Today, we’ll focus on what happens inside a case when a CPU is under heavy load. We’ll run a Cinebench 2024 rendering on a Ryzen R9 7950X cooled by a Noctua NH-D15 G2 air cooler with AM5 offset mounting bars and see how it affects the temperatures and how all the values change with different settings of the system fans’ performance across their entire operating speed range.
Although one of the most powerful air coolers you can buy today sits on the processor, in the test it was not enough to keep the processor from hitting the temperature limit at around 5100MHz clock speed, around 1.221V and 215W of power consumption. I guess you can’t say it’s unexpected, these aren’t temperatures that no one else could get to with this cooler and processor combination. It is clear from the tests that the limiting factor in this case is the performance of the CPU cooler, and with the components in question, at maximum performance the cooler is the biggest source of noise in the build.
The effect of system fan performance on CPU performance and operating temperatures is measurable, but not significant. Still – this is an intial sketch, I can’t see under the cooler, and I’ve only tried mounting it once so far, so I can’t say what the temperature variance might be if it fits a bit better or worse. You can usually only be sure of how well the cooler has been mounted when you take it off. And you’ll only find out if it’s possible to do it even better when you try putting it back on a couple of times and repeat the measurements
The processor is equipped with a standard Noctua NH-D15 G2 variant with NT-H2 paste and AM5 offset mounting. Besides that, I have already received the LBC variant, so next time I will probably look under the cooler to see how well it fitted in this test, try it on a couple of times and measure it again to check and then see how much the results change with the LBC variant.
We probably can’t expect dramatic differences from this, but I won’t get ahead of myself. Depending on how it turns out, we’ll see where we go from here in tweaking the cooling.
English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš
