The Ryzen Master Software: A New Era in Overclocking and Cooling
I've been experimenting with the AMD Spire cooler, and I must say that it's been a fascinating journey. We're seeing temperatures now in the High 40s, which is actually really good, especially when you consider overclocking and all that. The fact that we're only raising like 7 to 10 degrees from idle to game time is kind of interesting. I'm not exactly sure if the idling temps are high or if the overclocking temps are low; it's just kinda strange, but that's only part of the question because the R7700 is really appealing to gamers who want more than just gaming.
They're actually doing multi-threaded applications like live encoding, and if you're going to be gaming while streaming, maybe editing videos at the same time. So, I decided to retest with GTA 5 still running but this time streaming it out to 720p at 60 frames per second as well as having a couple Chrome tabs open. Just to see exactly how much the temperatures spike up, and sure enough, we did see an increase going from the high 40s again to uh the 50s and 60s now. I was monitoring these temperatures within AMD Ryzen Master by the way, so I don't know if it's still too early to tell just how reliable that application is for monitoring temps, but that's really all I had on hand at the moment.
So, getting into the 50s and 60s; I mean, that's still very reasonable considering we're almost overclocking to 4 GHz here now. I did try to overclock to 4 GHz, however, the voltage required to hit that was actually introducing too much heat for the Spire to really handle. And so, what we saw was a little bit of thermal throttling once we got up to like the high 70s and then all of a sudden it just auto-failed safed and shut down; I mean, it just crashed from instability or from getting too hot to prevent any sort of damage from happening.
That was kind of a bummer because we didn't quite get to hit that 4 GHz mark with the Spire at least with my chip. You guys might be able to fare better in the silicon lottery and whatnot, and be able to hit 4 GHz no problem with this cooler but at least in my testing setup today, I was unable to do so. So, that sort of leads me into how I feel about the Spire overall.
If you're not trying to hit the utmost highest overclock with your R7700 then the Spire is a perfectly sound solution. It's incredibly quiet for what it is and actually offers some really decent thermals especially on you know; it's a 65-watt TDP chip with a 95-watt TDP cooler so you do have that additional headroom if you did want to overclock. Just might not be able to squeeze every last ounce of performance out of your CPU as you might with say a higher-end aftermarket air cooler or of course, a liquid-cooled option.
Overall, the Spire is a solid value from AMD that's going to save a lot of users a nice chunk of change on an aftermarket cooler. The last thing I want to mention is that the Spire is a downward-firing cooler so you're going to be exhausting hot air completely different directions all over inside your case but as long as you have the proper airflow path that's going through your chassis, you know, you've got some nice intake fans maybe a couple of exhaust at the top and the rear then that should pretty much redirect and refocus that exhausted air from the cooler out the appropriate um uh exits of your chassis.
The Future of Overclocking and Cooling
The future of overclocking and cooling is looking bright with the AMD Spire. It's a solid solution for those who want to push their CPUs to the limit without breaking the bank. With its decent thermals, quiet operation, and additional headroom for overclocking, it's an excellent choice for anyone looking to upgrade their gaming rig or build a new PC.
However, as we saw in my testing, there are some limitations to the Spire's capabilities. It may not be able to hit the highest overclocks, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. With the right cooling solution, you can still achieve excellent performance without overheating your CPU.
The AMD Ryzen Master software is also an exciting development in the world of CPU cooling. Its ability to monitor temperatures and provide real-time feedback is invaluable for overclockers and enthusiasts alike. While it may take some time to become fully reliable, it's already proven itself to be a valuable tool in the right hands.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the AMD Spire cooler is an excellent choice for anyone looking to upgrade their gaming rig or build a new PC. With its decent thermals, quiet operation, and additional headroom for overclocking, it's a solid solution that won't break the bank. While there may be some limitations to its capabilities, those can be mitigated with proper cooling solutions and airflow management.
