Performance
Performance has been tested on AMD R7 1700X processor and ASUS Prime X370-Pro motherboard with 0502 BIOS. I’ve noticed that results will vary depends on used BIOS version. There are sometimes up to 10°C differences what of course affect fan speed. It’s because of Ryzen platform is not mature enough and motherboard manufacturers are working on better BIOS releases.
As in previous reviews there are three main tests but I also added AIDA64 load as it’s about what we can see in most tests and applications which base on CPU power. So we have idle state which I don’t have to describe, mixed load which bases on PCMark 8 tests, AIDA64 CPU stability test which is stressing CPU only and full load test which bases on the latest version of Prime95 with all additional instructions.
Let’s begin with a test results table. Tests are limited to three Noctua coolers as there is limited number of AM4 coolers on the market and so far we were able to test only these three models. The Ryzen premiere has its place three weeks ago so not all had time to prepare coolers on time.
Every Noctua cooler for AM4 is more than enough for new AMD Ryzen procesors. The smallest one – NH-L9x65 is performing well in all tests. If we won’t load CPU to the maximum then fan is quiet and we won’t really hear it. At full load we may hear something but it’s hard to call it loud. Maximum noise specified by Noctua is a bit more than 23dB. It’s really low considering that fan is spinning up to about 2500 RPM. Maximum speed registered by monitoring software was a bit higher – 2650 RPM. I’m not sure if it’s wrong read or read speed.
The NH-L9x65 is performing great. It has compact build but has no problems to handle 8 core processors and still offer low noise. I had no chance to test AMD box cooler as it comes only with R7 1700 but looking at other users experience NH-L9x65 is much better option.
Here is also fan speed graph at said load:
Idle speed supposed to be lower but for some reason it couldn’t run slower. I guess it’s BIOS issue and I didn’t want to force different profiles so results will be comparable. We will probably repeat tests when new, improved BIOS will be released.
As you can see, the NH-L9x65 is performing great. It should be interesting option for all who wish to build small computer based on AMD Ryzen platform. Soon there will be lower power processors with less cores so this cooler will be even more interesting. Right now we are sure it can handle 8 core monsters!
Additionally I wish to add that maximum possible overclock on this cooler was 3.85GHz on all cores. Full load temperature went up by about 12°C due to high voltage but everything was stable in tests.
