**The Myth of Overcooling: A Look at AMD Ryzen 7000 Series CPUs with High-End Coolers**

When it comes to cooling solutions for high-performance CPUs, many enthusiasts tend to believe that overcooling is the key to unlocking maximum performance. However, as we dive into the world of AMD Ryzen 7000 series CPUs and their respective coolers, we're about to challenge this notion.

The question on everyone's mind: can a high-end cooler make a significant difference in performance when it comes to gaming or general use? To answer this, let's take a closer look at our testing methodology and the results we've seen so far. In our all-core workload test, we compared the performance of several coolers, including the 360, 240mm AIO, 120mm AIO, AK-620, AK-400, and Ak-620. The results were eye-opening – even the entry-level AK-400 cooler was able to keep the Ryzen 7950X well above its base clock speed of 5.4 GHz, with temperatures remaining under control at around 95 degrees.

However, when it comes to gaming performance, the story changes dramatically. We took the average of six popular games and compared their performance with our various coolers, all running at different fan speeds. The results were stark – none of the coolers we tested showed any significant difference in frame rates across all six games, even when the fans were turned down to 50%. This suggests that for most users, the best cooling solution is not necessarily the one that keeps temperatures lowest, but rather one that strikes a balance between performance and power consumption.

But what about the 7600X? Our testing revealed that this particular CPU is affected by its cooler more than any other AMD processor. The 7600X has a base clock speed of 5.4 GHz and can stick to this frequency even at temperatures as high as 70 degrees Celsius. However, once it hits 84 degrees, the clock speed starts to drop significantly – in our testing, this occurred after around 88 degrees Celsius. This means that for users who are pushing their CPU hard, a better cooler is essential to avoid the worst-case scenario: a reduced clock speed due to excessive heat.

In light of these findings, we must ask ourselves: what's the point of investing in a high-end cooling solution if it doesn't make a difference in our typical usage scenarios? The answer lies in understanding your own usage patterns and making informed decisions based on that. If you're a gamer who spends most of their time playing games, you may not need an extreme cooling solution to keep your CPU at 84 degrees or lower.

That being said, what does the future hold for CPU cooler testing methodologies? With desktop CPUs increasingly emulating laptops in terms of thermal design and performance, the role of coolers is becoming more critical than ever. We can expect to see changes in how we test and evaluate cooling solutions as these processors become more prevalent. For now, though, it's clear that not all high-end coolers are created equal – and sometimes, a budget cooler like the AK-400 or 8K620 can provide excellent performance at a fraction of the cost.

**The Cooling Landscape for AMD Ryzen 7000 Series CPUs**

As we move forward into the future of CPU cooling, it's essential to understand that the myth of overcooling is being turned on its head. With desktop CPUs becoming more and more laptop-like in terms of thermal design and performance, coolers are no longer just a nicety – they're a necessity.

Our testing has shown that even the most extreme cooling solutions don't make a significant difference in gaming or general use scenarios for most users. However, when it comes to pushing your CPU hard, especially with the Ryzen 7000 series processors, a good cooler is essential. The Ryzen 7950X and its sibling processors have unique thermal design characteristics that require careful consideration of cooling solutions.

Our findings suggest that for users who are gaming or running demanding applications, a balance between performance and power consumption is key. While extreme cooling solutions may provide benefits in certain scenarios, they're not necessary for most users. Instead, look for coolers that can strike a balance between these two competing priorities – it's the sweet spot that will deliver optimal performance while minimizing power consumption.

The truth is, we need to rethink our approach to CPU cooler testing methodologies. As desktop CPUs continue to emulate laptops in terms of thermal design and performance, the role of coolers becomes more critical than ever. We'll be seeing changes in how we test and evaluate cooling solutions as these processors become more prevalent – and it's an exciting time for enthusiasts who want to push their CPUs to the limit.

In conclusion, our testing has shown that the myth of overcooling is being turned on its head. For most users, a balance between performance and power consumption is key. Don't be fooled into thinking that you need the absolute highest-end cooling solution – instead, look for coolers that can strike a balance between these two competing priorities. And remember, sometimes the best cooling solution is not necessarily the one that keeps temperatures lowest, but rather one that delivers optimal performance at a reasonable price.

