It has been a long while since looking into mid to high end air cooling and I need opinions and options.
I'm hoping to get a Ryzen 5900x or at least settle for a 5800x before too long and will need a good heatsink for said CPU. The size and performance of modern air coolers is an issue I'm aware of but have no experience with. The CPU will probably be put on either an MSI x570 Tomahawk board or Gigabyte x570 Aorus Pro Wifi board for those familiar with them. The case allows for a maximum height of 165mm coolers and will likely have a couple sticks of G.Skill Trident Z Neo RAM.
I want good performance without breaking the bank and expect to spend a minimum of $50 but prefer to stay well under $100. After price, performance is of the most concern with noise not being a huge issue. I don't want a howling banshee in my case but some noise isn't a great concern. For example I have a CM Hyper 212 LED with fans in a push/pull config running 100% on a Ryzen 2600x and don't notice the sound outside the case. I should mention that I'm likely going to be running the fan(s) at 100% all the time. Between video encoding and distributed computing projects the CPU will be running quite hard most of the time and I will notice if fans ramp up and down which annoys me to no end. Hearing fans is not a problem but hearing them spin up and down at all is beyond irritating.
So, what options and opinions do you all have for a giant piece of metal hanging off the motherboard designed to cool the CPU?
I'm hoping to get a Ryzen 5900x or at least settle for a 5800x before too long and will need a good heatsink for said CPU. The size and performance of modern air coolers is an issue I'm aware of but have no experience with. The CPU will probably be put on either an MSI x570 Tomahawk board or Gigabyte x570 Aorus Pro Wifi board for those familiar with them. The case allows for a maximum height of 165mm coolers and will likely have a couple sticks of G.Skill Trident Z Neo RAM.
I want good performance without breaking the bank and expect to spend a minimum of $50 but prefer to stay well under $100. After price, performance is of the most concern with noise not being a huge issue. I don't want a howling banshee in my case but some noise isn't a great concern. For example I have a CM Hyper 212 LED with fans in a push/pull config running 100% on a Ryzen 2600x and don't notice the sound outside the case. I should mention that I'm likely going to be running the fan(s) at 100% all the time. Between video encoding and distributed computing projects the CPU will be running quite hard most of the time and I will notice if fans ramp up and down which annoys me to no end. Hearing fans is not a problem but hearing them spin up and down at all is beyond irritating.
So, what options and opinions do you all have for a giant piece of metal hanging off the motherboard designed to cool the CPU?