Air cooler for 6800K at 4 GHz?

Bladestorm

[H]ard|Gawd
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Everything I read says you need to water cool the 6800K if you plan on overclocking, and the consensus seems to be starting at the 4 GHz mark. Is there an air cooler that's up to the challenge?
 
you don't need water cooling for 6c/12t. but as a 140W part you need a high-end cooler.. anything in the line of Thermalright Silver Arrow, Phanteks PH-TC14PE, Noctua NH-D14/NH-D15, Cryorig R1 Ultimate/Universal, Prolimatech Megahalems.. will do a good job there.. 4ghz isn't anything record breaking to worry too much.
 
From the article -

"Air cooling is really only an option if you run the -6800K at its stock frequencies. A simple closed-loop liquid cooler is needed to step up to 4.0GHz."
There is a small problem: they never tested air cooling in article, and looking at temps, they shot up about 10 degrees from stock to 4Ghz.

In fact: https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/4lu65v/table_of_broadwelle_reviews_overclock_result/

Looking at those i am positive that at 4Ghz even 6950X can be cooled on air and above 4Ghz you are hitting the heat transfer bottleneck on any cooling (except maybe subzero).
 
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From the article -

"Air cooling is really only an option if you run the -6800K at its stock frequencies. A simple closed-loop liquid cooler is needed to step up to 4.0GHz."

that's the keyword "Simple Closed-loop" most high-end air coolers blow off low-end and mid-range Closed loop coolers. both in cooling performance and noise.. you really need high-est end Closed loop coolers/ DYI/ pre-assembled expandable liquid coolers to be on pair and beat high-end closed loop at high wattage cooling...

Those air coolers I mentioned will do a great job as according the same review, that CPU hit just 177W under FPU torture test overclocked at 4.4ghz which are way higher than the 73W average and maximum 113W Under gaming, so what you got there its a 140W CPU that at default stock clocks go up to 93W under FPU stress test, that's in fact quite low even for 6c/12t chips... so if you are aiming 4ghz the requirement would be quite lower for cooling.
 
A Noctua D15 is neck and neck with the H110/H105.... Air cooling works with the right cooler. You arent going to run a Hyper 212 on these bad boys with an overclock but you definitely do not NEED a water solution.
 
Found your post doing a search on 6800k temps! I love my 6800k, built the system last weekend and it is a real screamer. I have Air cooling as well! I use this build mostly for a workstation so I need reliability.Speed comes second, but I have been tweaking things here and there.

I have a EVO 212 Cooler, and it cools the 6800k pretty well. I have a slight overclock on it and it's at a constant 3975 MHZ for all 6 cores. My idle temps are 31c to 33c and my at load temp go up to about 55c to 60c. Which seems acceptable for me.

I think the article is right, you could go to 4.0 on air cooling no problem, but if you want to overclock higher I would go water cooling. For me though, I am happy with a slight overclock and those temps. I just want a workstation that I can close the case and it works great for years to come, but if I had overclocking in mind yeah get the water cooling solutions cause I think the Air coolers for this baby are not going to cut it if you want to do extreme overclocking stuff.
 
Running the 6800k with a Noctua D15s with two Corsair ML 120 Pros. At stock speeds it runs 22° C @ idle. I just don't see going to 4GHz causing a thermal throttling issue. To me, that article at Toms Hardware is a bit lazy. I'm going to try for a 4GHz OC tomorrow and see how it goes. I don't imagine the D15s having any trouble cooling it.
 
Running the 6800k with a Noctua D15s with two Corsair ML 120 Pros. At stock speeds it runs 22° C @ idle. I just don't see going to 4GHz causing a thermal throttling issue. To me, that article at Toms Hardware is a bit lazy. I'm going to try for a 4GHz OC tomorrow and see how it goes. I don't imagine the D15s having any trouble cooling it.
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So... Did you do the thing? :)

I have an NH-D14 on a 3930K and it's Overclocked from 3.2 to 4.3GHz 24hr P95 stable. IIRC the 3930K does ~123W at idle and ~235W at load on stock setup... I've been considering going to a Skylake 6800K to save electricity as my system runs 24/7. Your feedback is appreciated
 
The high end air coolers are really good, you need a custom/real loop to clearly beat them. I am noctua for life, have at least a dozen of their heatsinks and lots of extra fans. There are other coolers in their class that perform as well but I like standardizing on socket mounting because I move my systems into different cases sometimes. They also really come through on support with free extra clips or mounts as long as you have an invoice or whatever.

I'm a 'conservative' overclocker, no pushing volts or memory timings much (and using ecc when I can) since I'm just looking for that good easy boost without much trouble.
I had a D14 on my 1680v2 @ 4.5, upgraded to D15S and got a better pci arrangement. (using server cards for various home projects) Its a real mint cpu, didn't have to touch any other setting.
Have a D15S + fan on my 5960x @ 4.4 which took some doing to get right, haswell-E sure was bleh for oc'ing and the early X99 boards and DDR4 modules had some real lemons.
Just put a D15S on my 2696v4 last night, probably going to triple-fan it just because. PS: fuck intel for locking the 16xx v4s and keeping the core count so low/unavailable.
 
I have a 6800k at 4.1 Ghz 1.2 v on air completely stable no temp problems. Air cooler is the Cryorig R1 Universal. From what I understand there are even a few air coolers out there better than this one so I think the Toms Hardware article was lazily written. How can they rule something out that they didn't try.
 
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