Threadripper cooling

[z_enzyme]

Allrite, researching for a friend. No, really, I am.
I've got a friend who does a lot of programming and sahder compiling. Gamedev mostly. She's looking to update her old i7 to Threadripper cause, threads. But she's also planning to game on the thing.
This is why she's opting for 3970x on an  Asus Rog Zenith II Extreme Alpha. But the question is cooling. 
We sat a long time and looked through the solutions and it seems watercooling - custom one - is the best at the moment, but as we are not really feeling comfortable in building a rig with custom loop thus my question.

Has anyone any experience with air coolers on Threadrippers, specifically the Noctua NH-U14S TR4-SP3 and  beQuiet Dark Rock Pro tr4.
Or is there any solution that we were unable to find.
Or whether we should stick to liquid cooling. If so, which one? AIO, custom?

No overclocking is planned I guess, at least nothing really extreme.

Thanks a bunch for all the tips.

[jaslion]

1 minute ago, z_enzyme said:

Allrite, researching for a friend. No, really, I am.
I've got a friend who does a lot of programming and sahder compiling. Gamedev mostly. She's looking to update her old i7 to Threadripper cause, threads. But she's also planning to game on the thing.
This is why she's opting for 3970x on an  Asus Rog Zenith II Extreme Alpha. But the question is cooling. 
We sat a long time and looked through the solutions and it seems watercooling - custom one - is the best at the moment, but as we are not really feeling comfortable in building a rig with custom loop thus my question.

Has anyone any experience with air coolers on Threadrippers, specifically the Noctua NH-U14S TR4-SP3 and  beQuiet Dark Rock Pro tr4.
Or is there any solution that we were unable to find.
Or whether we should stick to liquid cooling. If so, which one? AIO, custom?

No overclocking is planned I guess, at least nothing really extreme.

Thanks a bunch for all the tips.

All coolers you listed will do just fine. I do question if investing so much money is worth it when most likely (I do not know what your friend uses) is not going to fully use the cpu as a lot of compilers don't scale past a certain core amount. Of course without knowing what is being used this can also totally not be the case.

 

Either way any of the coolers will be fine but the dark rock seems to edge out the noctua's by a little bit it seems.

[Guest]

 

I used the Arctic Freezer 50 TR out of pure curiosity while I was building my loop, it was pretty decent.

Running it stock kept temps well under control. Boost duration was less than my Enermax Liqtech TR4 (stay the heck away), but very usable.

I imagine the Noctua and BeQuiet solutions yield similar results.

[z_enzyme]

10 minutes ago, jaslion said:

All coolers you listed will do just fine. I do question if investing so much money is worth it when most likely (I do not know what your friend uses) is not going to fully use the cpu as a lot of compilers don't scale past a certain core amount. Of course without knowing what is being used this can also totally not be the case.

 

Either way any of the coolers will be fine but the dark rock seems to edge out the noctua's by a little bit it seems.

Well, to be specific, Visual Studio compiling, hardcore C++ full engine rebuilds (so high load for a long time) and hlsl shaders, Unreal Engine Lightmass and shader compilers. It does max out my 3950x so I reckon it could use at least 64 threads. Not sure tho, gotta read up on that, thank you.

[Bombastinator]

I don’t like the look of those fans.  They have a proprietary wire about the shrouds.