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These processors are getting ridiculous. It seems like you definitely need at least an AIO watercooler with a 360mm radiator for the i9 these days. I have the i

by pram 4y ago

These processors are getting ridiculous. It seems like you definitely need at least an AIO watercooler with a 360mm radiator for the i9 these days. I have the i7-13700k, and it immediately goes up to 100C with the stock boost/tvb settings. This is with a dual tower Dark Rock Pro 4 heatsink, that was more than adequate to cool an i9 9900K.

izzydata 4y ago
Meanwhile I have an i5-9600k in a case that is smaller than a Playstation 5 using a cooler that is only a bit bigger than those old stock coolers. It comfortably idles around 40c and peaks at 70c. What are people even doing on these newest CPUs? Video rendering? Servers? Because if they are playing games it is a huge waste of power.
- dbspin 4y ago
  Not sure how this generalises, but for video editing - less rendering, which is already fast for most workloads, but the actual tasks of editing, grading etc - CPUs are still nowhere near fast enough. You can easily bring a modern machine to its knees realtime editing 4K or 6K H264 / H265 video with grading at native resolution. Let alone 8K video. Dedicated pipelines for decompressing various video codecs on the fly (including ProRes) are part of the reason Macbook Pros sell so well for video tasks. Another is that you can run them unplugged without slowdown, which is incredibly useful for video editors (good luck editing on a train, plane or back seat of a cab with a windows laptop). All that said, DaVinci Resolve which is increasingly taking over from Premiere for many commercial editors, is more GPU than CPU bound. Lots of sales of the current fastest GPU Nvidia's RTX 4090 to this market.
- grogenaut 4y ago
  Why is rendering video (likely for entertainment) not a waste of power, where playing video games (entertainment) is?
  - izzydata 4y ago
    Ah, that is not what I meant. Such a powerful CPU is a "waste" in a computer meant for gaming because it can never be utilized. It will never be the bottleneck of such a system and you can run your games just as well on a less powerful CPU. The energy used for such activities is another question.
    - grogenaut 4y ago
      Aah. Kk thanks for reply. I'm a dev so I like having those ghz around for other uses as well.
    - kitsunesoba 4y ago
      It depends on the game, settings the user is running it at, and desired framerate and resolution. A number of games are partially CPU-bound and not well multithreaded, which means the only way to get them consistently at or above certain framerates is to pump IPC, which usually means buying the higher end CPUs.
      - skyyler 4y ago
        Are there any games out right now that an i5-9600k would struggle with?
        izzydata 4y ago
        I was using about 60% of my cpu running Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p 120fps. Maybe if you wanted to run it at 8k using an RTX 4090.
        kitsunesoba 4y ago
        There are some that won't consistently stay above certain framerates in some circumstances. World of Warcraft for instance performs tangibly better on newer CPUs in settings like 40v40 team fights in battlegrounds for example due to how CPU-bound it is — on a 9600k it'll struggle to stay above 120FPS and occasionally dip below 60FPS.
        4y ago
- BoorishBears 4y ago
  If you ran a newer CPU at the effective performance of a 9600k you could probably get away with a passive cooler. A last-gen i5 mobile processor outperforms at 9600k with a 45W TDP. People make a ton of noise about the efficiency of processors that are explicitly designed to be the hotrods of desktop computing: meanwhile we've also seen the bottom end get significantly faster over the years. Conversely, the floor for TDPs have barely risen.
- rkagerer 4y ago
  Some games are still single-thread CPU bound, eg. KSP (even after the multithreading enhancements were implemented my understanding and anecdotal sense is most of the bottlenecking math is still sequential in one thread).
coldcode 4y ago
I use a Mac Studio with an M1 Ultra and I have never even heard the fan. I don't miss the white noise at all. I routinely use all 20 cores too.
- Maursault 4y ago
  The Ultra Studio doesn't make sense to me because it costs as much as two Max Studios, which together will outperform one Ultra, and the difference isn't negligible.
helf 4y ago
I have a i9-13900K with just a noctua air cooler and itll happily churn along with cores loaded at 5.5-5.8ghz on the performance ones and whatever peak is on the efficiencies (I have forgotten off the top of my head) and it sits around 89C. so... don't get a top end model or undervolt/underclock it if you care that much? I don't get all the weird complaining about /halo products/ and /highest end models/ potentially using a lot of power and producing a lot of heat. It's like, OK? and?
dijit 4y ago
> It seems like you definitely need at least an AIO watercooler There is another problem with watercooling, which is that once the water warms up (which it will under sustained loads) your CPU temperature will begin to climb. Then it becomes a game of "do I have thermal mass enough to run my job before throttling", and often it can be the case that radiators are unable to effectively cool down the CPU; but the additional water becomes thermal capacity; sometimes giving the appearance of better cooling when in actuality your system will throttle after 10 minutes of work. Your heatsink is one of the better ones, an NHD-15 might be better but only slightly, after which point: I don't think it can be expected to cool a CPU at a sustained load with any AIO system, even the triple fan ones. I'm probably not communicating this terribly well, I went down this rabbit hole when I was watercooling my old GPU and CPU in a custom loop by EK, I ended up discovering that if I wanted to do sustained work (which I did) then a direct airflow system would have worked better, so I ripped out the loop and it did work better for sustained loads.
- omni 4y ago
  > sometimes giving the appearance of better cooling when in actuality your system will throttle after 10 minutes of work. If it throttles after 10 minutes instead of after 20 seconds, that is in fact better cooling. The higher thermal mass is one of the major benefits of water cooling over air cooling for this reason.
  - devnullbrain 4y ago
    It's a pretty useless quality for a gaming PC.
    - fomine3 4y ago
      No game continue utilizing CPU at 100%
- gpapilion 4y ago
  Basically it sounds like your water cooling system was undersized. You didn’t have a good method to cool the water, so you just built up heat in your working fluid. The air did a better job because it was open. So you average initial temp was higher but could be sustained, because you always had cool air. If you had a radiator with a fan it’s like the water solution would have still worked better.

