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Comment by rb808 | Hacker News Reader

The bundled cooler with the Ryzen helps a lot as well, as those low tech hunks of metal are crazy expensive.

I have an 3900x and in gaming it easily hits 80-90C. In 100% load it gets 97C and throttles. I switched to Noctua D15 and it does not go past 70 on full loa dand 60 on gaming. Higly recommend it, its so silent.

"throttles"

Are you certain you don't mean "stops boosting" when you say that?

I'm running exactly the same: a 3900X with the default included cooler. Yeah, it hits 95C and at that point it's running at 3.8 GHz instead of 4.4 (I never see 4.6 unless I boot Linux in single user mode).

But 3.8 is the base clock speed, so I don't think "throttle" is the right word for "running at base clock."

I find the included cooler for the 3600 not so great. I bought one the month it came out, and was hitting pretty high temps when creating h264 using only CPU. I tried applying paste before buying a better cooler. I think 3600x and up have much better coolers.

For most cases on the 3600, you need a separate cooler to get longer life from the CPU. I was getting warnings when playing some games with the stock cooler. Good thing they only cost about $30.

Do modern CPUs fry themselves like the ones from 15-20 years ago? I thought they just throttled down when approaching their limits, and extra cooling is helpful for allowing CPUs to boost clock speeds for longer.

AMD seems to design their components to get all the way up to 95 and sit there. It happened in the stock cooler for the 3600, and it happens on my 5700xt, even though I went for one of the nicer cards. It's still below the safe junction temperature, and it won't fry, and it can even run just fine like that for several hours.

The downside is that there is evidence that such high temperatures increase electron migration (or something similar) in the chips themselves, leading to not infinite lifetimes. I want this computer to last 10 years, so I bought an aftermarket CPU cooler for $30 to keep temps closer to 50 degrees

Not generally in the short term, but over the longer term increased heat is going to make it more likely that the chip fails prematurely.

Of course, if you do something like not attaching the heatsink at all, it's plausible that heat could spike fast enough to cook the chip before throttling or overtemp protection can kick in/shut the system off.

Yeah, the X series processors come with the Wraith Prism which is a really nice cooler. My processor isn't overclocked but the fact that I've never seen it get above 55 degC with the prism is impressive.

>never seen it get above 55 degC with the prism is impressive.

Pretty sure I've seen 75+ on mine 3700x

Thermalright coolers are sleepers; not well known, but superb performance and price-performance ratio far superior to anything else. You can basically get something that gets close to a 100 € Noctua NH-D15 for less than half the price.

Also check Scythe

Especially in super-budget builds. The extra $30 that you save by getting a reasonably good cooler with your CPU versus needing to replace the stock Intel one can be huge for someone building in the $500 range.

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