Are these temperatures strange?

Giganthrax · July 3, 2019

So I have two systems.

One is a Ryzen 1600x overclocked to 4000MHz and cooled by a Noctua U14S cooler with two 140mm Noctua fans. The other is an FX-8150 mobo-boosted to 3900MHz and cooled by a no-name Chinese heatsink with 3x90mm Aliexpress fans that use molex adapters and therefore are always at full speed.

During a couple Cinebench R2.0 runs, my 1600x goes up to 71 degrees Celsius, whereas the FX-8150 goes up to 46 degrees Celsius. This also surprises me because the Ryzen system is inside a bigger case with a 200mm noctua fan bringing in air and another 140mm fan pushing it out, whereas the FX system is inside an older case with a dual 120mm fan push-pull configuration.

I know the Ryzen is overclocked quite a bit and that max 1600x temps is 95 degrees, whereas max FX-8150 degrees is 61 degree, but it still seems surprising to me that a Noctua-cooler 6-core processor is pulling higher tempts than an Chinese heatsink 8 core processor.

Am I worrying for nothing or should I do something about this? Both systems work perfectly without issue.

mariushm · July 3, 2019

My guess is your system's BIOS is configured to dynamically adjust the rpm of the cpu cooler as low as possible, as long as the temperature is below 70-75c or something like that.

So basically, your BIOS tries to make your system as silent as possible, because it knows the Ryzen CPU is perfectly fine working at 70 degrees Celsius.

You probably have some option called "aggressive" or "gaming" or "overcking" mode for the cpu cooler, or you can tweak the temperature vs rpm curve to make the cpu fans spin at higher rpm to maintain the temperature lower.

Also note the Ryzen has a sweetspot voltage, once you go over it the power consumption increases significantly without big increase in performance... here's a picture from a Reddit thread - it's for 1700 but 1600 would be similar :

So you may get much lower power consumption by adjusting the voltage a bit, or just by lowering the frequency by 50-100 Mhz. You may simply be unlucky and your 1600 simply needs too high a boost in the voltage department to get your 4000 Mhz.

The 8150 is older generation, for all intents and purposes in those benchmarks it's a quad core processor. Look at the amount of work it does for that temperature.