**The Verdict: A Balance of Performance and Power Consumption**

In our testing, we've seen that a balance between performance and power consumption is key for most users. While extreme cooling solutions may provide benefits in certain scenarios, they're not necessary for everyone. Instead, look for coolers that can deliver optimal performance at a reasonable price – it's the sweet spot that will give you the best results.

Our testing has shown that even the entry-level AK-400 cooler is able to keep the Ryzen 7950X well above its base clock speed of 5.4 GHz, with temperatures remaining under control at around 95 degrees. This suggests that for most users, a good cooling solution can provide excellent performance without breaking the bank.

However, it's essential to remember that this balance may vary depending on your specific usage patterns. If you're pushing your CPU hard, especially with the Ryzen 7000 series processors, a better cooler is essential to avoid reduced clock speeds due to excessive heat. In these scenarios, look for coolers that can provide excellent thermal performance while minimizing power consumption.

In conclusion, our testing has shown that a balance of performance and power consumption is key for most users. Don't be fooled into thinking that you need the absolute highest-end cooling solution – instead, look for coolers that can deliver optimal performance at a reasonable price. Remember, sometimes it's not about keeping temperatures lowest, but rather delivering optimal performance at a reasonable cost.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwell hello everybody Mike here with Hardware Canucks and ever since the ryzen 7000 series were launched a couple of weeks ago was it a couple weeks ago it's all a blur there has been a concussion about the temperatures they run at a lot of people in our Comet threads in other videos are simply saying they run too hot but it's a lot more nuanced than that and that is exactly what I wanted to tackle in this video but do it from a little bit of a different perspective so instead of completely bookending all of our testing with the absolute highest end cooling solution that we could possibly find and comparing that to a garbage trashy out of the box heatsink I want it to take a little bit more of a nuanced approach to this whole thing and that means testing with a bunch of different coolers and seeing how these CPUs behave straight out of the box so I've got a couple lined up for you there is going to be the 240 millimeter AIO a 120 millimeter AIO there's going to be a seven the ls720 which is a 360 millimeter AIO and I'm going to run out of spacer very very soon there is also going to be a bargain heatsink the ak-400 from deepcool that costs just 30 bucks bucks and finally one of the best coolers that we've tested in a while the ak-620 from Deep cool look at that there you go there's my lineup right now and the camera guy is laughing behind the camera because he's like where's my shot going so anyways let's take a look at how things set up here starting right off with the behavior people are seeing on these chips compared to the last generation in an all core workload when paired up with the deepcool ak620 running at just 50 fan speed and over the course of a 10 minute render the temperature Delta between the ryzen 9 5950x and 7950x is absolutely massive to the tune of 35 degrees it looks like the 7950x just beats on the ak-620 like it owes it money whereas the older CPU is a hell of a lot easier to cool even with the fans running at half speed the 5600x 7600x situation isn't any different with the newer chip showing a 30 degree temperature increase and based on that it really does look like these processors run hot but there is actually a reason for that and that is because AMD is trying to maximize the amount of performance I mean I could go on and on but I want to actually let one of their quotes that they sent to me explain everything so basically what's being said here is that the 7000 series is designed to maximize temperatures and power Headroom in order to hit the best performance possible that's why the 7950x gets pegged at 95 degrees and even the 7600x starts getting up there relative to the 5000 series but is this cause for concern well seeing 95 degrees might come as an absolute shock for desktop users anyone who's familiar with our laptop temperature testing will know this is exactly exactly the way mobile CPUs have been operating for the longest time striving to reach 95 degrees here is by Design but there's another Factor here and that is the way these processors are actually physically designed it is a very very large contributor to the temperatures that we're seeing and the behavior that we're seeing let me explain a little bit more both the 7950x and 7900x have a pair of ccds parked right next to one another which when combined can chug back 220 Watts on the 7950x and that leads to a crap ton of heat output in a small area concentrated right at the very very edge of the IHS the 78600x and 7700x on the other hand are in a very different situation with a single CCD but that little guy can output a good 110 