Good replacements for Ryzen 7 1700 stock cooler

[ono]

I recently ordered an R7 1700 that I plan to OC on the Asus Prime X370 Pro. I'm a newbie to OCing, so I need some help picking a cooler. I hear the stock cooler is pretty good, so its hard for me to know what will actually improve temps for me an not just be a waste of money. I am using the Fractal Design Define R5, so it is pretty roomy. I don't really have a solid budget on what I want to spend yet. Say under $100 for now.

 

One of the reasons I went with the 1700 over the X versions was to get the stock cooler (and since they'll OC close to each other anyway is what I was told) so that I didn't have to restrict myself only to coolers that work out-of-the-box since I'm impatient. I was thinking of the Noctua U12S, which has an out-of-the-box AM4 version that seems to be out of stock last I searched for it. I saw an AM4 version of D15 in stock at Amazon, but that thing is massive and I don't know if I want to go that far and make maintaining a bit more annoying since it probably blocks a lot of things and may require remounting if I need to work on something.

[Thinkfreely]

Are you wanting to water cool it or air cool it?

[Tiwaz]

the chips are binned, so if you're lucky you can oc the 1700 to match a 1800x, if you have bad luck you will be stuck at stock speeds or 3,8ghz oc

[minibois]

I quite like my Be Quiet Dark Rock 3 on it, had to order the bracket for it separately, but it arrived within a week (from Germany to the Netherlands) and fits very well.

Would imagine the Pro version of this cooler, cools a bit better, but because of the limits on Ryzen overclocking not really being on the thermal side and rather on the voltage side, it might not make a huge difference.

 

Do look out with taller memory though, as the Dark Rock 3 can only be installed with the logo from left to right, which means it will definitely overhang slot 1 and slightly above slot 2 (the Dark Rock Pro 3 will have the same thing). Will depend on the motherboard, but on my system with TridentZ it fits just fine.

[paddy-stone]

3 minutes ago, ono said:

I recently ordered an R7 1700 that I plan to OC on the Asus Prime X370 Pro. I'm a newbie to OCing, so I need some help picking a cooler. I hear the stock cooler is pretty good, so its hard for me to know what will actually improve temps for me an not just be a waste of money. I am using the Fractal Design Define R5, so it is pretty roomy. I don't really have a solid budget on what I want to spend yet. Say under $100 for now.

 

One of the reasons I went with the 1700 over the X versions was to get the stock cooler (and since they'll OC close to each other anyway is what I was told) so that I didn't have to restrict myself only to coolers that work out-of-the-box since I'm impatient. I was thinking of the Noctua U12S, which has an out-of-the-box AM4 version that seems to be out of stock last I searched for it. I saw an AM4 version of D15 in stock at Amazon, but that thing is massive and I don't know if I want to go that far and make maintaining a bit more annoying since it probably blocks a lot of things and may require remounting if I need to work on something.

What do you plan on using it for?

 

The reason I'm asking is so I know what to recommend. Ryzen requires quite a lot of voltage to get that all important 4Ghz. Whereas on some chips a 3.9Ghz OC can be like 1.35v for instance and might even be cooled by the stock cooler if it's for medium-high loads of say 50-70% CPU load, stress testing 100% load on 3.9Ghz could be a little too much for the stock cooler. So basically what I am trying to say is depending on your workload the stock cooler could be fine, even for gaming maybe at 3.9, whereas 4Ghz might be too much of a stretch for the stock cooler and might require an AIO cooler even... that's if you can even get it stable, some have found that 4Ghz just isn't possible as it's getting close to 1.5Vcore and that could be really bad for the lifespan of the chip.

 

So if you bear the above in mind. For mid-high loads at 3.8/3.9 the stock cooler should be fine as long as you have decent case fans for intake too. for higher loads and 4Ghz, you will almost definitely need a BIG air cooler or AIO. I would recommend the kraken range, but they are a bit pricey... so that leaves maybe the corsair H100i range, but they are a little over a $100 IIRC, so maybe a thermaltake AIO, or a bequiet air cooler.

