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Comment by cyber_kinetist | Hacker News Reader

AMD is also in the process of being a toaster oven. The new Ryzen 9 7950x will use considerably higher power (105W -> 170W) for a smaller die area, which is making people worry about air-powered cooling being not enough (previously a Noctua D15 was enough to cool a 5950x). And I really don't want high-end CPUs to require water cooling since it's more unreliable and requires more maintenance.

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There's a small silver lining in that you can set hard power limits in the bios and amd claims it's still ~15% faster when limited to 105w. It would be nice if they just left it at that but it makes them look worse in benchmarks against Intel since most people won't check the power consumption.

keep in mind that is not idle power consumption. If you are setting a limit like that it's because of heating or power constraints (battery? PSU?)

> 7950x will use considerably higher power (105W -> 170W)

The 5950X uses 180W at full load. Some measure as high as 230W. The 105W figure reported as "TDP" was a mistake.

Not sure why the specs were a big lie but this is well documented online.

> air-powered cooling being not enough

If you want to turbo to 4.1GHz or better on all cores on the 5950X, you have to spend about $60 on a cooler - water or air. The AIOs perform well. A big AIO will give you 4.5GHz. No turbo air cooling - 3.4GHz - is a waste of money.

I can definitely confirm this, I tried to air cool my 5950X without much luck. Enabling PBO I've seen it go over 200W, which a 240mm rad handles very well.

Huh. Interesting. I put a noctua heatsink (dual fan) on mine but I am guessing this is why my overclocking curves weren't that great. Any chance you have the rough before/after numbers and how much did you splurge for the water cooling?

those are base-clock TDPs not the boost TDPs (which AMD calls a PPT) too... it's 170W base/230W boost power, and those chips are allowed to boost for an unlimited duration (which of course has pluses and minuses).

Since noctua nh d15 air cooling has been on par or surpassing any aio and even all but the high end custom loops. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeQX1uhb0iQ

Not really. The NH D15 is an impressive cooler, but it falls behind 280 AIOs. Even ones cheaper than itself.

https://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/3571-arctic-liquid-fre...

Yeah I admit that there are cheaper water coolers than Noctua that perform better. But the main issue I have is with water cooling itself (can burst or leak if unlucky or with poor maintenance, has a more limited life span, etc...)

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