Noctua Air Cooling With The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2970WX

With this week's launch of the Ryzen Threadripper 2920X and 2970WX, the new 24-core / 48-thread 2970WX has a 250 Watt TDP like the 2990WX. Fortunately, with Noctua's high-end TR4/SP3 heatsinks, it's still possible to get by with air cooling.

For those wondering about air cooling with the AMD Threadripper 2970WX, I did some fresh thermal tests this week with the various Noctua TR4-SP3 heatsinks that work for AMD EPYC and Threadripper processors. Today's tests are complementary data to our earlier Cooling AMD EPYC with Noctua heatsinks and Threadripper cooling benchmarks done in the past.

For this 2970WX testing was the Noctua NH-U14S TR4-SP3, NH-U12S TR4-SP3, NH-U9S TR4-SP3, and a second run of this smallest NH-U9 TR4-SP3 when the fans were set to run at their full fan-speed rather than the "SmartFan" settings from the BIOS. With the NH-U9 TR4-SP3 is the smallest, it's my favorite Threadripper/EPYC heatsink because it fits within 4U height requirements. I am currently running four NH-U9 TR4-SP3 heatsinks in various Threadripper/EPYC systems and they continue doing great: I haven't found a better workstation cooler for these processors that fits within 4U height for rackmount systems.

The system was running within a SilverStone CS350 chassis.

To little surprise, the largest of these heatsinks - the NH-U14S TR4-SP3 - led to the coolest results.


In compiling LLVM with 48 threads, the NH-U9S TR4-SP3 did appear to have a bit of thermal throttling given the variation in the results. Fortunately, when running the two Noctua 92mm fans at full-speed the performance was in line with the other coolers.

In compiling GCC, no thermal throttling was encountered.



The thermal results in some of the other workloads tested where no thermal throttling was encountered on any of these Noctua heatsinks.

With Blender 3D modeling, the full-speed fans on the 4U compatible cooler was also necessary to avoid reduced performance.

Lastly is a look at the data overall during the course of many benchmarks carried out. All of the individual data sets can be found via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file. These Noctua EPYC/Threadripper heatsinks can be found from the likes of NewEgg.