to 135 watts of heat in a traditional situation with a thin IHS you get all that concentrated heat transferred right back up into the CPU coolers base with a minimum of dispersion yet with the 7000 series the IHS thickness has gone from three millimeters on the 5000 series to what is now 4.25 millimeters now according to AMD this was done to keep am4 cool cooler compatibility and I know this has been made to sound like a completely bad thing but it can also be a benefit in some cases too take heatsinks with heat pipe direct touch or HDT bases for example with a thin IHS transferring heat directly upwards they would have fared terribly especially with single CCD designs since some of their heat pipes wouldn't even touch the IHS right above the cores so instead of projecting heat right upwards into the cooler through a thin IHS the thickness allows for I guess you'd call it like a pre-distribution a dispersion of extreme temperatures from the CPU itself without having to worry about the heatsinks type of Base becoming too much of a limiting factor but this setup actually does have a double-edged sword effect too basically that thick ass IHS is not very efficient at pulling the heat away from those cores quickly it actually soaks up a lot a lot of the heat that's being generated by these processors and what that does is a theory called heat soak base basically some of that heat will not be sent directly up into the cooler it will soak right back into the CPU itself you can actually see an example of this in the first 150 seconds right here while the 5000 series has a gradual increase in temperatures while the heat gets dumped directly to the ak-620 the 7000 series has an almost immediate Spike as the IHS becomes a limiting factor and temperatures remain pretty much constant through the whole test basically it puts any cooler a step behind from the very beginning so obviously there's a bottleneck going on here and it is not necessarily your CPU Cooler guess what and their Bauer pretty much proved that when he did some direct dye cooling on the 7000 series CPUs you can actually find that video right up here it's very very very well done but you know what won't cause a bottleneck to your gaming it's these Cooler Master gaming monitors oh yes I've always wanted to be inside one of these 27 inches of pure Dimitri pixels you can kind of see into my soul oh what's this behind me just a 576 mini LED zone for gorgeous exposure and HDR performance with the 1200 nit Peak brightness feel the immersion in reality with the new 4k 160 Hertz mini LED monitor The Cooler Master gp27u bringing everything to life anyways what does this mean for how coolers behave in this and I really have to give deep cool a shout out here because they were kind enough to send every single one of their current coolers so we could sort of do an Apples to Apples comparison and let's start off by looking at the 7950x temperatures and at first it looks pretty bleak if you're looking just at Raw temperatures alone since at half fan speed even the biggest cooler here fails to get under that 90 degree Mark even with fans running at full huge Factor there's not much of a change everything under that 240 millimeter AIO hits amd's TJ Maxx point of 95 degrees the 7600x fares a little bit better since every cooler here can keep that chip well below 95 degrees without too much of a problem even at ultra low fan speeds but the relatively small 12 degree Delta between a basic air cooler running at 50 percent and a high-end 360 millimeter air running at 100 fan speed points towards the cooler type becoming almost irrelevant now at this point a lot of folks they would probably look at those numbers and simply say that the 7000 series runs hot but do you need a 360 millimeter expensive all-in-one liquid cooler to get the best out of these chips outside of temperatures the answer to that is no probably not in order to go a little bit deeper I want to actually look at the clock speeds that these CPUs were getting under different types of thermal load because seeing how temperatures relate directly to clock speeds is oh so important under a full core load 82 degrees was the absolute lowest we saw on the 7950x and that got an average clock speed of about 5.2 gigahertz and as temperature ramps up frequencies do of course drop but not as much as you might expect even at 92 degrees the chip is still hitting 5.1 gigahertz and finally end ended up at around 5.07 gigahertz at 95 degrees now if we overlay how coolers perform here in relation to temperatures and clock speeds we've got the 360 millimeter AIO that lands about here the lower Mark indicates the coolest it got at full fan speeds while the higher Mark shows the temperatures at 50 fan speed and everything else in between is between those two speeds there's also a big big log Jam right at the chips TJ Maxx point of 95 degrees but you might have noticed in that last chart that both the 30 ak-400 and the 240 millimeter AIO we're at 95 degrees does that mean that they were actually performing the same no absolutely not because there's so much more to it than that to prove it let's put this little guy at 50 fan