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What are you cooling your 12900KS with ?

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5 Jul 2007
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506
And what are your max temps in game ?

I'm using a Bequiet Shadow Rock 3 White with Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut Extreme paste. Max temp (4k Wildlands max settings) is around 60c. Note my 'Bequiet Pure Base 600' case now has two big 140mm holes in the front, dropped temps around 10c !, god knows why they chose to choke the front fans so badly.

Considering increasing fan CFM's and using Coollaboratory liquid pro when my rig has proved itself (hate using liquid metal due to the shorting risk and lid etching). Changing from Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut to Extreme hardly had an effect at all, maybe 2-5c drop.
 
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the max tdp for the 12900ks is 228w so that cooler isnt good enough really. seeing lots of people selling bundles with inadequate coolers strapped to them.
 
the max tdp for the 12900ks is 228w so that cooler isnt good enough really. seeing lots of people selling bundles with inadequate coolers strapped to them.
Yeah but the first one didn't fit my motherboard (blocked first ram slot and wouldn't sit flat as resting on top VRM heatsinks !) , this one almost touches the case glass side panel. I always intended to fit a better fan...
 
Yeah but the first one didn't fit my motherboard (blocked first ram slot and wouldn't sit flat as resting on top VRM heatsinks !) , this one almost touches the case glass side panel. I always intended to fit a better fan...
yeah i know its hard to find what fits now days. mem clearance and the like. even part picker i swear by default says may have issues. how generic is that ? i wish more shops retailers would have something to make it more clearer what works with what board and so on. also because the higher end cpus on intel and amd are pretty warm you often need bigger more expensive cooling.

i just built a 12700 rig.
 
Firstly I don't have this CPU I use a 5900X but I do have some thoughts around some of the choices made here, however missing a lot of context around your system and how it is used so I am just going to assume you're primarily gaming with it as it's a safe enough bet around here and frankly if you were running full on heavy number crunching tasks on your CPU it wouldn't be maxing out at 60c it would be much, much more.

So, the only reason your max temp at 4K is 60C is because the cpu probably isn't really being hit hard at all, the GPU will be instead I would say, so very likely 100% GPU usage to perhaps 20-30% CPU usage. If you were to actually hit the CPU hard with the power limits off, it would most likely be 90c + very quickly with that cooler, probably 100c + actually. You really can only aircool these with a Noctua D15/s or a BeQuiet Dark Rock Pro 4 or something similarly girthy with lots of mass and surface area, most people seem to use a 280mm or 360mm AIO's, which leads me to the motherboard. That particular motherboard is so built up around the CPU socket I really get the impression Asus intended it to be used with watercoolers not big hsf units anyway, probably because the intended use profile for a board like that would involve a chip like you have and therefore water cooling.

You may not like what I am about to say but my own thoughts looking at this are as follows; so apologies if I am telling you how to suck eggs here, again I lack a lot of context around this;

But, the thing is to run a 12900KS the way it was 'meant' to be, you need to build the rest of the system around it (and the GPU), keeping it cool and such, if you compromise cooling to fit your case or motherboard rather than buy those to fit the demands of the CPU then your rather wasting the money you spent on a 12900KS I think, you might aswell buy the K or really just a 12700K as the K isn't really easier to deal with than the KS anyway it just costs a lot less. I gather this is a transitionary upgrade and you're going to put a better GPU and more modern faster monitor in later as it's a very imbalanced system right now, the 4K monitor is nice but again if gaming there is just no point in any of this without using a high refresh rate monitor, I would say a 4K one for this system aswell. I use a high refresh 4K monitor (Samsung Odyssey G7 S28) with a 3070 and it's very nice although I would personally like more GPU and mine is about 30% faster than yours and assuming you put something equal to your 12900KS in at some point, perhaps a 4080/4090 when they show up ...you're gonna want a lot more than your 60hz 4K monitor can give in my opinion, or I would at least, because you don't buy a CPU like that to play at around 60fps. If you turn v-sync off and let it run too high you will get tearing and you've got to deal with the higher input latency of a 60hz native monitor awell as that introduced by v-sync itself which you will need, to keep a lid on the frame rate with a better GPU a lot of the time as I don't believe that monitor has any kind of adaptive-sync, again, all of which doesn't become a 12900KS. It's the sort of chip you use when your whole system is maxed out really. As I said I am assuming gaming use here from what you did say and right now you've gone very heavy on the CPU but don't have the GPU or the monitor to really benefit from it (in a gaming context).
 
