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Friday Fun Thread for December 20, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Managed to get a water cooling system installed for my new 9800x3d cpu, for which I wasn't impressed by the noise or temperatures when using a regular air cooler.

This owns. Much lower temps, much lower noise.

Nice, custom loop or AIO? If custom loop what are people using nowadays for water-blocks on their GPU, did EK survive their 'try just not paying their suppliers and employees' experiment?

What's your workload like, mostly gaming? I feel like the sweet spot for AIO cooling of CPUs is something like 30s to 10 minute saturation workloads. Shorter than that and you're not producing enough heat for your cooling system to matter. Longer than that you're saturating the liquid anyway. But for some GPU limited games and some workstation tasks even a "cheap" AIO has way better peak noise normalized performance than even pretty premium air coolers.

It's an AIO named Arctic Liquid Freezer III 360. :) It was supposed to be notoriously difficult to install, but it went fine as soon as I figured out I had the brackets upside down. The smoother, prettier side needed to be facing down to the mb, quite counter-intuitively.

I'm trying to figure out the best activity/cooling curves. I'm using Argus Monitor.

I've got the connector labeled PUMP plugged into the header aio_pump, and I plugged the connector labeled VRM into either cpu_fan1 or cpu_fan2, and the connector labeled FAN into cpu_fan2 or cpu_fan1.

In the program, there's one thing labeled cpufan running at 640 rpm while at 32% speed - I assume this is the vrm. Then there's auxfan0 reporting 1020 rpm while at 32%. And auxfan1 at 1240 rpm(?) while at a fixed 20% - guess this is the pump. I set it at a fixed 20% because it was making a repeating whining or wind blowing noise every second at higher speeds.

My biggest regret with my last build (besides choosing Intel and getting a sure-to-die 13900k which I'm loathe to RMA which would strand me without a desktop for 2+ weeks) was opting for air cooling. I've used Noctua fans for a decade now, they've always done well by me. The first (and last) time I tried an AiO water cooler was in 2013 and it was so terrible I wrote them all off entirely. Pump headers weren't standard on motherboards back then and I remember absolutely hating Corsair's software that was mandatory to keep running 24/7. (I'm not sure if I could've "just" pegged CPU_FAN1 to 100% in the BIOS and things would've worked; probably should've tested it.)

Anyway, despite having a case designed for maximum airflow and a huge Noctua fan, my 13900k will thermal throttle instantly if I run any benchmarks. Though it's fine in daily use and I haven't seen it exceed 80 while gaming, it is the principle of the matter... also the Noctua fan is so large I need to take the whole assembly off if I want to swap out RAM or m2s, which is rather annoying. Apparently AiOs have gotten better lately, so I'll give them another shot for my next build. Or just go whole hog with a custom loop, it doesn't look that hard.

Heh. I wouldn't touch Intel with a bargepole at this point, and I assume you will surely pick AMD next time. The whole "RMA/stranded with no desktop PC" issue is why I'm keeping my old system instead of selling it. Wouldn't get more than five or six hundred for it anyway. Always safer to have a backup option.

Custom loop sounds like fun. I might try that next time around. It seems like if you want a much quieter build overall under gaming load you need to liquid cool the GPU as well.

I wouldn't touch Intel with a bargepole at this point, and I assume you will surely pick AMD next time.

Can you elaborate? Last I checked (year ago maybe), intel still seemed to be the choice for power, with AMD really only preferable for budget / green builds. You make it sound like there’s no contest anymore - was I mistaken before / did something go wrong at intel / did AMD put out new cpus?

Intel has had a problem with chips that damaged themselves because they weren't properly signaling power draw to the motherboard. They put out a microcode update to fix it, but the processors which were damaged can't be fixed. This has damaged Intel's reputation in the eyes of a lot of people who got burned by this bug.

Oof. That’s not Boeing level but it’s really bad.

Ah yes, this generation’s “Pentium bug.”

Well, there have been a few of them. There was one in 2011 where the SATA3 ports controlled on the northbridge would cook themselves (though that one was a problem with the chipset, not the processor); then there was Skylake's shit-ton of bugs in 2016 or so (to the point that Apple said 'fuck it' and accelerated their own CPU development). And then are the series of speculative execution attacks that made every older computer 30% slower when the patches were installed (and for some of them, there is no patch, they're just broken forever).

It seems Intel fucks up in a major way every 5 years or so at this point.