speed on a 7950x this might be a 10 minute test but right away you can see there's a direct correlation between the time spent at the 90 5 degree point and lower clocks as the minutes tick by spend more time at TJ Maxx with a cooler that can't remove the thermal buildup fast enough and the CPU will gradually cut back performance it isn't immediate either because those first two and a half minutes of the test show it takes the 7950x a solid minute or so to gradually settle at a point of about 150 or so megahertz lower than where it began and that's just a snapshot of the ak-620 operating at 50 fan speed what happens if we add all of these coolers to it and hit it with a 15 minute test are there going to be any differences at 100 fan speed the ls320 ak620 and ak-400 all showed 95 degrees but there are some minor frequency differences at 50 fan speed there's a little bit more variance from one to another but overall there's a maximum drop-off of about 200 megahertz just to put this in the context of raw performance in a rendering workload the difference between the best and worst CPU Cooler in these charts is pretty small actually even when you compare a budget heatsink running at low fan speeds against a 360 millimeter AIO going balls to the wall the Gap is less than a minute over a 60 Minute render and look I don't want you to think that this is me telling you to completely cheap out on a cooling solution no way get the best that you can afford period all I'm saying and leveling with you here is to explain that there might be a lot less Doom and Gloom than some of you actually believe at least on the 7950x because the 7600x that's a completely different animal because comparing temperatures to clocks this processor is affected a lot more than its Big Brother since it sticks to 5.4 gigahertz all the way to 70 degrees but after that frequencies tend to drop like a stone by the time it hits 84 degrees we're at 5.3 gigahertz 88 degrees sees another 100 megahertz cutback back and so on afterwards it continues to fall down to 5.15 and then in an absolute worst case scenario it'll knock itself back to 5 gigahertz after sticking to 95 degrees for a little while so the sweet spot for performance Under full core load would be anything under 84 degrees here so let's drop our coolers into this chart showing their performance ranges between 50 and 100 fan speeds of course the 360 and 240 millimeter aios get the best results but even the 120 millimeter one and ak-620 keep things in that 84 degree Sweet Spot the ak-400 well it's a budget cooler that still keeps the 7600x well above its base clock and you'd still only be losing about 100 megahertz over top end Solutions and what does this mean for performance of our coolers well once again there's really not that much of a difference between the high end and entry-level heatsinks in an intensive multi core workload I mean we're talking about less than 90 seconds over a 30 minute test and I also have to say that a lot of you guys probably aren't in this scenario that I'm showing right now and that a lot of other people tend to show you are not running a multi-core high-level rendering workloads on these CPUs what are you doing you're probably gaming you're probably doing word processing I mean hell 7950x for word processing best processor out there but seriously let's talk about how these behave when in a typical gaming scenario and for that I took the average of six games to see what kind of temperatures and what kind of performance you can expect on the 7950x not a single one of these coolers gets anywhere close to the temperatures they were getting during that all core workload and full speed fans bring them even lower though I'm sure you've got one question here is there any effect on frame rates at 100 fan speed the answer to that is no no no not one iota when you take the margin of error into account on these numbers every one of these gives you identical gaming performance on a 7950x even dropping the fans to 50 gives you identical frame rates right across the board the coolers are all getting the exact same numbers and these are literal carbon copy of the full speed results and of course the 7600x posts even lower results with the ak-400 and 8 k620 hitting an average of 60 degrees or less after 30 minutes of gaming gaming frame rates follow the exact same path as they did with the 7950x there's no performance difference between the heat sinks or when going from high speed to low speed fan profiles personally I think these gaming results Point towards the most important takeaway from this video you simply need to understand your usage case before just assuming you need the absolute highest end cooling solution for gaming even an ak-400 a 30 dollar CPU Cooler kept the 7950x under 75 degrees at super quiet fan speeds but if you constantly pound away on your CPU with multi-core workloads anything that you saw in the gaming results can be completely pushed aside in those types of scenarios you're really going to want to look at higher end cooling solutions for every single one of amd's new processors personally though we can talk about temperatures all day but what