Hacker News Reader

Comment by loser777 | Hacker News Reader

Just put together a first gen Threadripper build for work a few months ago where out-of-the-box ECC support was too good to pass up for a box with >= 64GiB DRAM. If it’s possible to do a drop-in upgrade (cooling solution not withstanding) then this will be a big deal as we have basically not seen backwards compatibility, especially with such a compelling upgrade, in this part of the market in over a decade from Intel.

But 16 to 32 cores is a leap (250W TDP!!!!!), so I wonder what cooling solutions will remain viable (e.g., what about the TR4 edition Noctua cooler made just for TR?)

View on HN

It's not actually that hard. AMD didn't cheap out on the integrate heat spreader (like Intel did) and it's HUGE. Commodity waterclocks on newegg already handle "500+ watts". I'm sure there will be a wide variety of solutions for 250 watts by the time they ship. It's really not that much power, many cases these days are designed for 3 or more 300 watt GPUs.

Just for example, my first gen TR has this guy on it[0], which is already spec'd for 300W.

I would think power delivery on existing motherboards only designed for 180W would be a bigger problem. But again, any board targeted at overclockers should already be prepared to handle at least 250W. The older boards will mostly just not support as much overclocking of the new, larger part.

[0]: https://www.arctic.ac/us_en/liquid-freezer-360.html

With a good cooler you might be limited by the current handling of the socket pins. I'm interested in what solutions will be found to circumvent that issue.

I think the solution AMD found to circumvent that issue was using 4094 pins.

I looked, and found the limit to be a little over 300W, based on research into LGA and AMD's publications pertaining TR4.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that cooler is smaller than the Threadripper socket.

https://www.gamersnexus.net/images/media/2017/CPUs/tr-1950x/...

There are "proper" TR4 coolers, such as the Noctua TR4-specific air cooler which actually covers the entire socket, for a maximum connection between the radiator and socket.

https://i.imgur.com/R0WbTSa.png

Pictured there is the Enermax TR4-specific liquid-cooler. There is another one on the market somewhere, I forgot the name though.

Anyway, the bigger heat-plate makes a big difference. People have measured somewhere on the order of ~10C to ~20C cooler.

> I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that cooler is smaller than the Threadripper socket.

Yes, I am aware of that (it's not news to me). The cooler is smaller than the integrated heat spreader (the visible metal cover on the top of the CPU), but it does fully cover all four (two active) CCX dies and conducts plenty of heat away.

I know you can get TR4-shaped coolers today, and they perform marginally better, but they were not available at the time. With all cores busy, this thing keeps the CPU at 50°C or less in ~25°C ambient (stock clocks/boost). That is totally sufficient — the CPU is rated to 68°C (and oddly, the Ryzen 1800X is rated to 95°C, so it's unclear why the TR isn't rated up to 95°C as well).

> Anyway, the bigger heat-plate makes a big difference. People have measured somewhere on the order of ~10C to ~20C cooler.

Yes, absolutely it makes a difference; something like ~10°C, at least under fairly common conditions, from my reading. 20°C probably indicates an incorrectly installed cooler.

> Yes, I am aware of that (it's not news to me). The cooler is smaller than the integrated heat spreader (the visible metal cover on the top of the CPU), but it does fully cover all four (two active) CCX dies and conducts plenty of heat away.

https://www.gamersnexus.net/images/media/2017/CPUs/tr-1950x/...

Technically covers, but you can see that the screw-holes of the cooler go right over the dies. So you've got some air-pockets over the most-important parts to cool.

> Yes, absolutely it makes a difference; something like ~10°C, at least under fairly common conditions, from my reading. 20°C probably indicates an incorrectly installed cooler.

I was looking at overclocked numbers at the ~20C metrics btw. 10C was closer to the "normal use" situation. Overclocking adds a lot of heat, and benefits from a cooler with a larger connection.

> Technically covers, but you can see that the screw-holes of the cooler go right over the dies. So you've got some air-pockets over the most-important parts to cool.

Sorry, I don't see any screw holes overlapping dies in that image; can you point them out?

Also, won't screw holes generally have screws in them, which are both conductive and not air?

https://i.imgur.com/A7h22DB.jpg

I added a few arrows to make it more obvious.

Here's the article these pics are from: https://www.gamersnexus.net/news-pc/3008-threadripper-cooler...

> Also, won't screw holes generally have screws in them, which are both conductive and not air?

https://static.arctic.ac/media/wysiwyg/Products/Liquid_Freez...

Screws have heads, and those heads have divots and are simply not a perfectly-flat surface.

I mean, nothing is perfectly flat. That's why we use thermal compound / thermal paste to connect things together. (Thermal compound is worse than copper at thermal exchange, but its way, way WAY better than air-gaps). So you use thermal-paste to fill in any air-gaps.

If you are going to use a "regular size" cooler, you probably should put thermal paste in all of those screw-heads, for a slightly better connection.

Cooling Threadripper has been my issue with adopting it as well. The only pre-assembled cooler I've seen is an Enermax AIO block. Otherwise, you have to loop it on your own.

