Noctua's NH-U9 TR4-SP3 Is Still The Best 4U EPYC / Threadripper Cooler I've Found

If you are in the market for an AMD Ryzen Threadripper or AMD EPYC heatsink that fits within 4U height requirements, the Noctua NH-U9 TR4-SP3 is still easily the best option available. I'm now running the NH-U9 TR4-SP3 in five different EPYC/Threadripper systems in the racks and they work out splendid.

I've already covered the NH-U9 TR4-SP3 multiple times before, but with having picked up another one of these coolers this past week and being satisfied with the results, just wanted to give another shout-out to Noctua and pass along the latest thermal results. For this latest build, the NH-U9 TR4-SP3 is cooling an EPYC 7351P 16-core / 32-thread CPU that tops out at 3.9GHz.

I've looked at the Noctua cooling performance in past rounds with Cooling AMD EPYC With Noctua Coolers (several different models tested) and the original Noctua NH-U9 TR4-SP3 Threadripper testing from 2017. There was also the Noctua Air Cooling With The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2970WX testing.

With having tested the NH-U9 TR4-SP3 with Threadripper 2 and EPYC 7551 CPUs, to little surprise the cooler worked out great with the EPYC 7351P that was running within a 4U Rosewill rackmount chassis.

I ran some tests with the cooler at the default auto/PWM behavior and then again when the Noctua fans were running at their forced full-speed, which makes the system slightly louder while with the default PWM behavior the fans are extremely quiet. But even with these fans at full-speed, still much quieter than normal 1U/2U cooling...

The 7351P EPYC was operating at about 37 degrees during the demanding test of compiling the Linux kernel or it was about three degrees cooler on average with the fans forced to their full-speed.

Even during the much longer process of compiling the entire GNU Compiler Collection, the 7351P was operating very well with the Noctua 4U-compatible cooler and quiet with the default PWM control.


With multi-threaded video encoding, the 7351P stuck to 40 degrees or less on average.

Blender was one of the most demanding workloads where the EPYC 7351P topped out at just 46 degrees in the stock configuration.

Lastly is a look at the cooling performance over the span of several hours with various single and multi-threaded workloads for this system. With the stock configuration in this 4U chassis, the EPYC CPU never even hit 50 degrees. Running with the fans always at full-speed led to a slightly noisier setup but was about four degrees cooler.

Those looking for Socket TR4/SP3 cooling solutions can find the Noctua NH-U9 TR4-SP3 and others via NewEgg.