Firstly I don't have this CPU I use a 5900X but I do have some thoughts around some of the choices made here, however missing a lot of context around your system and how it is used so I am just going to assume you're primarily gaming with it as it's a safe enough bet around here and frankly if you were running full on heavy number crunching tasks on your CPU it wouldn't be maxing out at 60c it would be much, much more.

So, the only reason your max temp at 4K is 60C is because the cpu probably isn't really being hit hard at all, the GPU will be instead I would say, so very likely 100% GPU usage to perhaps 20-30% CPU usage. If you were to actually hit the CPU hard with the power limits off, it would most likely be 90c + very quickly with that cooler, probably 100c + actually. You really can only aircool these with a Noctua D15/s or a BeQuiet Dark Rock Pro 4 or something similarly girthy with lots of mass and surface area, most people seem to use a 280mm or 360mm AIO's, which leads me to the motherboard. That particular motherboard is so built up around the CPU socket I really get the impression Asus intended it to be used with watercoolers not big hsf units anyway, probably because the intended use profile for a board like that would involve a chip like you have and therefore water cooling.

You may not like what I am about to say but my own thoughts looking at this are as follows; so apologies if I am telling you how to suck eggs here, again I lack a lot of context around this;

But, the thing is to run a 12900KS the way it was 'meant' to be, you need to build the rest of the system around it (and the GPU), keeping it cool and such, if you compromise cooling to fit your case or motherboard rather than buy those to fit the demands of the CPU then your rather wasting the money you spent on a 12900KS I think, you might aswell buy the K or really just a 12700K as the K isn't really easier to deal with than the KS anyway it just costs a lot less. I gather this is a transitionary upgrade and you're going to put a better GPU and more modern faster monitor in later as it's a very imbalanced system right now, the 4K monitor is nice but again if gaming there is just no point in any of this without using a high refresh rate monitor, I would say a 4K one for this system aswell. I use a high refresh 4K monitor (Samsung Odyssey G7 S28) with a 3070 and it's very nice although I would personally like more GPU and mine is about 30% faster than yours and assuming you put something equal to your 12900KS in at some point, perhaps a 4080/4090 when they show up ...you're gonna want a lot more than your 60hz 4K monitor can give in my opinion, or I would at least, because you don't buy a CPU like that to play at around 60fps. If you turn v-sync off and let it run too high you will get tearing and you've got to deal with the higher input latency of a 60hz native monitor awell as that introduced by v-sync itself which you will need, to keep a lid on the frame rate with a better GPU a lot of the time as I don't believe that monitor has any kind of adaptive-sync, again, all of which doesn't become a 12900KS. It's the sort of chip you use when your whole system is maxed out really. As I said I am assuming gaming use here from what you did say and right now you've gone very heavy on the CPU but don't have the GPU or the monitor to really benefit from it (in a gaming context).

