Air or AIO for Ryzen 7900X and 7600X? Cooler Comparison
If you are planning on picking up one of AMD’s Ryzen 7000 series CPUs, like the 7600X or 7900X, what sort of cooler do you need to pair these with? Will an air cooler manage, or will you have to splash out on an AIO? Well, thanks to Cyberpower I have the chance to test just that, so let’s jump in! I thought I’d test both these chips for both CPU intensive tasks and of course for gaming. I tracked the CPU temperatures, the performance over extended runs, and also the power consumption as I found a few interesting things there.
I’ll start with the CPU load – specifically Cinebench R23 multi thread on loop. Just looking at the thermals and power you can see that the 7900X is struggling a lot. It’s running at an average of 190W with the Corsair H100i ELITE, the 240mm AIO, versus just 160W with the Cooler Master single tower air cooler. The temps aren’t all that much different – 95°c or 92.6°c – but that’s because even the 240mm AIO is throttling. The 7900X should be able to draw 230W, so 190W is a considerable hit. It is worth noting that this is the sustained, average over a 10 minute run, but even still the peak wasn’t much higher and the performance isn’t quite at the same level. I’ll show you the performance in a second, but taking a look at the 7600X, that one didn’t see much throttling. Well, the socket power limit is 142W for that, but I’m averaging more like 115W. Again, that is the average though so that’s more expected. Still, there wasn’t all that much of a difference in temps overall, nor really in power consumption.
Looking at the performance numbers, you can see how much the 7900X throttled here. Over 1000 points – and the 240mm AIO result is a further 1000 points lower than most other reviewer’s results. That’s not great – although I think with a bit of tuning that can be improved. If you want to see that make sure to hit the subscribe button! But, compare that to the 7600X which does see a little performance hit, but not by quite as much. It’s still about 3.5% slower, compared to a little over 4% slower on the 7900X, so it seems like both chips could benefit from better cooling, at least on CPU specific loads.
When it comes to gaming though, your CPU really doesn’t get used all that much. The vast majority of the work is done by your GPU, with most games barely bothering your CPU cores. For this test I’m using Shadow of the Tomb Raider as it has an excellent built-in benchmark that’s easy to run on a loop offering consistent testing. These ran for right around 20 minutes each, and like you might expect, there’s a lot less of a difference in the power consumption, and a bigger difference in temperature. The 7900X averaged pretty much the same power consumption between the two runs, but the AIO dropped the temps by almost 15°c. That’s a massive difference, and I’d say well worth the extra cash. The 7600X actually had a rather interesting result – it actually drew a little less power. Not a whole lot, just an average of 7W, but it is lower. It also runs a full 10°c lower, at under 60°c, which is fantastic – especially when it’s right next to an RTX 4090 pumping 450W of heat into the case right below it!
Taking a look at the performance results, as you might expect there really isn’t much of a difference here. Technically speaking, the 240mm runs do all run a touch faster (like 1FPS), but functionally speaking it may as well be the same performance. Even down to the 1% lows, it’s primarily a GPU bound task – or at least it’s not limited by the CPU thermals and all core performance. Even in CPU bound titles, that’s normally the single threaded performance and latency that limits the FPS.
So, can you air cool Ryzen 7000? Well, if you are just gaming, the 7600X can do just fine even with a basic single tower, single fan air cooler. You can get better temperatures, and possibly even better efficiency, with a better cooler. Generally speaking, I don’t think anything over a standard 240mm cooler is worth fitting to the 7600X though. But the bigger brother 7900X? Yeah I’d say 240mm is the minimum there, maybe even 360mm especially for CPU specific tasks. If you are just gaming, you can save your cash and get a standard 240mm cooler like this one, but since you are already spending big bucks on not only the CPU but a top shelf motherboard, a higher end 360mm cooler won’t make too much of a dent to the budget, but should offer even better cooling potential.
