Pentium 4, GeForce FX 5800, PS3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, MacBook 20??-2019: "First time?"
This checks out. If y'all haven't specced a modern PC: Coolers for GPU and CPU are huge, watercooling is now officially recommended for new CPUs, and cases are ventilated on all sides. Disk bays are moved out of the main chamber to improve airflow. Fans everywhere. Front panels surface areas are completely covered in fans.
> watercooling is now officially recommended for new CPUs
First I'm hearing of this. Last I checked, air coolers had basically reached parity with any lower-end water cooled setup.
I built a PC last year and saw a bunch of the CPUs were recommending water cooling. There were a few high end air coolers that were compatible. I went with an AIO water cooler. It was cheap and easy. It should give as good or better temperature control as the air coolers that are 5x more expensive.
My guess is manufacturers don't want to tell people they should air cool if it requires listing specific models. It's easy to just say they recommend water cooling since basically all water coolers will provide adequate performance.
I hope you're correct. I'm in the middle of building a replacement PC (it's been like 10 years) and went with a ~80 USD air cooler that's got two fans and a bunch of heat pipes. The case is also a consideration, I selected one that can hold a BUNCH of fans and intend to have them all always push at least a little air through, more as it gets warmer.
In my case two fans on the CPU, pointing towards the rear exhaust fan to suck, and 6 fans 120mm or larger pushing air through otherwise, will _hopefully_ remain sufficient.
For most workloads it's probably fine. If you're doing any CPU heavy work it might thermally limit you if the cooler can't keep up. But that should rarely be an issue for most people.
The noctua cpu fans are quieter and as good as liquid cooling because of the pump.
That said, I think liquid cooling has reached critical mass. AIOs are commonplace.
I think it would be (uh) cool to have a extra huge external reservoir and fan (think motorcycle or car radiator plus maybe a tank) that could be nearly silent and cool the cpu and gpu.
IMO, Noctua coolers are overpriced these days. You can get nearly identical thermal performance to their $150 NH-D15 G2 from a $40 Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 or 140.
I am sure that they are overpriced, but the reason is because they can get away with this.
Despite the fact that I think that it is very likely that a $40 cooler like the one mentioned by you would work well enough, when I will build a new computer with a top model AMD Ryzen CPU, which dissipates up to 200 W in steady state conditions, I will certainly buy a Noctua cooler for it. A computer with an Intel Arrow Lake S CPU would be even more demanding, as those can dissipate much more than 250 W in steady state conditions.
The reason is that by now I have the experience with many Noctua coolers that have been working for 10 years or more, even 24/7, with perfect reliability and ensuring low noise and low temperatures.
I am not willing to take the risk of experimenting with a replacement, so for my peace of mind I prefer the proven solutions, both for coolers and for power supply units (for the latter I use Seasonic).
Noctua knows that many customers think like this, so they charge accordingly.
I think the reason they mentioned both those specific air coolers is because Noctua made a state-of-the-art cooler for the time, then rested on their laurels, and are now outgunned by a very specific brand (Thermal right) and their stand-out product, the Peerless Assassin. Not just any $40 cooler these days will do the trick.
There are lots of cheap buzzy coolers. Many CPUs came with one.
But the noctua fans are reliable, but really quiet.
Your ears are worth it.
> but really quiet
It’s still gonna be louder than a water cooler if that’s your primary concerns. Otherwise other air coolers are only marginally less silent and just as effective at half (if not less) the price.
In my experience every single (AIO) water cooler I've tried has been significantly worse in terms of noise than a decent air cooler.
Specifically the pumps. Those things have an obnoxious high-pitched whine that I personally find unbearable, especially during low/idle workloads.
It's possible that the actal dB level is lower, but the frequency and sound characteristics matters. A lot.
This was my understanding as well, which is pretty much unshaken from the replies I've received.