Thanks for the great reply !. Yes it's one step at a time with a new gpu, possibly AIO and higher refresh rate monitor at some stage. My current monitor has a beautiful and vibrant 4k picture and when my system reaches 60fps with all settings maxed out I'm generally happy and don't notice any stuttering or tearing (Ghost Recon Wildlands used to struggle to reach 60fps yet spends most of its time there now). I initially bought it for handling 50Mp images from my past Canon SLR yet that phase has sadly passed. I'll look at the Sansung you mentioned, thanks for that. My son has a 144hz Dell Monitor he absolutely loves for his games but the view angle isn't good... Yes I had a Be quiet! Dark Rock 4 CPU Cooler yet it didn't fit the motherboard so had to return. My current Shadow Rock 3 White is about to be upgraded with a Noctua NF-F12 3000rpm fan, I'll see how that fares (thanks bequiet for refusing to give CFM specs on the attached 1600rpm fan !!). Grizzly kryonaut extreme paste appears to have dropped me around 2-5c from the old Grizzly Kryonaut, I'm steering clear of the liquid metal for now thanks to Intel mounting a few capacitors on the top surface (thanks Intel idiots). Even though maxing around 60c in game I've noticed the processor is running at 5.3Ghz most of the time ! (and does peak at around 83c for VERY brief moments so may be throttling). I'm using MSI Afterburner to control gpu fans and give me on screen clocks, fps and temps of both the GPU and CPU. Yes I might have to move to water cooling at some point, generating Ray traced 3d fractal fly through movies is on the horizon so I'll need to cool it as much as possible in the future for sure...
 
Thanks for the great reply !. Yes it's one step at a time with a new gpu, possibly AIO and higher refresh rate monitor at some stage. My current monitor has a beautiful and vibrant 4k picture and when my system reaches 60fps with all settings maxed out I'm generally happy and don't notice any stuttering or tearing (Ghost Recon Wildlands used to struggle to reach 60fps yet spends most of its time there now). I initially bought it for handling 50Mp images from my past Canon SLR yet that phase has sadly passed. I'll look at the Samsung you mentioned, thanks for that. My son has a 144hz Dell Monitor he absolutely loves for his games but the view angle isn't good... Yes I had a Be quiet! Dark Rock 4 CPU Cooler yet it didn't fit the motherboard so had to return. My current Shadow Rock 3 White is about to be upgraded with a Noctua NF-F12 3000rpm fan, I'll see how that fares (thanks bequiet for refusing to give CFM specs on the attached 1600rpm fan !!). Grizzly kryonaut extreme paste appears to have dropped me around 2-5c from the old Grizzly Kryonaut, I'm steering clear of the liquid metal for now thanks to Intel mounting a few capacitors on the top surface (thanks Intel idiots). Even though maxing around 60c in game I've noticed the processor is running at 5.3Ghz most of the time ! (and does peak at around 83c for VERY brief moments so may be throttling). I'm using MSI Afterburner to control gpu fans and give me on screen clocks, fps and temps of both the GPU and CPU. Yes I might have to move to water cooling at some point, generating Ray traced 3d fractal fly through movies is on the horizon so I'll need to cool it as much as possible in the future for sure...
Hmm that wont be throttling at 83c that's not very likely with Intel until you get upto around 110c, however you can use Hardware Info to actually see that for sure though if you haven't already, it can give you info from all the onboard sensors so you can see what your VRM's are doing etc aswell, well you can with intelligent power stages which I have to believe that board will have but it can tell you if it thermal throttle at all during the time it's monitoring.

What I did before I got a 4K high refresh monitor this year, was use two for different purposes, for years I've used 1440P 144hz but I did have a 60hz 4K unit for text and photo work and used the 1440P HR one for gaming, worked well for me, given that my desk was wide enough that I could slide to the side to centre myself on whichever I wanted, that might work for you too if you buy something else in the future and don't want to pay out big money to get something that is better at everything. I think if I was buying again I would take a closer look at 32" 4K though rather than 28" ...as I tend to use 125% scaling where as running at 100% would be nice but it's just not comfortable for me to do on a 28".
 
Lol the Noctua NF-F12 3000rpm is WAYYY too noisy at 100% but brings my average game temps down to around 50c. Will try maxing lower to see if there's any benefit to having this fan attached compared to the elusive Bequiet 1600rpm. At first the Noctua looks well designed but then why so many support arms ??, even though angled they must add to noise levels and affect CFM.

Has there been any fan reviews where they were tested on the same cooler ?. Would be good to see if anyone sells a similar CFM with lower noise levels...
 
