec]

The Wraith Stealth that comes with the Ryzen 7600 is an absolute joke: Run the CPU at full tilt and within a matter of seconds it's nearly 90C.

 

[mikeymikec]

For my 5700G I used the Wraith Stealth when it was briefly in my daughter's pc. But when I put in in the HTPC, it was too noisy, so I ditched it for another stock cooler ... from a socket 754 Athlon64

View attachment 108007

I dropped on the biggest, slowest fan that would fit, and it's cooler and quieter now. Those were some really well built coolers.

I did a similar one in that a friend bought a Ryzen 9 3000 series (3900 something like that) and didn't use the stock heatsink (Wraith Prism). I ended up installing it on a customer's Phenom II X4 125W TDP CPU and it was perfectly quiet even under load.

 

[MrPickins]

I did a similar one in that a friend bought a Ryzen 9 3000 series (3900 something like that) and didn't use the stock heatsink (Wraith Prism). I ended up installing it on a customer's Phenom II X4 125W TDP CPU and it was perfectly quiet even under load.

We went the opposite direction on the Old <-> New swap

I took a closer look, and I remembered it was actually a socket 939 Opteron cooler (also used on the X2 4200+ and above):

https://hardforum.com/threads/amd-heatpipe-heatsink-variations.1029365/#post-1029129116

Also funny, I opened the case and remembered that the biggest, slowest, handiest fan I could find that would mount was actually the fan from the Wraith Stealth. I've got an AMD Frankenstein monster that's cooling really well.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

I always use stock coolers since I don't give a crap about acoustics since I'm usually either running a box fan in summer / fall / spring near my PC or running a loud old school heater sometimes in winter (though sometimes I just like to let my house drop to 60 degrees). Only time I notice the sound of my cpu is when it's running balls to the wall converting Yui Kasugano videos to x265 in Handbrake.