What Cooler do you use for your gaming PC? Intel or AMD

[BLUEVOODU]

^ topic .... what cooler do you use for your gaming pc?  It doesn't matter if it's Intel or AMD.

Post up what you use... and why you chose it.

[targetrasp]

a Yeti full of PBR....

[BLUEVOODU]

a Yeti full of PBR....

LOL... I wasn't expecting that one.   I have a pretty good PBR story -   another topic, another time.

[targetrasp]

totally kidding. I live in a craft brew city. People are such beer snobs here that I find joy in arguing the finer points of PBR.

[Polygon]

Well, I have a few systems, all Intel, for now. Once they refresh Threadripper later in the year I'll most likely be dumping the 6800K in my main system for one. On my main system I'm using a Noctua D15s. On the backup system I'm using a Noctua U9s. On the game room PC a Noctua L9i... sensing a theme? However, on the server I cheaped out and went with an Evo 212. When I upgrade my main system later in the year I might going with liquid. Still deciding if I'll build a custom loop or go with an AIO. Since Enermax is making ones you can drain and refill, they're now a somewhat appealing option to me.

Why? I haven't seen a reason to go to liquid until now. Why Noctua? While they're fans remind me of a hospital hallway, they some of the best air coolers out there. And you can replace the fans.

[BLUEVOODU]

LOL @ hospital hallway.      Yeah... I have a Noctua NH-D14... I didn't realize how massive it was.   I really haven't had a reason to go to liquid cooled either.  I do a little overclocking but not a ton.  With fan based cooling... I've had 0 heat issues.   I also use a nice power supply... noticed this reduced a lot of heat keeping the PSU load down and platinum rated.  A lot less energy wasted coming off as heat.

Noctua is definitely cool...  They make a great product.

I'm still on my "not building another PC kick" ... until I've used the life of my current pc a bit more.  Trying to get 1-2 years more life from it until Rebuild.  I was building PC's at least once per year until the last build.

[trkorecky]

Been doing custom water loops for 10 years or so now and have been a huge fan of EK, which I have on both GPUs and CPU.

Considered going Threadripper as it'd be a huge help when I'm compiling code, but figured I'd push an 1800X as far as I can and then upgrade to Ryzen 3rd gen and save some money.

[Polygon]

The D15 on my main system is cooling an overclocked 6800K. I'm pushing it as hard as I can and even when I was trying to get 4.3HGHz out of it and pushed it to 1.5v it stayed under 70 degrees, and it's still pretty quiet. Nearly silent at idle. I've been more than happy with it, but I have my doubts about even the best air option from Noctua for TR4 is good enough to push it, and I do overclock. Even some of the better AIOs are having a little trouble.

I've never much cared for them and while I've done custom loops for other people, I've never done one for myself cause while they look great, I've never seen a practical need for my usage. These new Enermax AIOs might change my mind about AIOs though.

I'm going to move to Threadripper. I wanted to get one of the initial ones, but then I heard about the Zen refresh and decided to grab one when they incorporate those. AS it sits, your 1800x kills my 6800K. Threadripper would probably cut my encode times in half.

[BLUEVOODU]

Do you have any links for the Threadripper and D15?

[Polygon]

Sadly, nope. I din't think Noctua sees the demand to bother. I've decided to get my first AIO when I upgrade to Thredripper later this year.

[trkorecky]

Welp, rumors are out. @Polygon you going to grab the 32 core 2990X?

I want one so badly -- compile times would massively improve and it would give an interesting coding challenge to keep all cores busy.

What kind of encoding do you do? From what I heard a bunch of the popular encoders have a relative thread limit?

[Polygon]

Welp, rumors are out. @Polygon you going to grab the 32 core 2990X?

I want one so badly -- compile times would massively improve and it would give an interesting coding challenge to keep all cores busy.

What kind of encoding do you do? From what I heard a bunch of the popular encoders have a relative thread limit?

Yep, I have been waiting for Threadripper+ to launch to build my next system. I already have the case. I would love to have the 2990X because, 32 cores... but I can't justify it at the potential cost of $1,700 and I don't think I'll get a $700 reduction in encode times between it and the 2950X. So, I'm going to opt for the 24 core. Sadly, right now I'm having a dilemma with what to cool it with. There aren't any good air coolers that allow for overclocking, yet. Though I am hopeful for the Dark Rock Pro 4. There's only one AIO that has a TR4 sized cold plate but I'm not sure I trust it after seeing a lot of corrosion issues. The other option is an open loop, which I'm not very apt to jump to right now.

For encoding, I'm using Handbrake and it seems to just eat up cores. It should cut my encode times significantly from my current overclocked 6800K. I also use Lame which I don't see really benefiting much, if at all. Not like it matters since encodes finish in 15 seconds on average right now. I've been using Power Director for some time now and I don't think it would benefit at all from the better processor becaise it's just a garbage program. Thus, I'm moving to DaVinci Resolve for editing. I thought about going Premier, but it would be a waste on an AMD platform. This should also last me longer than this 6800K has, which is about a year and a half at this point.