[BluJay614]

14 minutes ago, ono said:

I recently ordered an R7 1700 that I plan to OC on the Asus Prime X370 Pro. I'm a newbie to OCing, so I need some help picking a cooler. I hear the stock cooler is pretty good, so its hard for me to know what will actually improve temps for me an not just be a waste of money. I am using the Fractal Design Define R5, so it is pretty roomy. I don't really have a solid budget on what I want to spend yet. Say under $100 for now.

 

One of the reasons I went with the 1700 over the X versions was to get the stock cooler (and since they'll OC close to each other anyway is what I was told) so that I didn't have to restrict myself only to coolers that work out-of-the-box since I'm impatient. I was thinking of the Noctua U12S, which has an out-of-the-box AM4 version that seems to be out of stock last I searched for it. I saw an AM4 version of D15 in stock at Amazon, but that thing is massive and I don't know if I want to go that far and make maintaining a bit more annoying since it probably blocks a lot of things and may require remounting if I need to work on something.

Since it sounds like you are wanting to air cool, and you aren't wanting a massive chuck of aluminum hanging off your mobo, that U12S is a good option from Noctua. I would also suggest the H7 from Cryorig

[ono]

1 hour ago, Thinkfreely said:

Are you wanting to water cool it or air cool it?

I'm not sure. I'm a newbie and it sounded like liquid cooling is more work to maintain (maybe not so much with AIO?), so I'm leaning on air cool. AIO suggestions is also welcomed though.

1 hour ago, paddy-stone said:

What do you plan on using it for?

 

The reason I'm asking is so I know what to recommend. Ryzen requires quite a lot of voltage to get that all important 4Ghz. Whereas on some chips a 3.9Ghz OC can be like 1.35v for instance and might even be cooled by the stock cooler if it's for medium-high loads of say 50-70% CPU load, stress testing 100% load on 3.9Ghz could be a little too much for the stock cooler. So basically what I am trying to say is depending on your workload the stock cooler could be fine, even for gaming maybe at 3.9, whereas 4Ghz might be too much of a stretch for the stock cooler and might require an AIO cooler even... that's if you can even get it stable, some have found that 4Ghz just isn't possible as it's getting close to 1.5Vcore and that could be really bad for the lifespan of the chip.

 

So if you bear the above in mind. For mid-high loads at 3.8/3.9 the stock cooler should be fine as long as you have decent case fans for intake too. for higher loads and 4Ghz, you will almost definitely need a BIG air cooler or AIO. I would recommend the kraken range, but they are a bit pricey... so that leaves maybe the corsair H100i range, but they are a little over a $100 IIRC, so maybe a thermaltake AIO, or a bequiet air cooler.

The H100i is about $110 at Amazon and I was seriously thinking of that since the available bulky Noctua D15 was intimidating me haha But I decided to hold off that purchase to first check what I'm getting off stock and if I'm happy with the results. Started this topic to get the ball rolling on my research on this.

 

I don't know what the work load would be. My two use cases that could occur concurrently,

- Gaming: Both native PC and emulated. For native, I aim for 4K so my GPU is probably the bottleneck. Emulation only hits a couple cores hard.

- Photography: Mostly Lightroom. Seems like it only uses 5-6 cores effectively currently.

 

Combined, I'm not sure at the load will be at this moment.  I'll probably only go up to 1.35v, which I think is the AMD recommendation for long term? Hopefully I can get decent speeds there with my chip.

[paddy-stone]

1 minute ago, ono said:

I'm not sure. I'm a newbie and it sounded like liquid cooling is more work to maintain (maybe not so much with AIO?), so I'm leaning on air cool. AIO suggestions is also welcomed though.

The H100i is about $110 at Amazon and I was seriously thinking of that since the available bulky Noctua D15 was intimidating me haha But I decided to hold off that purchase to first check what I'm getting off stock and if I'm happy with the results. Started this topic to get the ball rolling on my research on this.

 

I don't know what the work load would be. My two use cases that could occur concurrently,

- Gaming: Both native PC and emulated. For native, I aim for 4K so my GPU is probably the bottleneck. Emulation only hits a couple cores hard.