Do you mean for liquid-cooled solutions only? We've been using this Noctua U14S TR4-SP3 (https://noctua.at/en/nh-u14s-tr4-sp3) on a 1950X (no overclock though) without issues.

Oh man, I love that fan. But I misread the height specs on it and I couldn’t fit everything into my case any longer, but my old fan had died. I Ordered a replacement on amazon and the sent out the wrong item twice, so for about 3 weeks I just ran it open and yelled at the cats if they came in my office. Amazon finally gave up on trying to send the right case, and just told me to by it somewhere else, and eventually gave me a refund. I wanted to not take any chances, and the cats were getting terrified of me, so I ordered a ThermalTake core X9. The thing is insane. You could reasonably fit two motherboards and 8 hard drives in it. Don’t try to fit it on a desk. It could almost be a desk. But it is all worth it because I love that fan so much.

I did not know this was a thing. Typical Noctua coming to the rescue!

How do the thermals compare with an AIO cooler? I've heard that their coolers come close to or exceed AIO cooling (assuming a standard Asetek Gen 5) on the usual square sized heat spreaders. Does Threadripper's more rectangular IHS impact temps at all with this cooler?

EDIT: Just saw the bit about not having an overclock. Has anyone tried overclocking on this Noctua cooler? What were the results when compared to the AIO solutions?

Noctua's U14-TR4/SP3 should work fine, easy peasy. And there are a ton of single piece AIO devices. No need for a custom loop.

Starting with Threadripper 2, AMD will (optionally) be shipping a capable air cooler derived from their current lineup of air coolers (Wraith coolers). Faithful to its namesake, it will be called "Wraith Ripper."

https://imgur.com/gallery/08xsWbu What is the wraith ripper?

Take a look at this https://i.imgur.com/jT5iXWP.jpg New cooler in the box of TR2

Power delivery by a motherboard might be a problem, too.

Definitely. On the other hand, many early TR boards were "gamer" boards and advertised overclocking ability. So they may have some power overhead to play with. Less overclocking ability with the old boards and the new 250W parts, of course.

250W should be no issue per se, even 500W for 32 is not a lot at any rate and would not be hard for a 12 phase VRM to keep it stable. It may require an extra fan

Don't forget the LGA pins.

LGAxxxx is an Intel socket type, not AMD. If you look at the pinout of LGAs most pins are power related

Threadreaper's TR4 socket is LGA socket with 4094 contacts.

Extrapolating from Ryzen 1800X and a 16-core first-gen Threadripper, you'd overload the LGA pins at about 50% (300W) of the potentially possible ~600W you could make the chip take without sub-ambient cooling technology (and expect it to live for more than half a year at that level), i.e. with a forced-flow nucleate boiling cooler or a powerful waterblock. I once did some calculations for this, trying to find out if it could be worthwhile to wait for the 64-core EPYC and clock that one to like 3.5~3.8GHz, possibly with a governor that throttles the clock (and voltage) if the system is under low load. But assuming from some numbers I could find/calculate for how much less power they take, the predictions were so pessimistic that I did not pursue it further. (I did dream about a high-performance machine that could live in a case you could carry as a backpack, even though you'd probably not want to carry it very far due to the coolant being heavier than air.)

AMD has reported that in actuality this chip should rarely hit 250W, essentially only if overclocked. As with the Ryzen 2 lineup, overclocking can actually hurt performance.

But you are correct that some of the more budget-oriented (and I use that term loosely) TR4 boards will struggle with power delivery. Worst case, you will shorten the lifespan of your motherboard and increase the risk of capacitor failure (eg: shorting, popping, etc).

I'm somewhat curious about what kind of cooling system Intel was using the other day with their 28 cores at 5 GHz demo/stunt. Some people isolated a frame of the streamed video where it shows the (insulated?) pipes that exit from the case and go behind the desk.

Edit: grammar

People have been saying some form of subambient cooling, phase change or similar.

Water cooling with a chiller - water was close to freezing temperature.

Most popular way is to use arctic fish aquarium chiller

Edit: someone snapped a photo of it: https://i.imgur.com/dRINhkW.jpg and people identified it as http://www.hailea.com/e-hailea/product1/HC-1000A.htm

Anandtech also has an article on that.

It's fine for showing off of far the chip can go, but nothing someone would have under the desk.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12907/we-got-a-sneak-peak-on-...

In addition to the overwhelmingly slap-dash appearance, its power draw was reportedly through the roof (north of 750W). With that chip, a fully-loaded workstation's power draw would exceed the wattage of most North American wall outlets.

Suffice to say, Intel's 5GHz 28-core chip is nowhere near production-ready and their demo is more than likely a heavily overclocked top-binned Xeon chip. In other words, Intel's new offerings are looking like less than stellar vaporware.

Threadripper 1 still beats the pants off of Intel's HEDT offerings in terms of price (Intels' costs quickly exceed the $5K mark), Threadripper 2 twists knife so much that its a gaping wound in Intel's side. The Epyc 2 lineup will similarly affect Intel's enterprise/data-center offerings.

I was pretty sure it was mostly for show and not a feasible product but nonetheless I was guessing around 500W. Without counting the chiller running under the desk.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com