5900X Temps

[dannyboy75]

I had a 5800X for a couple of years which always ran quite toasty - it would quite quickly hit 90C under load. About 18 months ago I replaced it with a 5900X, which I thought might run a tad cooler having two chiplets and lower thermal density.

Although the 5900X doesn't max out quite as quickly, it's still a hottie and hits 90 fairly easily when under load. From everything I've read, that's not unusual for Ryzen 5000 due to its aggressive boost clocks, and even 90C is fine as it throttles at that point. I can't help thinking I'm losing performance though, if my CPU is having to throttle, especially in CPU-locked games like MSFS.

I'm using a fairly cheap air cooler - Arctic Freezer E34 (just the chonky single fan version, not the more compact eSports Duo), and the MX-4 paste that came with it. But that's supposed to cope with up to 150W TDP, which should be OK for a 5900X with 105W TDP? I've done the whole 'reapplying thermal paste' thing several times over the last year or so, which made no difference.

Air flow is reasonably good in my case, despite my abysmal cable management. The case is vented at the top anyway, and also has two fans at the front to pull air through.

Idle temps in Ryzen Master are around 36-40C, or 50-54C in BIOS. I do have a mild overclock configured via PBO, but that hasn't really affected my Ryzen's willingness to hit 90C. It was doing that quite happily even at stock speeds.

Would it be worth me investing in a better air cooler, or am I unlikely to see much difference unless I go for an AIO instead?

thanks
Danny

[AGTDenton]

To give you some comparison my 5950x (stock) runs at less than 70c in games with an Arctic Freezer II 360 AIO.
My CPU is not as powerful in gaming as your two.

I would consider if sticking with air to bump up to two 140mm fans as long as chassis is big enough to accommodate. Can't go wrong with a Noctua but you would be hitting AIO pricing territory.

Highly recommend the Arctic Freezer ii I have, if less than £140 still.
I got mine around £125 but know it's had a price increase since, without shopping around.

The other option is as long as air is escaping your chassis and you're not experiencing any ill effects you could just stick with what you have. It certainly won't damage anything with the way things throttle these days and how much headroom they have.

[Percy1983]

My 59000x idles around 35-40 and doesn't go over 70 under load.

Running a 140mm radiator with 2 fans push/pull (Nepton 140XL)

Edit:
More info, thought I would run OCCT.

Max temp 74
Max boost 4.950

Stabilised around 70 with boost of 4.550

[kalniel]

Turn off PBO - it's there to remove thermal/power caps so your 105W TDP is now a >140W TDP. AMD tells reviewers to disable it because otherwise the power/heat figures will look bad. Check that your motherboard is likewise sticking to the TDP limit and hasn't disabled it - gamer oriented boards often do (on Intel at least, where the only difference between some chips was the TDP limit).

Then next cheapest solution is to get a 140mm CPU fan - get one with 120mm mounting holes and it's a straight swap while the extra airflow around the tower can do amazing things for temps.

Then consider another pull fan in line with the CPU tower - doesn't have to be on the tower itself if you don't have the mounting bracket, but just in the case roughly in line (and make sure you have it the right way around to exhaust!)

[DanceswithUnix]

These chips don't so much throttle at 90C, it is more that they keep cranking up the clocks until either they hit their power limit or they hit 90C whichever happens first. They basically seem to try and run hot.

Having said that, I also have an AC 34 eSports with the single fan and while I haven't been watching during things like gaming in my everyday work it doesn't go much above 70C (about 73 when I did a big compile just now that hits all cores for some time).

Perhaps a floating point workload like a big video transcode would hit it harder, but the ffmpeg transcodes I do as part of my usual work don't use all the cores and again top out at about 74C.

I do have an intake fan at the front of case and exit fan at the top and back near the CPU so airflow is pretty good. When the GPU is kicking out 300W into the case, I suspect it won't be so chilly.

I don't use PBO, not even tried on this CPU. Just seems to make the fans noisy and I can't feel any performance difference.

Still, I think the only way you can get temps down for sure is to go for a decent liquid cooling system. That should make it throttle on power limits rather than temperature but it will always crank the clocks until it throttles on something.