The cheaper coolers will work fine yes, but as I said with Ryzen specifically they won't allow the user to take full advantage of their hardware. Put simply, i

The cheaper coolers will work fine yes, but as I said with Ryzen specifically they won't allow the user to take full advantage of their hardware. Put simply, it has a particular temperature target that it tries to stay at as much as possible and it'll adjust its clockspeed boosting dynamically to achieve that. The more easily it can maintain that temperature, the higher the CPU will boost. With a lesser cooler, this means the chip may barely be boosting at all depending on the cooler's capabilities, especially for hotter chips like the 5800X, 5900X, and 5950X (which interestingly all share the same 105W TDP despite considerably different power consumption characteristics). Depending on how bad the mismatch is between CPU and cooler you may be better off saving money and buying a cheaper CPU with performance closer to what your cooler is capping more expensive CPUs to. And yes you're right, you're probably not going to get cooling that competent from a major OEM. That's why it's not a great idea for home users to buy from a major Windows PC OEM unless their needs are fairly pedestrian.