Can a Cooler Master Hyper 212 Turbo cool a Ryzen 9 5950X?

[milesuy]

I am upgrading to a Ryzen 9 5950X, but my cooler is the Cooler Master Hyper 212 LED Turbo, but the fans are upgraded to Noctua NF-F12 PWM chromax.Black.swap because the stock fans already failed.

 

Can a Cooler Master Hyper 212 LED Turbo cool the Ryzen 9 5950X? I won't mind if it gets loud or requires undervolting.

 

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[YoungBlade]

It can be done, especially if you undervolt and reduce the power limits using PBO. The 5950X is quite an efficient chip. Whether or not it's the best way to go is up to you - the Thermalright Peerless Assassin is only about $40 and can cool a stock 5950X no problem.

 

For gaming, I wouldn't expect the cooler to matter much - very few games are going to push 16 cores these days. However, for your code compilation, assuming it can use all cores, you may see thermal throttling with that cooler if you don't do anything.

[milesuy]

3 minutes ago, YoungBlade said:

It can be done, especially if you undervolt and reduce the power limits using PBO. The 5950X is quite an efficient chip. Whether or not it's the best way to go is up to you - the Thermalright Peerless Assassin is only about $40 and can cool a stock 5950X no problem.

 

For gaming, I wouldn't expect the cooler to matter much - very few games are going to push 16 cores these days. However, for your code compilation, assuming it can use all cores, you may see thermal throttling with that cooler if you don't do anything.

I plan to upgrade to a Deepcool AK620 Zero Dark in the future, do you think this cooler is good enough?

[YoungBlade]

Just now, milesuy said:

I plan to upgrade to a Deepcool AK620 Zero Dark in the future, do you think this cooler is good enough?

Yeah, the AK620 is a sufficient cooler for a stock 5950X. You'd only need something beefier if you wanted to overclock.

[milesuy]

18 minutes ago, YoungBlade said:

It can be done, especially if you undervolt and reduce the power limits using PBO. The 5950X is quite an efficient chip. Whether or not it's the best way to go is up to you - the Thermalright Peerless Assassin is only about $40 and can cool a stock 5950X no problem.

 

For gaming, I wouldn't expect the cooler to matter much - very few games are going to push 16 cores these days. However, for your code compilation, assuming it can use all cores, you may see thermal throttling with that cooler if you don't do anything.

Follow up question:

Is undervolting and temporarily disabling cores an option until I get a better cooler? (Will it help bring down the temps?)

Would continue using it cause damage to the CPU if I frequently hit thermal throttling temps (which means overheating?) ?

I also do video rendering in Davinci Resolve, is this CPU intensive, if I understand correctly, it uses hardware acceleration, so its more dependent on the GPU?

[YoungBlade]

Just now, milesuy said:

Follow up question:

Is undervolting and temporarily disabling cores an option until I get a better cooler? (Will it help bring down the temps?)

Would continue using it cause damage to the CPU if I frequently hit thermal throttling temps (which means overheating?) ?

You can undervolt it to bring down temps. Proper undervolting on Ryzen 5000 series is a bit different from previous generations. What you want to do is use PBO Curve Optimizer to set a negative offset and then use PBO to reduce the PPT power limit along with the TDC and EDC current limits of the CPU. Those two in tandem will both reduce the voltage that the CPU uses and the amount of power that it draws - only doing the former will not reduce power consumption, but instead let the CPU boost higher within its power envelope and thus improve performance.

 

A more basic thing to do would be to just use PBO to reduce the PPT, TDC, and EDC to reduce power consumption. This will hurt all-core performance, but shouldn't impact performance when using only a few cores, as it's only affecting the total power draw. A starting point would be to use the default settings for chips like the 5700X, so PPT 88, TDC 65, EDC 90 if I remember correctly. That will basically turn your 5950X into a TDP 65W part, which would be easy for the Hyper 212 to cool - however, it will hurt all-core performance.

 

If you want to find the right balance, you'd need to manually tune things using BIOS or Ryzen Master to find the optimal PPT, TDC, and EDC settings for best performance to thermals.

 

I wouldn't recommend disabling cores - it would be better to just reduce the power limits so you still have the cores available, even if they run slower.

 

You won't damage the CPU in any meaningful way unless you are exceeding TJMax, but your motherboard should pull back on power before it reaches that point. The TJMax for the 5950X is 90C, so anything up to that is within spec and shouldn't harm the CPU.

[RevGAM]

You can improve the 212 by using more powerful fans on it. The higher the static pressure, the better. It's not infinite, of course, since your heatsink isn't that big, but it'll help. 

[freeagent]

The 212 gets 0 respect from me.

 

But it should work if you leave the CPU at full stock.

[milesuy]

Its been 3 days since I installed the 5950X and so far its been holding up. I did undervolting immediately and ran Cinebench for 30 mins to test for stability. It never ran below the base clock, so I guess I never overheated / thermal throttled. I have used Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut for my thermal paste.

Edit: Cinebench scores are 1535 (Single Core) and 22894 (Multi Core).

7 hours ago, RevGAM said:

You can improve the 212 by using more powerful fans on it. The higher the static pressure, the better. It's not infinite, of course, since your heatsink isn't that big, but it'll help. 

I have the Noctua NF-F12 PWM chromax.Black.swap, the stock fans of the already 212 died.

 

7 hours ago, freeagent said:

The 212 gets 0 respect from me.

 

But it should work if you leave the CPU at full stock.

I am leaving it mostly stock, the most 'overclocking' the system will get is from the PBO2 and DOCP.

[freeagent]

2 hours ago, milesuy said:

am leaving it mostly stock, the most 'overclocking' the system will get is from the PBO2 and DOCP.

I can get my 5900X to do 260w with PBO/CO/Boost override. I would imagine you could do closer to 300 if you have a good cooler.

[RevGAM]

14 hours ago, milesuy said:

have the Noctua NF-F12 PWM chromax.Black.swap, the stock fans of the already 212 died.

That's a pretty good fan. One or two?

[freeagent]

Also, the more you use the curve, the harder the CPU will try to raise its clock speed, there is a fine balance.

[milesuy]

On 1/3/2024 at 8:11 PM, RevGAM said:

That's a pretty good fan. One or two?

There's two of them

[RevGAM]

1 hour ago, milesuy said:

There's two of them

If you find that the Noctuas are not doing enough, then look at stronger fans; I mean those with higher static pressure. That fan has 2.36mmAq.