- Photography: Mostly Lightroom. Seems like it only uses 5-6 cores effectively currently.

 

Combined, I'm not sure at the load will be at this moment.  I'll probably only go up to 1.35v, which I think is the AMD recommendation for long term? Hopefully I can get decent speeds there with my chip.

If any rendering is required that is CPU dependant that would be a 100% load. Anyway, I would wait and see how you get on with the wraith spire, it is a nice little cooler and not noisy or anything, you can pla around with the fan curve or profiles to see if you get better performance out of it, but if rendering as I said above I wouldn't try to OC past 3.8 it WILL get very toasty most likely, unless you won the silicon lottery and didn't have to up the vcore very much. It shouldn't be too much hassle changing the cooler if you decide to go with the AIO after testing though. Just make sure that when you are testing that the workloads you are trying to put through aren't time sensitive or anything, as you WILL have to re-run them if you get a BSOD, you will also have to alter your frequency and/or voltage so you don't BSOD again hopefully.

[Thinkfreely]

26 minutes ago, ono said:

I'm not sure. I'm a newbie and it sounded like liquid cooling is more work to maintain (maybe not so much with AIO?), so I'm leaning on air cool. AIO suggestions is also welcomed though.

So like Paddy said, see what you can get on the stock cooler ( I was able to get a ryzen 3 for my wife's build I am doing to 3.7.-3.8 on the little stealth cooler) before buying a new one. If you do need a new one AIO's aren't hard to maintenance if you go water, or you can get a powerful AIR cooler.

[hammer3339]

AIO's are essentially zero maintenance, you slap it on and leave it until it dies in a couple years (unless you get a faulty one)

 

speed is mostly irrelevant its more or less purely the amount of voltage that you want to cram into your CPU that will determine how hot it will get under load, try not to go over 1.35-1.4v on air and you should be fine, I've heard reports that you can get pretty decent OC's with the spire cooler but I'd recommend something along the lines of the Be Quiet Dark Rock 3, it's my daily driver and an excellent balance of cost/performance/ noise, Noctua makes some nice mid - high range gear and cryo rig isn't too shabby either.

[WoodenMarker]

You should see how the stock cooler performs first before deciding on whether or not to replace it.

[ono]

My 1700 arrived. At 3.7 GHz 1.25v, I get 40c idle and gets to 85c full load on aida64 running for a half hour. Aida64 is unstable at that speed at a lower voltage. Not sure about ambient temp as I didn't see one on the latest Hwinfo beta. Motherboard temp is about 40c. That full load temp is pretty bad? Might be ok under more normal, non-stress testing use, but I haven't tried to do any gaming or daily tasks at that speed/voltage yet.

 

I did test 3.6 GHz stock voltage (1.18v I think) and that's about 40c idle and 75c on aida64. That seems more reasonable. I've ran this for a day doing daily stuff and Lightroom. No gaming yet. But so far so good at that speed and voltage.

 

I saw that Noctua U12S AMD edition go back in stock, so I ordered that. Hopefully that gets me to 3.7 less toasty or maybe even 3.8.

 

On a side note, when I do a manual voltage setting on my Asus Prime X370 Pro BIOS (latest version), it locks my clockspeed to 1.5 GHz when I'm in Windows regardless of what ratio I set. I haven't tried using offset mode yet, but I hear that fixed the issue for some people on other mobos. The above OC figures I did with Ryzen Master, which seems neat since I can switch between the two above profiles as needed without a reboot.

 

Noctua U12S came in and better results. Maybe some of it is attributed to better thermal compound and/or application.

 

I went with 1.35v since I recall that was the AMD recommended threshold (though I hear others cite 1.4 etc.). I didn't dare do this with the Wraith Spire since it got toasty with 1.25. At that voltage I got 3.85 GHz, ~38c idle and ~72c on an hour of aida64. System unstable at faster speeds. So much, much better cooling performance than I was getting with the Wraith.

 

Thanks for the cooler suggestions, folks.