The ryzen 3950x overclocking world record has been set yesterday.
It stands at 5.2ghz all core, achieved with LN2 - Voltage around 1.7v
Sort of confirms that 5ghz on water will not be possible.
I’m gong to guess 4.7ghz requires a loop and 4.5ghz could maybe be done with an air cooler
I'd say air will stuggle at that, and you'd need a decent loop.
The 3800X with 105W TDP is 3.9Ghz base clock with potential for 1-2 cores at 4.5Ghz. There will be some silicone binning, but at best if you double the cores to a 3950X I'd say you'll need to dissipate ~ 200W at 4.0 - 4.1Ghz and that's where air starts to run out of headroom unless you add a couple of delta's. I'd even speculate the limit on water will be ~4.5Ghz, perhaps a little more if we get blocks that feed the water in the right place. Current blocks assume a central core.
My plan is to go full water and then keep the CPU nice and cool so PBO can do it's thing on a 3900X. I think in most general applications a few cores at high turbo + some cores with lower boost will be decent enough and I'm not sure I need an extra few %.
3950X will be great for encoding etc, even at 3.5Ghz base it's like having a 7Ghz 3800X but frequency is a killer, closer to 5Ghz we get, the more power we need and the better cooling hence these crazy VRM's that have been spec'd for the X570 platform.