Better Cooling for Threadripper 3960x?

[Tillwoofie]

After I finally got my whole rig updated (thank you so much Canada Computers video card restock!) I've started to get a bit more concerned about the CPU thermals that I've been getting. I've been trying to find a Video Card for months, to replace the 1080 Ti from my last build, which finally happened this last week. It's quite a bit extra from what I was originally planning, but chip shortages, and parts availability ended up pushing the specs on the build quite a lot, since the only things I could easily get without scalping was very high-end stuff.

 

Rig specs are:

• Threadripper 3960x (auto turbo/OC)
• ASUS ROG STRIX TRX40-E GAMING
• 128GB G.Skill DDR4 3200MHz
• EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti FTW3 ULTRA GAMING
• Phanteks Eclipse P600s (white... my shame is forever)
• Corsair HX1000
• Noctua NH-U14S TR4-SP3 push/pull fans (2x fans)
• Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut TIC on cpu
• 2x 140mm Noctua industrial PPC fans in front of case as intake
• 2x 140mm Phanteks fans (from the case) in top as exhaust
• 1x 140mm Phanteks fans (also from the case) in back as exhaust.

My issue is mostly the CPU thermals. Idle and low load, and gaming it's pretty alright, no concerning temperatures. Though if I'm working with much higher loads (rending/etc in Blender), or anything else that's fully loading the CPU, it gets quite toasty indeed, warm enough to start throttling. The spacing to the video card is also of concern, since the NH-U14S and the backplate of the card are basically touching (maybe 1-2mm of clearance, if any at all).

 

So I've been considering water cooling the machine, but there starts my confusion. I was originally looking at a AIO cooler, though there seems to be very few that will cover the entire Threadripper heat spreader. Those seem to include the ASUS ROG Ryujin 360 (which is strangely very pricy?), the corsair H150i Pro XT, and maybe the Master Liquid ML360. Then, of course, there's custom loop liquid, which I have not done before, but I'm sure I am capable of. If I did go custom loop, it would just be the CPU, the graphics card seems pretty fine so far (I've only had it about a week so far, so I don't really have any solid characteristics on if it's going to also be a problem.

 

With all the research I've done, I'm starting to get fairly confused with what solution would actually help with bringing down the temperatures of the CPU to a better level. So I'm hoping to get a bit of help deciding what would end up being best for this. 

 

Some goals of this, since I know some people will ask:

• Putting a budget on this seems pointless with the money that's already been sunk into this, so budget is just ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
• Temperature stability for long sessions of 100% cpu load (with the AMD auto OC / turbo, whatever they are calling it now)
• Hopefully clearing up some space above the GPU so the backplate can breathe a bit, and not be heat soaked by the CPU cooler.
• An AIO would be fine, as long as it's going to perform better than the current air cooling, and I'll consider custom loop water if it's just going to be a better choice.

[RONOTHAN##]

For a Threadripper chip, I almost always recommend a custom loop because of how few Threadripper specific AIOs exist and how pricy they are. A custom loop may be more expensive, but the quality will be better, and it's actually serviceable unlike an AIO. Piecing together from EKWB how much it would be to build a custom loop (soft tubing for ease of maintenance and assembly), you will spend $350 plus tax and the cost of distilled water and PT nuke (a growth inhibitor). A custom loop is definitely harder than installing a NH-U14S or an AIO, but it's not as hard as you might think. Expandability is also a plus, so you can always add in your GPU to the loop if you decide you want to, or if the single radiator isn't enough, you can add another one. Plus, IMO it's the next step in PC building, and is a lot more fun. 

 

If you do decide to go with a custom loop, these are the parts I would buy from EK (I might go with Bitspower fittings from somewhere like Performance-PCS.com instead, but EK fittings are pretty good as well).