really excites me is the fact that the ryzen 7000 series and to a lesser extent Raptor Lake that you're going to see in a little bit are going to turn CPU Cooler testing methodologies on their freaking heads that's because desktop CPUs nowadays are acting more and more like the processors that we've seen on the laptop side for such a long time they're trying to almost work against the cooling solution in order to push temperatures and power to their utmost limits in order to get the best possible performance so suddenly having a great CPU Cooler is going to come down to actual frequencies and performance so we're going to see how that affects all of our testing going forward anyways I'm Mike with Hardware Canucks I hope you like this one and if you did I can't wait to see you in the next onewell hello everybody Mike here with Hardware Canucks and ever since the ryzen 7000 series were launched a couple of weeks ago was it a couple weeks ago it's all a blur there has been a concussion about the temperatures they run at a lot of people in our Comet threads in other videos are simply saying they run too hot but it's a lot more nuanced than that and that is exactly what I wanted to tackle in this video but do it from a little bit of a different perspective so instead of completely bookending all of our testing with the absolute highest end cooling solution that we could possibly find and comparing that to a garbage trashy out of the box heatsink I want it to take a little bit more of a nuanced approach to this whole thing and that means testing with a bunch of different coolers and seeing how these CPUs behave straight out of the box so I've got a couple lined up for you there is going to be the 240 millimeter AIO a 120 millimeter AIO there's going to be a seven the ls720 which is a 360 millimeter AIO and I'm going to run out of spacer very very soon there is also going to be a bargain heatsink the ak-400 from deepcool that costs just 30 bucks bucks and finally one of the best coolers that we've tested in a while the ak-620 from Deep cool look at that there you go there's my lineup right now and the camera guy is laughing behind the camera because he's like where's my shot going so anyways let's take a look at how things set up here starting right off with the behavior people are seeing on these chips compared to the last generation in an all core workload when paired up with the deepcool ak620 running at just 50 fan speed and over the course of a 10 minute render the temperature Delta between the ryzen 9 5950x and 7950x is absolutely massive to the tune of 35 degrees it looks like the 7950x just beats on the ak-620 like it owes it money whereas the older CPU is a hell of a lot easier to cool even with the fans running at half speed the 5600x 7600x situation isn't any different with the newer chip showing a 30 degree temperature increase and based on that it really does look like these processors run hot but there is actually a reason for that and that is because AMD is trying to maximize the amount of performance I mean I could go on and on but I want to actually let one of their quotes that they sent to me explain everything so basically what's being said here is that the 7000 series is designed to maximize temperatures and power Headroom in order to hit the best performance possible that's why the 7950x gets pegged at 95 degrees and even the 7600x starts getting up there relative to the 5000 series but is this cause for concern well seeing 95 degrees might come as an absolute shock for desktop users anyone who's familiar with our laptop temperature testing will know this is exactly exactly the way mobile CPUs have been operating for the longest time striving to reach 95 degrees here is by Design but there's another Factor here and that is the way these processors are actually physically designed it is a very very large contributor to the temperatures that we're seeing and the behavior that we're seeing let me explain a little bit more both the 7950x and 7900x have a pair of ccds parked right next to one another which when combined can chug back 220 Watts on the 7950x and that leads to a crap ton of heat output in a small area concentrated right at the very very edge of the IHS the 78600x and 7700x on the other hand are in a very different situation with a single CCD but that little guy can output a good 110 to 135 watts of heat in a traditional situation with a thin IHS you get all that concentrated heat transferred right back up into the CPU coolers base with a minimum of dispersion yet with the 7000 series the IHS thickness has gone from three millimeters on the 5000 series to what is now 4.25 millimeters now according to AMD this was done to keep am4 cool cooler compatibility and I know this has been made to sound like a completely bad thing but it can also be a benefit in some cases too take heatsinks with heat pipe direct touch or HDT bases for example with a thin IHS transferring heat directly upwards they would have fared terribly especially with single CCD designs since some of their heat pipes wouldn't even touch the IHS right above the cores so instead of projecting heat right upwards into