by pram 4y ago

izzydata 4y ago

Meanwhile I have an i5-9600k in a case that is smaller than a Playstation 5 using a cooler that is only a bit bigger than those old stock coolers. It comfortably idles around 40c and peaks at 70c. What are people even doing on these newest CPUs? Video rendering? Servers? Because if they are playing games it is a huge waste of power.

dbspin 4y ago
Not sure how this generalises, but for video editing - less rendering, which is already fast for most workloads, but the actual tasks of editing, grading etc - CPUs are still nowhere near fast enough. You can easily bring a modern machine to its knees realtime editing 4K or 6K H264 / H265 video with grading at native resolution. Let alone 8K video. Dedicated pipelines for decompressing various video codecs on the fly (including ProRes) are part of the reason Macbook Pros sell so well for video tasks. Another is that you can run them unplugged without slowdown, which is incredibly useful for video editors (good luck editing on a train, plane or back seat of a cab with a windows laptop). All that said, DaVinci Resolve which is increasingly taking over from Premiere for many commercial editors, is more GPU than CPU bound. Lots of sales of the current fastest GPU Nvidia's RTX 4090 to this market.
grogenaut 4y ago
Why is rendering video (likely for entertainment) not a waste of power, where playing video games (entertainment) is?
- izzydata 4y ago
  Ah, that is not what I meant. Such a powerful CPU is a "waste" in a computer meant for gaming because it can never be utilized. It will never be the bottleneck of such a system and you can run your games just as well on a less powerful CPU. The energy used for such activities is another question.
  - grogenaut 4y ago
    Aah. Kk thanks for reply. I'm a dev so I like having those ghz around for other uses as well.
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago
    It depends on the game, settings the user is running it at, and desired framerate and resolution. A number of games are partially CPU-bound and not well multithreaded, which means the only way to get them consistently at or above certain framerates is to pump IPC, which usually means buying the higher end CPUs.
    - skyyler 4y ago
      Are there any games out right now that an i5-9600k would struggle with?
      - izzydata 4y ago
        I was using about 60% of my cpu running Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p 120fps. Maybe if you wanted to run it at 8k using an RTX 4090.
      - kitsunesoba 4y ago
        There are some that won't consistently stay above certain framerates in some circumstances. World of Warcraft for instance performs tangibly better on newer CPUs in settings like 40v40 team fights in battlegrounds for example due to how CPU-bound it is — on a 9600k it'll struggle to stay above 120FPS and occasionally dip below 60FPS.
      - 4y ago
BoorishBears 4y ago
If you ran a newer CPU at the effective performance of a 9600k you could probably get away with a passive cooler. A last-gen i5 mobile processor outperforms at 9600k with a 45W TDP. People make a ton of noise about the efficiency of processors that are explicitly designed to be the hotrods of desktop computing: meanwhile we've also seen the bottom end get significantly faster over the years. Conversely, the floor for TDPs have barely risen.
rkagerer 4y ago
Some games are still single-thread CPU bound, eg. KSP (even after the multithreading enhancements were implemented my understanding and anecdotal sense is most of the bottlenecking math is still sequential in one thread).

coldcode 4y ago

I use a Mac Studio with an M1 Ultra and I have never even heard the fan. I don't miss the white noise at all. I routinely use all 20 cores too.

Maursault 4y ago
The Ultra Studio doesn't make sense to me because it costs as much as two Max Studios, which together will outperform one Ultra, and the difference isn't negligible.

helf 4y ago

I have a i9-13900K with just a noctua air cooler and itll happily churn along with cores loaded at 5.5-5.8ghz on the performance ones and whatever peak is on the efficiencies (I have forgotten off the top of my head) and it sits around 89C. so... don't get a top end model or undervolt/underclock it if you care that much? I don't get all the weird complaining about /halo products/ and /highest end models/ potentially using a lot of power and producing a lot of heat. It's like, OK? and?

dijit 4y ago

> It seems like you definitely need at least an AIO watercooler There is another problem with watercooling, which is that once the water warms up (which it will under sustained loads) your CPU temperature will begin to climb. Then it becomes a game of "do I have thermal mass enough to run my job before throttling", and often it can be the case that radiators are unable to effectively cool down the CPU; but the additional water becomes thermal capacity; sometimes giving the appearance of better cooling when in actuality your system will throttle after 10 minutes of work. Your heatsink is one of the better ones, an NHD-15 might be better but only slightly, after which point: I don't think it can be expected to cool a CPU at a sustained load with any AIO system, even the triple fan ones. I'm probably not communicating this terribly well, I went down this rabbit hole when I was watercooling my old GPU and CPU in a custom loop by EK, I ended up discovering that if I wanted to do sustained work (which I did) then a direct airflow system would have worked better, so I ripped out the loop and it did work better for sustained loads.

omni 4y ago
> sometimes giving the appearance of better cooling when in actuality your system will throttle after 10 minutes of work. If it throttles after 10 minutes instead of after 20 seconds, that is in fact better cooling. The higher thermal mass is one of the major benefits of water cooling over air cooling for this reason.
- devnullbrain 4y ago
  It's a pretty useless quality for a gaming PC.
  - fomine3 4y ago
    No game continue utilizing CPU at 100%
gpapilion 4y ago
Basically it sounds like your water cooling system was undersized. You didn’t have a good method to cool the water, so you just built up heat in your working fluid. The air did a better job because it was open. So you average initial temp was higher but could be sustained, because you always had cool air. If you had a radiator with a fan it’s like the water solution would have still worked better.