Will there be an official “cleared for frying eggs” badge? We'll have to do something with all that heat.
mfw you forget AMD Thunderbird
Sometimes the solution is worse than the problem. My favorite example is the TRS-80 Model II and its descendants, with the combination of the fan and disk drives so loud that users experience physical discomfort. <https://archive.org/details/80-microcomputing-magazine-1983-...>
Modern computers should come with built in piezo, haptic and rumble motors that can emulate HDD, FDD and CD-ROM sounds whenever you start a game or app. Change my mind.
- Inner voice: "You don't miss the old PC noises, you just miss those times".
- Shut up!
But this only simulates keyboard and mouse click sounds. In any case, you wrote "whenever you start a game or app" (my emphasis). The Model II's fan and drive noises are 100% present from start to finish, with the combination enough to drive users insane (or, at least, not want to use the $5-10,000 computer).
I kind of miss the bass drop the Model 16's "Thinline" drives did when they were accessed. That was a cool sound.
The Model II was a loud beast. Its floppy drive drew directly from mains power, not a DC rail off the power supply, and spun all the time. The heads engaged via a solenoid that was so powerful it made a loud "thunk" sound and actually changed the size of the display on the built-in CRT.
The Model 12 and 16 improved on the design, sporting Tandon "Thinline" 8" drives that ran on DC and spun down when not in use, leaving fan noise that was quite tolerable.
Hardest to cool cpu I've ever owned was an AMD Athlon 3200+. I remember moving to P4, and life got a lot easier. It still ran very hot, but it could do so without frequent crashing. This was before the giant coolers that we have today were common place. I was far too afraid of water cooling back then.
The most power hungry P4 didn’t top 115W.
The 90 nm Prescott Pentium 4 was much more power hungry than the previous 130 nm Northwood Pentium 4.
Even worse than the TDP was the fact that the 90 nm Pentium 4 had huge leakage current, so its idle power consumption was about half of the maximum power consumption, e.g. in the range 50 to 60 W for the CPU alone.
Moreover, at that time (2004) the cooler makers were not prepared for such a jump in the idle power consumption and maximum power consumption, so the only coolers available for Pentium 4 were extremely noisy when used with 90 nm Pentium 4 CPUs.
I remember when at the company where I worked, where we had a great number of older Pentium 4 CPUs, which were acceptable, we got a few upgrades with new Prescott Pentium 4. The noise, even when the computers were completely idle, was tremendous. We could not stand it, so we have returned the computers to the vendor.
The die was much smaller…
Die size: 135mm²
A current AMD CCD is ~70mm² and can drop around 120 W or so on that area. E.g. the 9700X has one CCD and up to a 142W PPT, 20 W goes to the IOD, ~120 into the CCD.
edit: (1) this account/IP-range is limited to a handful of comments per day so I cannot reply directly, having exhausted my allotment of HN comments for today (2) I do not understand what you take offense at, because I did not "change [my] original argument" - you claimed, a P4 die is much smaller, I gave a counter example, and made the example more specific in response to your comment (by adding the "E.g. ..." bit with an example of a SKU and how the power would approximately split up).
The tdp is for the whole cpu with multiple ccds and iod…
Since Milan the IOD consumes up to 40W during extended PPT loads (The right term for the numbers you are talking about which is more keen to Turbo of the older P4s ie. 130W tdp on Prescott). It's also important that PPT refers to power delivered to the socket, not directly to the CPU, and shouldn't be confused with TDP. Editing comments to change your original argument is cowardly behavior, so I'm ending this discussion.
You added wrong numbers and shifted the metric from tdp to ppt. There seems to be a reason for your restrictions. Goodbye.
Which was huge in the era when CPUs didn't underclock themselves at idle to save power and coolers looked like this: https://www.newegg.com/cooler-master-air-cooler-series-a73/p...
Some coolers today still look like that but they're on chips drawing 35W or so while idling at <2W.
I mean, if what you want is P4-class performance, the modern semiconductor industry is excellent at delivering that with low TDP. An Apple A18 Pro [1] gives you over 7x the single thread performance of a Pentium 4 Extreme Edition [2] at 8 W TDP, compared to 115 W for the latter.
[1]: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+A18+Pro&id=62...
[2]: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Pentium+4+3.7...