the cooler through a thin IHS the thickness allows for I guess you'd call it like a pre-distribution a dispersion of extreme temperatures from the CPU itself without having to worry about the heatsinks type of Base becoming too much of a limiting factor but this setup actually does have a double-edged sword effect too basically that thick ass IHS is not very efficient at pulling the heat away from those cores quickly it actually soaks up a lot a lot of the heat that's being generated by these processors and what that does is a theory called heat soak base basically some of that heat will not be sent directly up into the cooler it will soak right back into the CPU itself you can actually see an example of this in the first 150 seconds right here while the 5000 series has a gradual increase in temperatures while the heat gets dumped directly to the ak-620 the 7000 series has an almost immediate Spike as the IHS becomes a limiting factor and temperatures remain pretty much constant through the whole test basically it puts any cooler a step behind from the very beginning so obviously there's a bottleneck going on here and it is not necessarily your CPU Cooler guess what and their Bauer pretty much proved that when he did some direct dye cooling on the 7000 series CPUs you can actually find that video right up here it's very very very well done but you know what won't cause a bottleneck to your gaming it's these Cooler Master gaming monitors oh yes I've always wanted to be inside one of these 27 inches of pure Dimitri pixels you can kind of see into my soul oh what's this behind me just a 576 mini LED zone for gorgeous exposure and HDR performance with the 1200 nit Peak brightness feel the immersion in reality with the new 4k 160 Hertz mini LED monitor The Cooler Master gp27u bringing everything to life anyways what does this mean for how coolers behave in this and I really have to give deep cool a shout out here because they were kind enough to send every single one of their current coolers so we could sort of do an Apples to Apples comparison and let's start off by looking at the 7950x temperatures and at first it looks pretty bleak if you're looking just at Raw temperatures alone since at half fan speed even the biggest cooler here fails to get under that 90 degree Mark even with fans running at full huge Factor there's not much of a change everything under that 240 millimeter AIO hits amd's TJ Maxx point of 95 degrees the 7600x fares a little bit better since every cooler here can keep that chip well below 95 degrees without too much of a problem even at ultra low fan speeds but the relatively small 12 degree Delta between a basic air cooler running at 50 percent and a high-end 360 millimeter air running at 100 fan speed points towards the cooler type becoming almost irrelevant now at this point a lot of folks they would probably look at those numbers and simply say that the 7000 series runs hot but do you need a 360 millimeter expensive all-in-one liquid cooler to get the best out of these chips outside of temperatures the answer to that is no probably not in order to go a little bit deeper I want to actually look at the clock speeds that these CPUs were getting under different types of thermal load because seeing how temperatures relate directly to clock speeds is oh so important under a full core load 82 degrees was the absolute lowest we saw on the 7950x and that got an average clock speed of about 5.2 gigahertz and as temperature ramps up frequencies do of course drop but not as much as you might expect even at 92 degrees the chip is still hitting 5.1 gigahertz and finally end ended up at around 5.07 gigahertz at 95 degrees now if we overlay how coolers perform here in relation to temperatures and clock speeds we've got the 360 millimeter AIO that lands about here the lower Mark indicates the coolest it got at full fan speeds while the higher Mark shows the temperatures at 50 fan speed and everything else in between is between those two speeds there's also a big big log Jam right at the chips TJ Maxx point of 95 degrees but you might have noticed in that last chart that both the 30 ak-400 and the 240 millimeter AIO we're at 95 degrees does that mean that they were actually performing the same no absolutely not because there's so much more to it than that to prove it let's put this little guy at 50 fan speed on a 7950x this might be a 10 minute test but right away you can see there's a direct correlation between the time spent at the 90 5 degree point and lower clocks as the minutes tick by spend more time at TJ Maxx with a cooler that can't remove the thermal buildup fast enough and the CPU will gradually cut back performance it isn't immediate either because those first two and a half minutes of the test show it takes the 7950x a solid minute or so to gradually settle at a point of about 150 or so megahertz lower than where it began and that's just a snapshot of the ak-620 operating at 50 fan speed what happens if we add all of these coolers to it and hit it with a 15 minute test are there going to be any differences at 100 fan speed the ls320 ak620 and ak-400 all showed 95 degrees but there