Cooling 10980XE - Noctua DH15, Arctic Liquid Freezer II 420MM, or do I really need to go custom water?

[lopoetve]

Got the CPU, going on a Designaire 10G - 128G of RAM (mixed usage - CAD and 3d design some, might run a 3d printer, some server workloads in the background, possibly occasional light gaming if I feel weird). Trying to figure out how to cool it - with my Threadripper, I just chucked the TR4 version of the Noctua on and went away happy, but I've heard that the 10-series HEDT is... less tolerant of that as a monolithic die vs the chiplets. No overclock past the base configuration on the system for ~now~, but in theory, I might in the future (although not to extremes, most likely). Estimating a normal sustained load of 50-60%, with some spikes, and probably only a little AVX.

So that's obviously option 1. Just get the Noctua again and let it be.

Option 2 would seem to be the Arctic Cooling Liquid Freezer II 420 AIO - 420MM of rad space, three 140mm fans... but finding results from folks using it has been hard - not sure how much of a difference it makes with the water.

Option 3 is to suck it up and admit I have to do custom water on this - even if I leave the GPU air cooled. That's a bunch of money I was trying to avoid spending right away, but... I'm willing to consider it if I have to (also changes my case choices).

Thoughts?

 

[Dan_D]

The CPU's are actually not too bad as far as cooling goes if you leave them at stock clocks and speeds. For that, a Noctua is probably OK. It might be a bit better if you go with a really good AIO, but that's up to you. I would only go custom water if overclocking it heavily. Our test CPU could do 4.8GHz all core, but it took a ton of radiator and custom water to do it. Even a 360mm custom loop couldn't handle it. That CPU could hit 108c-109c at 4.8GHz. 110c is where those throttle. The chips can pull over 500w on their own clocked like that. We were able to keep it cool enough (barely) on some AIO's at 4.7GHz, but 4.8GHz was impossible on an AIO.

 

[lopoetve]

So if I were planning on 4.5 or so, I could possibly get away with the 420mm... (for the future, as things rotate down).

 

[Dan_D]

So if I were planning on 4.5 or so, I could possibly get away with the 420mm... (for the future, as things rotate down).

Yes. I don't want to say your good to go for sure as some CPU's don't clock as well as others. Some require too much voltage and top out around 4.5GHz. Even if they do, you are probably still OK with a 420mm AIO.