As we look to the future of overclocking and cooling, the AMD Spire is definitely worth keeping an eye on. Its potential for performance and reliability makes it an exciting development in the world of PC hardware.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up party people welcome back to the channel today we're going to be taking a closer look at amd's one of amd's brand new stock coolers that comes bundled with the r7700 and that is The Wraith spire and this is not to be confused with The Wraith the original wraith that AMD launched a year or two ago nor is it to be confused with The Wraith Max which is the other new stock cooler from AMD that comes bundled with the 1800x and the 1700x now it's perfectly reasonable for you to be wondering why am I doing a standalone video on a stock cooler that seems is more or less uninteresting and it might be for some of you but the way I see it is that the r7700 is probably the most appealing of the three ryzen chips right now of the R7 family uh due to its lower price point at 330 MSRP uh and the fact that you can overclock the crap out of it and pretty much get similar performance on par with the 1800x for a fraction of the cost so with that in mind users looking to buy the 1700 are also probably checking out the included Spire cooler thinking well is that cooler really good enough or is it cool enough or quiet enough or should I just throw in the towel right now and assume that I'm going to have to buy a 3040 $50 cooler anyway so that's what we're really going to answer today now with that said let's dive into some of the basic specs of The Wraith Spire starting with its TDP of 95 Watts which is actually fairly nice because we uh only have a 65 wat TDP on the ryzen CPU the 1700 is a fairly low power chip so the fact that AMD is bundled a 95 watt TDP cooler with it means that they've actually kept overclocking and overclockers in mind with this particular launch so that's actually really nice we're going to have additional headro to take the chip a bit further you may have also noticed that the Spire is significantly smaller than both The Wraith and wraith Max uh and that's actually a really good thing because the one complaint that the big complaint that I had with the original Max uh the original wraith cooler was that it was so freakishly large that it was intruding on the ram clearance and actually you couldn't even install uh the leftmost dim properly unless you had like a like a full ATX board because with a with a small form Factor board you just had all that componentry being squeezed together on the PCB and it was creating all these sort of clearance issues between the cooler itself and the memory you're not getting that at all with the Spire regardless of what form factor motherboard you're dealing with so I think that's a huge plus overall the other thing I want to mention is that the fan itself uh on the Spire is 92 mm it's actually fairly large for a stock cooler these days uh very much modeling after The Wraith in that sense um but it's also fairly quiet as we will see uh a bit later and that is being controlled by a pin pwm fan header which is also nice to see the Spire also comes included with a second cable that's got a four pin connector that plugs directly into the RGB header on your motherboard should you have one and that's just to control the RGB ring that goes around the fan we're not going to be diving into any customization or or demoing that at all this is more so about the performance again uh but if you were to control or configure that that led uh you would have to go into the appropriate motherboard manufacturer software so if you had a Crosshair Asus board you'd have to use Aura if you were on a MSI Motherboard like I am it' be the MSI gaming app and so forth but um pretty cool to see some little bit of bling factor on a stock cooler for once that is pretty sweet however of course you don't have to enable that you can just not use the cable don't plug that in and all of a sudden it's uh it's it's completely um unilluminated so the last bit to discuss here is mounting and the Spire actually mounts to the motherboard very easily it probably takes 10 to 15 seconds to do and at first it looks like it does it the same way as the Intel stock coolers with push pins but that's actually not the case these are in fact uh just regular Phillips head screws that screw directly into an am4 back plate that goes behind the PCB of course of the motherboard and installation is just a breeze super simple straightforward and it works properly it's less awkward than the push pins on the Intel side and it's much less awkward than the stupid seesaw bar the Seesaw retention bar that we that we find on older AMD uh and also the uh The Wraith coolers as well and I think now we can talk about some of the testing so testing Hardware first off we're rocking an MS i x370 x power gaming titanium motherboard that is just way too long for for a name we've also got a GTX 1070 that's rocking a Founders Edition stock frequencies 16 gigs of Corsair Vengeance lpx ddr4 of course which is one