Sorry it didn't occur to me before that you may think 60c is an issue, but it really isn't a problem at all, that's pretty low really, actually a very good temperature for gaming on a 16 core high clocked cpu, I generally push into the low 80s now the weather has warmed up, I could go lower but I'm tuning more to keep my system quiet rather than maximum cooling, the 12900KS I would generally expect to run hotter really. A lot of people will be well into the 80s with these gaming. I wouldn't really start to take action to bring temperatures down until you hit 90c, now AMD cpu's will throttle at 90c but Intel will run quite a bit higher before they do, it's well within their design specifications. Any fan at 3000rpm is going to be inrusively noisy I would think, I find them all various levels of annoying at 2000rpm. So I was gaming for about 2 hours this evening and accoridng to HWInfo (I run it all the time) the highest core temperature I reached was 80c but the maxmium speed my CPU fan span was 1196rpm and that is a Noctua NF A-15
 
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What air cooler are people recommending for socket 1700 though? Ie minimal issues with clearance, performance, noise. I've been looking but would be nice to get one which had support designed in instead of added later with an additional bracket or something
 
What air cooler are people recommending for socket 1700 though? Ie minimal issues with clearance, performance, noise. I've been looking but would be nice to get one which had support designed in instead of added later with an additional bracket or something
just find one that will cover the max tdp. dark rock pro 4 will be decent and noctua high end ones. problem is one some ram motherboard combos and most sites dont tell you if they fit or not.
 
Sorry it didn't occur to me before that you may think 60c is an issue, but it really isn't a problem at all, that's pretty low really, actually a very good temperature for gaming on a 16 core high clocked cpu, I generally push into the low 80s now the weather has warmed up, I could go lower but I'm tuning more to keep my system quiet rather than maximum cooling, the 12900KS I would generally expect to run hotter really. A lot of people will be well into the 80s with these gaming. I wouldn't really start to take action to bring temperatures down until you hit 90c, now AMD cpu's will throttle at 90c but Intel will run quite a bit higher before they do, it's well within their design specifications. Any fan at 3000rpm is going to be inrusively noisy I would think, I find them all various levels of annoying at 2000rpm. So I was gaming for about 2 hours this evening and accoridng to HWInfo (I run it all the time) the highest core temperature I reached was 80c but the maxmium speed my CPU fan span was 1196rpm and that is a Noctua NF A-15

Yeah I like things to be as cool as possible for longevity and on occasion higher clock speeds, there is the lga1700 bending issue too. I'll have a look at hwinfo as msi afterburner temp readouts are a bit erratic hence the fan speeds can be too.
 
I would very highly recommend the Noctua D15S ....specifically the S as it accounts for clearance issues with an offset and better memory clearance than the twin fan none S but you would need to check Noctua's website for specific compatibility for @digitaldreams motherboard specifically I've just done a check https://ncc.noctua.at/motherboards/model/ASUS-ROG-Strix-Z690-A-Gaming-WiFi-D4-5375 and it's a no go for the D15 which isn't surprising but ok for the D15s

Hmm that one looks good !, shame noctua don't use the same ratings as other manufacturers yet it looks like it will cool better than my BeQuiet Shadow Rock 3 and not be too noisy...
 
I'd be surprised if it doesn't, the D15 and D15S have been the standard for air-coolers for some time now really only challenged directly by BeQuiet's Dark Rock Pro 4 not the Shadow Rock, that's just not in the same league as the the D15/S and Dark Rock Pro 4 , the Pro part is important, the Dark Rock 4 is a smaller cooler than the Pro 4.
 
i have it on my 12700 its not the pro though. was going to get the dark rock pro but wasnt sure if it was okay with my memory. which isnt low profile.
 
What air cooler are people recommending for socket 1700 though? Ie minimal issues with clearance, performance, noise. I've been looking but would be nice to get one which had support designed in instead of added later with an additional bracket or something
U12a is exceptional. Can handle around 220w at 30c ambient, and up to 280w at 20c ambient without throttling. Have it on my 12900k
 
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