Question High CPU temperature with Noctua NH-D15 G2 CPU cooler ?

[ankydu]

I have upgraded my system with a Ryzen 9 9950X3D CPU, Noctua NH-D15 G2 CPU Cooler, an
MSI MPG X807E CARBON WIFI Motherboard, 64GB (32GB x2 ) Gskill RAM, and a Zotac 1660 Super 6GB GPU (reused old one). They are all inside a Cooler Master HAF X cabinet with 4 fans (front, top, side and back).

I am a little worried with the CPU temperatures I am seeing.

Immediately at boot it's between 55-59*C. After booting into Windows and not doing anything it hovers between 55-62*c. And when I ran a multi core stress test with CPU-Z for about 7-8 mins it was stable at 86*c in between touching 87*c occasionally. Is it normal for this CPU with this air cooler??
I applied Noctua Nt-H2 thermal compound with the 5 dots application method.

 

[Lutfij]

You're fine. You could undervolt the processor and see if that drops your temps a little.

For the sake of relevance, what are your ambient room air temps?

 

[ankydu]

You're fine. You could undervolt the processor and see if that drops your temps a little.

For the sake of relevance, what are your ambient room air temps?

Though initially I didn't measure exactly but I think it was definitely above 32 degree C in the room. Later on I brought it down to about 26* C and am now running windows 11 setup to upgrade my windows 10 installation and during setup now it's varying from 62 - 70*C. Also the lowest idle temperature I have seen till now is 48-50*C but it went to that only for a short while.

 

[LordVile]

If you want the bigger CPUs to run cool you need water cooling at this point. Some of intels chips from the 13th and 14th gen could not be cooled by an air cooler on all core loads.

 

[JayGau]

That's pretty much the kind of temperature to expect with an air cooler and a 9950X3D

https://www.reddit.com/r/Noctua/com...=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

By the way, if you are using this computer for gaming and don't intend to upgrade the GPU, you totally wasted your money.

 

[ankydu]

That's pretty much the kind of temperature to expect with an air cooler and a 9950X3D

https://www.reddit.com/r/Noctua/com...=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

By the way, if you are using this computer for gaming and don't intend to upgrade the GPU, you totally wasted your money.

I mainly use this system for Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Pro. I have short listed a Zotac Nvidia RTX 5070 12GB, just waiting for the price to normalize a bit. Any others you can recommend?

 

[Misgar]

I have an older NH-D15 Chromax Black on a 7950X (no PBO or XMP) and whilst running Topaz Video AI trancodes, the CPU sits in the mid eighties to low nineties (Celcius).

Trancodes can take 10 to 12 hours with an RTX 4070. I restrict max power on the GPU to 95% with MSI Afterburner to stop occasional system crashes.

Early Topaz software (late 2022/early 2023) was very flaky. I chose Topaz for the full screen stabilisation feature instead of most other editors which crop the video. AI fills in the edges quite effectively from other frames.

For faster CUDA, I'd like an RTX 5090 or an RTX A6000, but I'm not prepared to spend that amount of money or risk connectors catching fire.

My RTX 4070 runs the Topaz DeNoise plugin for Photoshop faster than my old RTX 3060 (both 12GB). I waited until Black Friday 2024.

 

[JayGau]

I mainly use this system for Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Pro. I have short listed a Zotac Nvidia RTX 5070 12GB, just waiting for the price to normalize a bit. Any others you can recommend?

It strongly depends on what you do in Photoshop and Premiere Pro. If you only do basic low resolution image and film editing, the 5070 would be more than enough (could even consider a 5060 Ti in that case), but if you do some complex 3D editing and 4k redenring, I would not go below a 5070 Ti, or the AMD equivalent (9070 XT), especially if you use GPU acceleration.

 

[geofelt]

Your temps seem nominal.
As an experiment, disconnect the top forward fan and see how you do.
It may be redirecting the front intake airflow up and out of he case before it can reach the cooler.
Possibly, you can reuse that fan as an additional front intake using a bay to fan adapter

 

[Misgar]

Your temps seem nominal.

When I use the term "nominal" as an electronics design engineer, it means the system is working as intended with no problems.

https://www.clrn.org/what-does-nominal-mean-in-engineering/

"Fundamentally, ‘nominal’ in engineering signifies a target value or design specification representing the ideal or intended characteristic of a component, parameter, or system."

when I ran a multi core stress test with CPU-Z for about 7-8 mins it was stable at 86*c in between touching 87*c occasionally.

The design spec for the 9950X3D is +95*C and you haven't exceeded +87*C.
https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Zen/AMD-Ryzen 9 9950X3D.html

Electrical / Thermal parameters
Maximum operating temperature ?	95°C

I regularly run my 7950X with peak temperatures between +87*C and 95*C, as shown in HWMonitor.

I don't run PBO on my 7950X and the RAM is at stock DDR5-4800 (no XMP/EXPO/DOCP).

The +95*C limit is set by AMD when the CPU is boosting under heavy loads. You could argue this reduces life time due to increased electromigration, but things don't always last forever.

My old Phenom II X4 955 and 965 have a maximum temperature limit of +60*C. My 7950X has a iimit of +95*C. Intel's i9-14900K is rated at +100*C. Take your pick.

If you improve the cooling of a modern CPU by swapping an NH-D15 for a 420mm AIO, I'd expect it to boost a few hundred MHz faster, until the Silicon die reaches the maximum design temperature, at which point it should start to throttle.

If you're worried about temperatures, there are various things you can do including setting a reduced CPU power limit, but video renders will take slightly longer. Your choice.

Modern CPUs can get hot. It's the way they're designed to work. That's how Intel and AMD achieve high CPU clock speeds and apparently more speed is "better".