of the few uh ddr4 kits that's validated for ryzen and then we've also got a Lepa 1600 watt power supply a 512 gig sx900 SSD from adata which we're using as a fresh clean install boot drive it's it's a really fresh Drive there's really not much else on it other than the essentials and of course the WRA spire and all that jazz so that's pretty much going to do it for our testing setup we are rucking Windows 10 64bit of course with the latest NVIDIA drivers 37866 all right and um testing so I fired up the test bed for the first time everything running stock The Wraith cooler is that it stock whatever default curve that it runs at uh and the 1700 is running at stock frequencies which Precision boosts up to 3.2 GHz on all cores under multi-threaded workload so that's what we were rocking there so for this initial test we fired up GTA 5 at Max settings 2560 x440 2xmsaa and what we found after about 20 minutes of gameplay was that the CPU temperatures were staying in the low 60s and that's in degrees celsius of course which is fairly reasonable granted we aren't putting a huge thermal uh burden on the CPU just yet because we haven't overclocked it at all but uh I mean the fan is just running on auto we haven't maxed out the fan speed on the Spire by any means and I guess I was just expecting a little bit worse in terms of thermal performance than what we're seeing here I mean it's not super chilly in my room or anything ambient temps aren't they they could always be lower but uh actually a fairly good uh start for The Wraith Spire but now let's see how it performs when we crank things up on the multiplier I got the chip stable at 3.9 GHz at 1.3 volts of course CPU Z was reading it a little bit higher at 1.31 to um but uh overall very very consistent on the V cor and then I fired up GTA V once again all the same settings and saw the core temps start to spike up I mean they just started climbing the ladder uh once they hit about 80° c i rebooted into the BIOS and I just cranked The Wraith fan uh the uh the Spire fan up to 100% And before you start judging and start thinking well it's probably going to sound like a turbine engine at this point it actually doesn't the the Spire fan is incredibly quiet even at 100% fan speed I was remarkably impressed by how quiet it was um I I actually had my uh again my my AC my window AC unit running at the time when I uh crank the fan to 100 and I literally had to put my ear to the cooler to make sure that it was actually taking effect um because it was just being drowned out by the the window AC unit which isn't really that loud to begin with so especially if you're going to be using headphones while you're gaming you're really not going to notice uh The Wraith um spinning up to 100% at all especially inside of a conventional closed chassis and on that note before we kick it off to a sound test you can actually hear what 100% fan speed sounds like I did want to mention that you're also the microphone is also going to be picking up the fan noise coming from the GPU and the power supply as well so just bear that in mind as you go about listening so with our R7 overclocked to 3.9 GHz stable and our wraith Spire cooler now operating at 100% fan speed I jumped once again into GTA 5 just to see how much slower the temperatures on our CPU would be and what we found was with just GTA 5 no background applications just the game alone uh we were seeing temperatures now in the High 40s that's actually really good especially running overclocked and all that when you consider everything um I will say that idling temperatures are are oddly High we were seeing like high 30s and low 40s um just at idle and so the fact that we're we're only raising like 7 to 10 degre jumping into a game is kind of interesting I'm not exactly sure if the idling temps are high or if the overclocking temps are low uh it's just uh just kind of strange but uh that that is only that is only like that only answer part of the question because the r7700 is really appealing to Gamers who want more than just gaming who are actually doing uh multi-threaded applications like live encoding if you're going to be gaming while streaming maybe editing your videos at the same time so I decided to retest um with GTA 5 still running but this time streaming it out to 720p at 60 frames per second as well as having a couple Chrome tabs open as well just to see exactly how much the the temperatures Spike up and sure enough we did see an increase going from the high 40s again to uh the 50s and 60s now so I was monitoring these temperatures within AMD uh ryzen Master by the way so I don't know I still don't know it's still too early to tell just how reliable that uh application is for monitoring temps but that's really all I had on hand at the moment so just bear that in mind going into these numbers uh so get getting into the 50s and 60s I mean that's still very reasonable considering that we're almost overclock to 4 GHz here now I did try to overclock to 4 GHz however the voltage required to hit that at least on my particular chip uh which was 1.3 625 that's actually