[Tillwoofie]

That is almost the same custom loop that I had thrown together in EK's configurator, as a price comparison to see how much a custom loop costs these days. I think with what that had put together, it came to around $500 (of course had extras that I didn't bother to remove at the time). With a loop cost of around $350-500, the ASUS Ryujin is just about impossible to justify (being like $400). I've never been able to find any real solid data about most AIOs on a threadripper either, other than to avoid the heck out of that Enermax Liqtech unit.

[markwoll]

I have at 3975wx, asus pro ws wrx80e-sage and a 3080ti rog strix oc card with the same noctua push/pull , two 140 fractal design pwm front and one 140 rear. No top fans. Fractal meshify 2 xl. No OC on the TR, that's a trade off with the Pro chips.

The gpu is mounted in the bottom slot so there is at least 6 inches back plate to cpu fan.

I have not run any really long renders yet, but lots of benchmark loading to test thermals.

No thermal throttle, I do open the front door of the case to remove the small amount of dust filter air flow resistance.

The fans ramp up.

The only big difference is the orientation of the cpu and cooler (90 degrees ) so it blows out of the top of the case more than the back.

What type of case is it? Could you improve case. airflow, it sure seems like you have a lot of air flow potential with all of the fans

[RONOTHAN##]

8 minutes ago, Tillwoofie said:

That is almost the same custom loop that I had thrown together in EK's configurator, as a price comparison to see how much a custom loop costs these days. I think with what that had put together, it came to around $500 (of course had extras that I didn't bother to remove at the time). With a loop cost of around $350-500, the ASUS Ryujin is just about impossible to justify (being like $400). I've never been able to find any real solid data about most AIOs on a threadripper either, other than to avoid the heck out of that Enermax Liqtech unit.

I did kinda forget you're based in Canada, these prices are in the US, so it'll probably be closer to $400-450, but it will easily outperform any of the asetek-based AIOs. You'll still pay double the cost of an H150i, but in return will get much better CPU temperatures and better upgradeability and IMO aesthetics (soft tubing can still loop pretty nice if you know what you're doing). 

[Tillwoofie]

6 minutes ago, markwoll said:

The only big difference is the orientation of the cpu and cooler (90 degrees ) so it blows out of the top of the case more than the back.

What type of case is it? Could you improve case. airflow, it sure seems like you have a lot of air flow potential with all of the fans

The case is a Phanteks P600s, got tired of needing to cram everything in super tight for a clean look. Went for the big boy so I had half a chance in heck of being able to organize cables. The NH-U14s can only be mounted "horizontally" with the air blowing out the back of the case (or, the front I guess if you really wanted to for some reason).

 

It's not thermal throttling very hard, it's just on the edge. Short full turbos are up to 4.2GHz, but after a couple minutes it'll slide down to 4.0 ish GHz. I'm not really trying to go any faster than the normal AMD turbo speeds.

9 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

I did kinda forget you're based in Canada, these prices are in the US, so it'll probably be closer to $400-450, but it will easily outperform any of the asetek-based AIOs. You'll still pay double the cost of an H150i, but in return will get much better CPU temperatures and better upgradeability and IMO aesthetics (soft tubing can still loop pretty nice if you know what you're doing). 

I'm not that worried about spending $500 and a couple hours doing an install if it's going to actually work. I just really don't want to, for instance, go and buy an AIO, have temps be worse, and then go do a custom loop after I can't return the AIO so I'm spending double on it. Cause that sounds not fun at all!

[markwoll]

Sorry, I was thinking phantek fans not case. So it you remove the sound panels ( if you don't run that way normally )  does it make it too loud?

Do you have room to drop the gpu? the top 3 slots are pci 4 16x cpu not chip set ( from what I see in the manual ) , enough space in the case?

 

[Tillwoofie]

3 minutes ago, markwoll said:

Sorry, I was thinking phantek fans not case. So it you remove the sound panels ( if you don't run that way normally )  does it make it too loud?

Do you have room to drop the gpu? the top 3 slots are pci 4 16x cpu not chip set ( from what I see in the manual ) , enough space in the case?

