Ryzen chips no longer shipping with CPU cooler? ~ Noctua u12s?

DarkSideA8

Gawd
Joined
Apr 13, 2005
Messages
988
I bought an Ryzen 7 2700 x a while back and it came with a CPU cooler that everyone assured me was 'good enough, presuming you weren't overclocking'. Since I need chips for work / occasional gaming and don't overclock, that sounded good to me.

I recently looked at Ryzen 9 3900xt and saw it was chip only - no AMD cooler included. Is this a cost-saving 'keep the price in line with Intel' thing, or did the market just not like using stock coolers?

... and all of that said - I presume (hope) that the Noctua u12s is a good choice for a cooler... and wonder if I should use the thermal pad that comes with it, or get some 3d party paste? (If I need paste, what brand?)

Thanks for the advice.
 
the 3800XT, 3900XT, and 3950X do not come with CPU coolers as it is recommended you use something aftermarket/they assume you will anyway, so it is priced at a given price point by not including one (which would cost more money). That is because these are enthusiast class CPUs and they assume enthusiasts use aftermarket cooling (not wrong). Pretty much any noctua with a 120mm fan or more is good.

You mention a thermal pad, do they include a pad or paste? I didn't know anyone was including thermal pads with HSFs. If they include it though I am sure it is adequate and difference between pastes might be a few C in real conditions.

All that said, you CAN use the cooler from your 2700X on a 3900XT. A 3900X would come with the same Wraith Prism RGB cooler that the 2700X came with. Just expect it to run a little hotter.

All that said, lower temps = higher boost clocks.
 
the big thing for me was noise. I hated the sound of the wraith prism, and it would cause a weird vibration in my case at a certain RPM (which happened to be the RPM it would hang out at under moderate load).

Understandable. If I remember right, the conclusion of that article mentions the difference in noise. In terms of raw performance though, you don't really lose THAT much with the lower temp/higher boost of a high end cooler. At least not like you'd think you would.
 

There's also this:
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?.../search?q=watercooling+vs+air+cpu&FORM=HDRSC3

the 3800XT, 3900XT, and 3950X do not come with CPU coolers as it is recommended you use something aftermarket/they assume you will anyway, so it is priced at a given price point by not including one (which would cost more money). That is because these are enthusiast class CPUs and they assume enthusiasts use aftermarket cooling (not wrong). Pretty much any noctua with a 120mm fan or more is good.

You mention a thermal pad, do they include a pad or paste? I didn't know anyone was including thermal pads with HSFs. If they include it though I am sure it is adequate and difference between pastes might be a few C in real conditions.

All that said, you CAN use the cooler from your 2700X on a 3900XT. A 3900X would come with the same Wraith Prism RGB cooler that the 2700X came with. Just expect it to run a little hotter.

All that said, lower temps = higher boost clocks.

Frankly - I don't know if they do or not. The AMD 'stock' cooler had a pad when I bought it and I just used that (figuring AMD knew what they were doing when they sold me a CPU and Cooler combo). It's been about a decade since I put a non-stock cooler on a PC, and back then you had to use paste - thermaltake I think... but since its been so long, I don't know what the current 'best practices' are.
 
There's also this:
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=watercooling+vs+air+cpu&&view=detail&mid=D71DD1D86D52DF15DC81D71DD1D86D52DF15DC81&&FORM=VRDGAR&ru=/videos/search?q=watercooling+vs+air+cpu&FORM=HDRSC3



Frankly - I don't know if they do or not. The AMD 'stock' cooler had a pad when I bought it and I just used that (figuring AMD knew what they were doing when they sold me a CPU and Cooler combo). It's been about a decade since I put a non-stock cooler on a PC, and back then you had to use paste - thermaltake I think... but since its been so long, I don't know what the current 'best practices' are.
I think most cooler manufacturers supply a small tube of paste. For the AMD and Intel stock heatsinks, they usually have a square application of paste pre-applied to the bottom of the cooler, but it is still considered 'paste'.
 
I own two Noctua products. The NH-D15 big boy and its smaller bro the U12s. The NH-D15 cools my 6700K delidded and OC to [email protected]. Temps are in the 60s. If I push to [email protected], temps are low 70s. Due to size constraints, I actually removed the 140mm fans and I am using one Arctic P12 and one Noctua A12x25. Personally I feel these fans are better since they are alot quieter, and since the chip is delidded its thermals aren't crazy.

The U12s I kept stock and it cools the 3600 (non-x) in my htpc. Its basically completely silent and temps are in the 50-60s. It helps that I keep the cpu stock.

In summary, unless you are OCing by a huge amount, a $80-100 cooler is a waste for you. The $60 U12s is worth every penny.
 
The XT processors were supposed to be slightly higher binned/clocked version of thier non X variants and the 3950X never came with one (again, probably assumed if someone is buying that much of a chip they may want to just use their own cooling solution and/or to keep price down slightly). I think the thought was these were more intended to people overclocking or pushing limits more, so they didn't include a cooler. I'm not really sure if this is going to be the plan going forward or not, so it'll be interesting to see. Like others mentioned, the U12s should be fine though.
 
The XT processors were supposed to be slightly higher binned/clocked version of thier non X variants and the 3950X never came with one (again, probably assumed if someone is buying that much of a chip they may want to just use their own cooling solution and/or to keep price down slightly). I think the thought was these were more intended to people overclocking or pushing limits more, so they didn't include a cooler. I'm not really sure if this is going to be the plan going forward or not, so it'll be interesting to see. Like others mentioned, the U12s should be fine though.

I just read an article that there are only going to be 8 and 12 core 5XXX CPUs initially. They might not come with a cooler. We'll see I guess.
 
I just read an article that there are only going to be 8 and 12 core 5XXX CPUs initially. They might not come with a cooler. We'll see I guess.
I wouldn't be to heartbroken... I still have an r5 1600 and r7 3700x cooler sitting in their box, with one 3700x cooler in use; but I can understand it could be annoying if you planned on just using it.
 
[Has a Prism]

... and all of that said - I presume (hope) that the Noctua u12s is a good choice for a cooler...

U12s doesn't do as well as U14s/big dual fan coolers. As cited above it's fine for stock clocks on lower core ct cpus.

3900xt with PBO enabled isn't going to act like 8c or lower cpus. It's going to draw power like you're manually clocking 8c or under.

If your case allows, get a bigger air cooler with a 140mm fan footprint.
Those tend to give up little to dual tower coolers if you added a 2nd fan.
Keep an eye out for a cheap Cryorig, I had good luck with those in narrow cases.

Try to shop cheap and used, I dislike getting to aio $ with air coolers.
You're already giving up peak performance, fwiw, going with air.
No reason to dig deeper into your pocket.

Try that Prism on the 3900xt.
Some people cannot stand the noise, others are oblivious.
Temps won't be ideal but you'll see what happens when you don't have enough thermal capacity for free.
 
Back
Top