what I got away with when I was using using that knock to a cooler uh in the other video that voltage uh was introducing too much heat for the Spire to really handle um and so what we saw was a little bit of thermal throttling once we got up to like the high 70s and then all of a sudden it just auto fail safed and shut down I mean it just crashed from instability or or from getting too hot to prevent any sort of damage from happening and uh that was kind of a bummer so we didn't quite uh we're not quite able to hit that 4 GHz Mark with the Spire at least with my chip you guys might be might Faire better in the Silicon Lottery and whatnot and be able to hit 4 GHz no problem with this cooler but at least in my testing setup today I was unable to do so so that sort of leads me into how I feel about the Spire overall and we can kind of wrap this video up is that if you aren't trying to hit the utmost highest overclock with your r7700 then the Spire is a perfectly sound solution that is incredibly quiet for what it is and actually offers some really decent thermals especially on you know it is a 65 wat TDP chip with a 95 wat TDP cooler so you do have that additional Headroom if you did want to overclock you just might not be able to to squeeze every last ounce of performance out of your CPU as you might with say a higher-end aftermarket air cooler like a tower cooler for example or of course a liquid cooled option but overall a very solid value ad from AMD that I think is going to save a lot of users a nice chunk of change on an aftermarket cooler uh the last thing I want to mention is that the Spire is a downward firing cooler so you're going to be exhausting hot air completely different directions all over inside your case but as long as you have the proper airflow path that's going through your chassis you know you've got some nice intake fans maybe a couple exhaust at the top and the rear then that should pretty much redirect and refocus that exhausted air from the cooler out the appropriate um uh exits of your chassis so that's pretty much all I have for you guys today let me know what you think about the Spire so far in the comments and also feel free to toss me a like on this video if you enjoyed it have a good one guys I hope you all have a lovely weekend or whenever or weekday depending on when I post this video I'm not sure but uh yes thank you all so much for watching as always feel free to check out some of the links in the description uh ways that you can help support the channel there's my story you can subscribe to bitw ultra but I'm going to get out of here guys so have yourselves a very good day and I'll see y'all in the next videowhat's up party people welcome back to the channel today we're going to be taking a closer look at amd's one of amd's brand new stock coolers that comes bundled with the r7700 and that is The Wraith spire and this is not to be confused with The Wraith the original wraith that AMD launched a year or two ago nor is it to be confused with The Wraith Max which is the other new stock cooler from AMD that comes bundled with the 1800x and the 1700x now it's perfectly reasonable for you to be wondering why am I doing a standalone video on a stock cooler that seems is more or less uninteresting and it might be for some of you but the way I see it is that the r7700 is probably the most appealing of the three ryzen chips right now of the R7 family uh due to its lower price point at 330 MSRP uh and the fact that you can overclock the crap out of it and pretty much get similar performance on par with the 1800x for a fraction of the cost so with that in mind users looking to buy the 1700 are also probably checking out the included Spire cooler thinking well is that cooler really good enough or is it cool enough or quiet enough or should I just throw in the towel right now and assume that I'm going to have to buy a 3040 $50 cooler anyway so that's what we're really going to answer today now with that said let's dive into some of the basic specs of The Wraith Spire starting with its TDP of 95 Watts which is actually fairly nice because we uh only have a 65 wat TDP on the ryzen CPU the 1700 is a fairly low power chip so the fact that AMD is bundled a 95 watt TDP cooler with it means that they've actually kept overclocking and overclockers in mind with this particular launch so that's actually really nice we're going to have additional headro to take the chip a bit further you may have also noticed that the Spire is significantly smaller than both The Wraith and wraith Max uh and that's actually a really good thing because the one complaint that the big complaint that I had with the original Max uh the original wraith cooler was that it was so freakishly large that it was intruding on the ram clearance and actually you couldn't even install uh the leftmost dim properly unless you had like a like a full ATX board because with a with a small form Factor board you just had all that componentry being squeezed together on the PCB and it was creating all these sort of clearance issues between the cooler itself and the