Big Boy Heatsinks: The 64-core AMD Threadripper 3990X Cooler Test

[Julio Franco]

After reviewing the Threadripper 3990X, it was made clear the 64-core/128-thread beast from AMD lays waste to every HEDT part we have ever tested. It's an insane productivity CPU, that we pushed to extremes to torture a few motherboards just this week. Then we thought, why not try out some big bulky coolers as well?

Read the full article here.

https://www.techspot.com/review/1995-amd-threadripper-air-cooling/

 

[Vulcanproject]

Pretty nice how you could air cool them. If you swapped out processors quite a bit as some do air cooling is generally simpler to manage. The strain you put on a board when you fit a very large cooler though and stand the machine up is tolerable, but if you move the machine about a bit it becomes more precarious. The Noctua with twin fans is over 2lb, at least 1kg. Beast!

 

[Heavens]

Is there even a point in getting a AiO watercooling setup then other than the case not being big enough for a large air cooler (probably unlikely in the HEDT segment) if a decently sized custom loop is only a couple of degrees cooler?

 

[QuantumPhysics]

There's no way I'd air cool a $4000 CPU over having a 240mm+ radiator AIO.

Then again, anyone buying this will more than likely either be a rich Youtubber - who didn't buy it but was given a sample to promote - or a business building workstations.

$4000 exceeds the costs of most people's builds. It sounds great, but it's no more practical than an RTX Titan or Vega Pro Duo.

 

[loading88]

Good to see Noctua is still king of the air coolers.That brown/beige color though... probably the ugliest thing in my case.

 

[JimboJoneson]

...

$4000 exceeds the costs of most people's builds. It sounds great, but it's no more practical than an RTX Titan or Vega Pro Duo.

That's a like saying an excavator is no more practical than a shovel, because it costs a lot more. I dunno, if I had to dig a swimming pool, I'd want to use the excavator and get the job done in 30 minutes, as opossed to shoveling hard for 6 days straight just because I didn't like the brand of excavator offered ...

 

[JimboJoneson]

Is there even a point in getting a AiO watercooling setup then other than the case not being big enough for a large air cooler (probably unlikely in the HEDT segment) if a decently sized custom loop is only a couple of degrees cooler?

What? This makes no sense ...

 

[moobg]

Good to see Noctua is still king of the air coolers.That brown/beige color though... probably the ugliest thing in my case.

Yep. Same. I use an NH-U14S on my 3700X and it's insanely quiet and cool but there's a reason I don't have any windows on my case. I wish they had a Chromax Black version of the cooler.

 

[Evernessince]

There's no way I'd air cool a $4000 CPU over having a 240mm+ radiator AIO.

Then again, anyone buying this will more than likely either be a rich Youtubber - who didn't buy it but was given a sample to promote - or a business building workstations.

$4000 exceeds the costs of most people's builds. It sounds great, but it's no more practical than an RTX Titan or Vega Pro Duo.

Most businesses tend to lean the other way. Water coolers have more points of failure and when they do fail, they have a much higher potential to do damage to the CPU or other components. Air coolers can at the most loose a fan, which isn't nearly as devastating as a failed pump or water leak. As you see in the charts above, performance is excellent for air coolers anyways.

 

[Trespasser]

Really nice round-up but sadly missing the Noctua's biggest competitor: The bequiet! Dark Rock pro 4

 

[Lionvibez]

Most businesses tend to lean the other way. Water coolers have more points of failure and when they do fail, they have a much higher potential to do damage to the CPU or other components. Air coolers can at the most loose a fan, which isn't nearly as devastating as a failed pump or water leak. As you see in the charts above, performance is excellent for air coolers anyways.

I find this to be less of an issue if you have configured the bios setting properly on your board when hitting high temps to shut down the system. However a water leak is no bueno but mostly a problem with custom loops rare to see an AIO leak.

 

[Evernessince]

I find this to be less of an issue if you have configured the bios setting properly on your board when hitting high temps to shut down the system. However a water leak is no bueno but mostly a problem with custom loops rare to see an AIO leak.

This should work most of the time. The thing with AIOs is that once the pump stops working temps spikes up quickly.

 

[Yynxs]

Again thank you for this information. I don't really care what the equipment looks like as long as it performs properly at load.

 

[ADVenturePO]

@Techspot Please explain exactly how was the 1h load test performed.
I'd like to do the same with LC.

 

[ADVenturePO]

There's no way I'd air cool a $4000 CPU over having a 240mm+ radiator AIO.

Then again, anyone buying this will more than likely either be a rich Youtubber - who didn't buy it but was given a sample to promote - or a business building workstations.

$4000 exceeds the costs of most people's builds. It sounds great, but it's no more practical than an RTX Titan or Vega Pro Duo.

But you know there is an arch-vis business, don't you?
Please. You don't even know how this monster performs under full custom liquid cooling loop.
This one is 90% more efficient than 3970x. This brings unbelievable computing/rendering power to those artists. When you have 8 cores... You'll wait 2h for full photo-realistic render. Having 64 cores blings it to 16 minutes. Well, for someone who is earning 300-500$ for realistic, top in business render .. this is a game changer.
Take it like this : 8 months ago you'd pay for that kind of performance 125k $, now you'll pay 15k $. Much more affordable and giving enormous ability to learn and practice even more with ones scene performance.
Second business - BIG DATA at low cost
Third one - Science - mathematical field.
You don't need one I can see that

 

[ADVenturePO]

@Techspot I'm asking again: How was 1h load test performed. This test is for minutes. Have you altered the photons amount or made the render output bigger - like 8K, to obtain full load for 1h?
What was the exact procedure?
Thank You.

@Techspot Please explain exactly how was the 1h load test performed.
I'd like to do the same with LC.

 

[neeyik]

Steve is very tied up at the moment and may not be checking the forums at the moment. As far as I’m aware, the guys just ran the Gooseberry benchmark for 1 hour, as is:

Gooseberry Production Benchmark file

It's about time to share a benchmark for production quality renders - something nice and heavy, taking 8-12 GB memory and requiring an hour to render in a minimal quality! Here it is (240 MB). Note: you have load file "trusted" (allow scripts to run). This is the 1.0 release of the file, we like t

gooseberry.blender.org

 

[ADVenturePO]

Steve is very tied up at the moment and may not be checking the forums at the moment. As far as I’m aware, the guys just ran the Gooseberry benchmark for 1 hour, as is:

Gooseberry Production Benchmark file

It's about time to share a benchmark for production quality renders - something nice and heavy, taking 8-12 GB memory and requiring an hour to render in a minimal quality! Here it is (240 MB). Note: you have load file "trusted" (allow scripts to run). This is the 1.0 release of the file, we like t

gooseberry.blender.org

Thank you, Neeyik, but Gooseberry does not run for an hour on this CPU. I know the file, I know the engine, I know the CPU.
Rendering of still images demands different approach - much more realistic rendering to obtain no lows in CPU load.
This results suggest he was starting the test again and again but haven't made it that complicated to run it for an hour.
And now you have a big difference in VRM and CPU temps against reality.