Something happened recently (or maybe not so recently. I am an old fart) with the cooling situation. Previously a beefy air cooler could give you good performance at a low noise level. Now they all sound like jet planes when they try to dissipate 200w of heat.
Heck, even my 420mm AIO was struggling with the newer processors before undervolting. With AMDs latest series I have started using eco mode. An undervolted 7900x at 88w ("105w TDP") is at 95% of stock performance and doesn't make a sound with a decent air cooler if you are comfortable with it staying at 85 degrees C when doing work.
The single thread performance is the same, and I managed to have a stable boost of 5.8ghz for single core workloads. It compiles code good enough for me, and the occasional Minecraft session is a breeze.
bjoli|2 years ago
Heck, even my 420mm AIO was struggling with the newer processors before undervolting. With AMDs latest series I have started using eco mode. An undervolted 7900x at 88w ("105w TDP") is at 95% of stock performance and doesn't make a sound with a decent air cooler if you are comfortable with it staying at 85 degrees C when doing work.
The single thread performance is the same, and I managed to have a stable boost of 5.8ghz for single core workloads. It compiles code good enough for me, and the occasional Minecraft session is a breeze.