memory you're not getting that at all with the Spire regardless of what form factor motherboard you're dealing with so I think that's a huge plus overall the other thing I want to mention is that the fan itself uh on the Spire is 92 mm it's actually fairly large for a stock cooler these days uh very much modeling after The Wraith in that sense um but it's also fairly quiet as we will see uh a bit later and that is being controlled by a pin pwm fan header which is also nice to see the Spire also comes included with a second cable that's got a four pin connector that plugs directly into the RGB header on your motherboard should you have one and that's just to control the RGB ring that goes around the fan we're not going to be diving into any customization or or demoing that at all this is more so about the performance again uh but if you were to control or configure that that led uh you would have to go into the appropriate motherboard manufacturer software so if you had a Crosshair Asus board you'd have to use Aura if you were on a MSI Motherboard like I am it' be the MSI gaming app and so forth but um pretty cool to see some little bit of bling factor on a stock cooler for once that is pretty sweet however of course you don't have to enable that you can just not use the cable don't plug that in and all of a sudden it's uh it's it's completely um unilluminated so the last bit to discuss here is mounting and the Spire actually mounts to the motherboard very easily it probably takes 10 to 15 seconds to do and at first it looks like it does it the same way as the Intel stock coolers with push pins but that's actually not the case these are in fact uh just regular Phillips head screws that screw directly into an am4 back plate that goes behind the PCB of course of the motherboard and installation is just a breeze super simple straightforward and it works properly it's less awkward than the push pins on the Intel side and it's much less awkward than the stupid seesaw bar the Seesaw retention bar that we that we find on older AMD uh and also the uh The Wraith coolers as well and I think now we can talk about some of the testing so testing Hardware first off we're rocking an MS i x370 x power gaming titanium motherboard that is just way too long for for a name we've also got a GTX 1070 that's rocking a Founders Edition stock frequencies 16 gigs of Corsair Vengeance lpx ddr4 of course which is one of the few uh ddr4 kits that's validated for ryzen and then we've also got a Lepa 1600 watt power supply a 512 gig sx900 SSD from adata which we're using as a fresh clean install boot drive it's it's a really fresh Drive there's really not much else on it other than the essentials and of course the WRA spire and all that jazz so that's pretty much going to do it for our testing setup we are rucking Windows 10 64bit of course with the latest NVIDIA drivers 37866 all right and um testing so I fired up the test bed for the first time everything running stock The Wraith cooler is that it stock whatever default curve that it runs at uh and the 1700 is running at stock frequencies which Precision boosts up to 3.2 GHz on all cores under multi-threaded workload so that's what we were rocking there so for this initial test we fired up GTA 5 at Max settings 2560 x440 2xmsaa and what we found after about 20 minutes of gameplay was that the CPU temperatures were staying in the low 60s and that's in degrees celsius of course which is fairly reasonable granted we aren't putting a huge thermal uh burden on the CPU just yet because we haven't overclocked it at all but uh I mean the fan is just running on auto we haven't maxed out the fan speed on the Spire by any means and I guess I was just expecting a little bit worse in terms of thermal performance than what we're seeing here I mean it's not super chilly in my room or anything ambient temps aren't they they could always be lower but uh actually a fairly good uh start for The Wraith Spire but now let's see how it performs when we crank things up on the multiplier I got the chip stable at 3.9 GHz at 1.3 volts of course CPU Z was reading it a little bit higher at 1.31 to um but uh overall very very consistent on the V cor and then I fired up GTA V once again all the same settings and saw the core temps start to spike up I mean they just started climbing the ladder uh once they hit about 80° c i rebooted into the BIOS and I just cranked The Wraith fan uh the uh the Spire fan up to 100% And before you start judging and start thinking well it's probably going to sound like a turbine engine at this point it actually doesn't the the Spire fan is incredibly quiet even at 100% fan speed I was remarkably impressed by how quiet it was um I I actually had my uh again my my AC my window AC unit running at the time when I uh crank the fan to 100 and I literally had to put my ear to the cooler to make sure that it was actually taking effect um because it was just being drowned out by the the window AC unit which isn't really that loud to begin with so especially if you're going to be using headphones while you're gaming you're