AMD Ryzen 5 & 7 CPU Cooler Round Up

Thermal Testing

In this review, we have tested our coolers in a room temperature controlled environment and tested each CPU cooler with their stock fan configuration with their fans running directly from our system’s power supply at both 12V and 7V (using fan speed reducers).  

Each cooler will be tested on Windows 10 using OCCT to provide a heavy CPU load for half an hour, where we will use Ryzen Master to record CPU temperatures throughout testing. The highest measured temperatures are recorded on the graphs below. 

Any CPU cooler that reached 70 degrees automatically failed our thermal test, though it is worth noting that no coolers reached this high threshold unless we overclocked our CPU. 

In our stock tests, we used 2666MHz memory, the highest that Ryzen officially supports, with our overclocked tests running at 3200MHz to provide more stress on the system. 

 

Stock Settings

At stock settings, we can see that our R5 1600X only runs at slightly hotter temperatures than our R5 1500X on all coolers. Here the Cryorig H7 sits at the bottom of the graph, with AMD deciding to not ship this 6-core X-series CPU without a stock cooling solution. 

Again we see the AIO liquid coolers outperform both of the air coolers that we have tested and that all of our water coolers offering similar results, with all liquid coolers running with thermal results that were all within 4 degrees of each other.  

Even affordable air coolers like the Cryorig H7 are able to run an R5 1600X at stock with ease, though this quickly changes when we start overclocking.  

 

 

Overclocked results

When overclocking our R5 1600X we can see that the affordable Cryorig H7 was simply unable to keep up with the heat output of our R5 1600X at 4GHz. It seems that 1.4V core voltages are simply too much for small air coolers, with lower voltages and/or clock speeds being required for an overclocked 1600X to run on lower-end air coolers. 

When looking at out selection of liquid coolers we can see that they are all easily capable of running our 1600X with this overclock, with a maximum variation of 5-degrees between all units. Larger AIOs like the H115i V2 and the X62 will offer the lowest temperatures, which will give users enough headroom for higher voltages and overclocks or to run their fans at lower RPMs for lower noise levels. 

We can see that the Noctua NH-D15S is easily able to cool this overclocked CPU, which means that air coolers can be enough to cool overclocked Ryzen systems, though this cooler is easily overwhelmed when moving to higher core counts and higher voltages.