 

I run it without the sound panels all the time, it was too choked off with them on. It's only too loud if the Noctua PPC fans decide to spin up all the way, then it sounds like a shop vac instead of a computer.

 

I think there's a PCI-E 16x slot that's I think 2 spacings down on the mobo, though all the power cables are kinda tight for the bends to go through the little cable hole in the PSU shroud, but I suppose I could re-route them to go behind the mobo tray. They're definitely long enough for that... almost too long (yet another thing I have pondered changing).

[Jeppes]

Move the front roof fan to intake so you have a nice 3x140mm at front.

 

What voltage on load? And are you using the motherboard auto-oc or just the stock boost? Auto-oc is horrible 99% of times.

 

 

[Tillwoofie]

22 hours ago, Jeppes said:

Move the front roof fan to intake so you have a nice 3x140mm at front.

 

What voltage on load? And are you using the motherboard auto-oc or just the stock boost? Auto-oc is horrible 99% of times.

 

I'll prolly buy a couple more PPCs to fill up the front, and if I end up doing watercooling, I'll prolly throw PPCs there too.

 

As for the voltages though, that's prolly something I should look into, as I had to mess around in Ryzen Master (I know, not ideal) to get it back to doing auto-boost; so I imagine it's prolly more or less doing auto-OC and cranking the voltage higher than required.

[Jeppes]

1 hour ago, Tillwoofie said:

I'll prolly buy a couple more PPCs to fill up the front, and if I end up doing watercooling, I'll prolly throw PPCs there too.

 

As for the voltages though, that's prolly something I should look into, as I had to mess around in Ryzen Master (I know, not ideal) to get it back to doing auto-boost; so I imagine it's prolly more or less doing auto-OC and cranking the voltage higher than required.

Just reset bios to default options and try some manual settings. Or maybe try 1usmus clock tuner for ryzen as you have 8 ccx:s to tweak. The fancy curve optimizer that makes pbo great is only for 5000-series.

[Tillwoofie]

Been gathering a bit of information about voltages and temperatures (watching in HWMonitor during benchmark), and here's what I got:

 

Idle:

• Voltages: 1.43-1.45v
• Temperatures: about 60C
• Clock Speed: Most cores around 4300mhz, some around 3800mhz.

Loaded (Blender Benchmark, CPU only):

• voltages: 1.175-1.195v
• temp: 80-82C during load, but I watched temp spike up to 92C right after a scene finished? (yeah, dunno)
• clock speed: about 3950mhz all cores

Ambient room temperature was between about 27 and 28C during the tests.

 

I'm thinking maybe that it may be a good idea to do a bios reset to defaults, and then just enable XMP. I have a bit of a strange feeling that something weird is happening (between ryzen master, and stupid Asus AI suite). The Idle voltages seem really high, and the load voltages dip? The weird temp spike right after load lets off?

 

I also have the feeling like the air cooler just can't keep up super well at times, but it may also be some strange settings in here too.

[Tillwoofie]

Just did a couple tests after resetting bios to defaults, with XMP enabled, and AITuner disabled (kinda buggy anyways), performance was, very close, ambients about the same. That gave me about the same loaded stats. Idles improved a bit though, voltages and min clock speeds are down, with core temps being a bit lower.

 

I have noticed that the core voltages are still up around 1.4v, even on cores clocked down to around 3ghz though, which I still find a bit odd.

[Kinda Bottlenecked]

If temps still aren't satisfactory you could always try a beefier heatsink like the wraith ripper or arctic freezer 50 tr(only with low profile ram)

[jaslion]

Did you ever try without the front panel on? The p600s isn't the most airflow friendly case.

 

Actually what even are your temps you never listed them any where?

[Tillwoofie]

I don't run it with the noise panels on it at any time (temps were too bad). The idle temps now are 50-60C, and under full render load (on CPU), it tends to get up to about 80-ish degrees, and will stay roughly around there, though I have absolutely seen some odd spikes as high as 92C.