really not going to notice uh The Wraith um spinning up to 100% at all especially inside of a conventional closed chassis and on that note before we kick it off to a sound test you can actually hear what 100% fan speed sounds like I did want to mention that you're also the microphone is also going to be picking up the fan noise coming from the GPU and the power supply as well so just bear that in mind as you go about listening so with our R7 overclocked to 3.9 GHz stable and our wraith Spire cooler now operating at 100% fan speed I jumped once again into GTA 5 just to see how much slower the temperatures on our CPU would be and what we found was with just GTA 5 no background applications just the game alone uh we were seeing temperatures now in the High 40s that's actually really good especially running overclocked and all that when you consider everything um I will say that idling temperatures are are oddly High we were seeing like high 30s and low 40s um just at idle and so the fact that we're we're only raising like 7 to 10 degre jumping into a game is kind of interesting I'm not exactly sure if the idling temps are high or if the overclocking temps are low uh it's just uh just kind of strange but uh that that is only that is only like that only answer part of the question because the r7700 is really appealing to Gamers who want more than just gaming who are actually doing uh multi-threaded applications like live encoding if you're going to be gaming while streaming maybe editing your videos at the same time so I decided to retest um with GTA 5 still running but this time streaming it out to 720p at 60 frames per second as well as having a couple Chrome tabs open as well just to see exactly how much the the temperatures Spike up and sure enough we did see an increase going from the high 40s again to uh the 50s and 60s now so I was monitoring these temperatures within AMD uh ryzen Master by the way so I don't know I still don't know it's still too early to tell just how reliable that uh application is for monitoring temps but that's really all I had on hand at the moment so just bear that in mind going into these numbers uh so get getting into the 50s and 60s I mean that's still very reasonable considering that we're almost overclock to 4 GHz here now I did try to overclock to 4 GHz however the voltage required to hit that at least on my particular chip uh which was 1.3 625 that's actually what I got away with when I was using using that knock to a cooler uh in the other video that voltage uh was introducing too much heat for the Spire to really handle um and so what we saw was a little bit of thermal throttling once we got up to like the high 70s and then all of a sudden it just auto fail safed and shut down I mean it just crashed from instability or or from getting too hot to prevent any sort of damage from happening and uh that was kind of a bummer so we didn't quite uh we're not quite able to hit that 4 GHz Mark with the Spire at least with my chip you guys might be might Faire better in the Silicon Lottery and whatnot and be able to hit 4 GHz no problem with this cooler but at least in my testing setup today I was unable to do so so that sort of leads me into how I feel about the Spire overall and we can kind of wrap this video up is that if you aren't trying to hit the utmost highest overclock with your r7700 then the Spire is a perfectly sound solution that is incredibly quiet for what it is and actually offers some really decent thermals especially on you know it is a 65 wat TDP chip with a 95 wat TDP cooler so you do have that additional Headroom if you did want to overclock you just might not be able to to squeeze every last ounce of performance out of your CPU as you might with say a higher-end aftermarket air cooler like a tower cooler for example or of course a liquid cooled option but overall a very solid value ad from AMD that I think is going to save a lot of users a nice chunk of change on an aftermarket cooler uh the last thing I want to mention is that the Spire is a downward firing cooler so you're going to be exhausting hot air completely different directions all over inside your case but as long as you have the proper airflow path that's going through your chassis you know you've got some nice intake fans maybe a couple exhaust at the top and the rear then that should pretty much redirect and refocus that exhausted air from the cooler out the appropriate um uh exits of your chassis so that's pretty much all I have for you guys today let me know what you think about the Spire so far in the comments and also feel free to toss me a like on this video if you enjoyed it have a good one guys I hope you all have a lovely weekend or whenever or weekday depending on when I post this video I'm not sure but uh yes thank you all so much for watching as always feel free to check out some of the links in the description uh ways that you can help support the channel there's my story you can subscribe to bitw ultra but I'm going to get out of here guys so have yourselves a very good day and I'll see y'all in the next video\n"