are some minor frequency differences at 50 fan speed there's a little bit more variance from one to another but overall there's a maximum drop-off of about 200 megahertz just to put this in the context of raw performance in a rendering workload the difference between the best and worst CPU Cooler in these charts is pretty small actually even when you compare a budget heatsink running at low fan speeds against a 360 millimeter AIO going balls to the wall the Gap is less than a minute over a 60 Minute render and look I don't want you to think that this is me telling you to completely cheap out on a cooling solution no way get the best that you can afford period all I'm saying and leveling with you here is to explain that there might be a lot less Doom and Gloom than some of you actually believe at least on the 7950x because the 7600x that's a completely different animal because comparing temperatures to clocks this processor is affected a lot more than its Big Brother since it sticks to 5.4 gigahertz all the way to 70 degrees but after that frequencies tend to drop like a stone by the time it hits 84 degrees we're at 5.3 gigahertz 88 degrees sees another 100 megahertz cutback back and so on afterwards it continues to fall down to 5.15 and then in an absolute worst case scenario it'll knock itself back to 5 gigahertz after sticking to 95 degrees for a little while so the sweet spot for performance Under full core load would be anything under 84 degrees here so let's drop our coolers into this chart showing their performance ranges between 50 and 100 fan speeds of course the 360 and 240 millimeter aios get the best results but even the 120 millimeter one and ak-620 keep things in that 84 degree Sweet Spot the ak-400 well it's a budget cooler that still keeps the 7600x well above its base clock and you'd still only be losing about 100 megahertz over top end Solutions and what does this mean for performance of our coolers well once again there's really not that much of a difference between the high end and entry-level heatsinks in an intensive multi core workload I mean we're talking about less than 90 seconds over a 30 minute test and I also have to say that a lot of you guys probably aren't in this scenario that I'm showing right now and that a lot of other people tend to show you are not running a multi-core high-level rendering workloads on these CPUs what are you doing you're probably gaming you're probably doing word processing I mean hell 7950x for word processing best processor out there but seriously let's talk about how these behave when in a typical gaming scenario and for that I took the average of six games to see what kind of temperatures and what kind of performance you can expect on the 7950x not a single one of these coolers gets anywhere close to the temperatures they were getting during that all core workload and full speed fans bring them even lower though I'm sure you've got one question here is there any effect on frame rates at 100 fan speed the answer to that is no no no not one iota when you take the margin of error into account on these numbers every one of these gives you identical gaming performance on a 7950x even dropping the fans to 50 gives you identical frame rates right across the board the coolers are all getting the exact same numbers and these are literal carbon copy of the full speed results and of course the 7600x posts even lower results with the ak-400 and 8 k620 hitting an average of 60 degrees or less after 30 minutes of gaming gaming frame rates follow the exact same path as they did with the 7950x there's no performance difference between the heat sinks or when going from high speed to low speed fan profiles personally I think these gaming results Point towards the most important takeaway from this video you simply need to understand your usage case before just assuming you need the absolute highest end cooling solution for gaming even an ak-400 a 30 dollar CPU Cooler kept the 7950x under 75 degrees at super quiet fan speeds but if you constantly pound away on your CPU with multi-core workloads anything that you saw in the gaming results can be completely pushed aside in those types of scenarios you're really going to want to look at higher end cooling solutions for every single one of amd's new processors personally though we can talk about temperatures all day but what really excites me is the fact that the ryzen 7000 series and to a lesser extent Raptor Lake that you're going to see in a little bit are going to turn CPU Cooler testing methodologies on their freaking heads that's because desktop CPUs nowadays are acting more and more like the processors that we've seen on the laptop side for such a long time they're trying to almost work against the cooling solution in order to push temperatures and power to their utmost limits in order to get the best possible performance so suddenly having a great CPU Cooler is going to come down to actual frequencies and performance so we're going to see how that affects all of our testing going forward anyways I'm Mike with Hardware Canucks I hope you like this one and if you did I can't wait to see you in the next one\n"