Cooling AMD EPYC With Noctua Coolers: NH-U9 TR4-SP3, NH-U12S TR4-SP3, NH-U14S TR4-SP3

These heatsinks cooling the EPYC 7551 were immediately put to the test by starting off the benchmarks with a timed build of the Linux kernel. While compiling the Linux kernel across all 64 threads, the average CPU temperature on these three heatsinks ranged from 34 degrees to 42 degrees. The NH-U12S TR4-SP3 with a single fan was the warmest of the heatsinks tested but when installing a second fan its numbers were then in line with the smaller NH-U9 TR4-SP3 with its dual 92mm fans by default. To no surprise at all, the NH-U14S TR4-SP3 led to the coolest EPYC 7551 temperatures.

Monitoring the CPU temperature while running the Redis NoSQL database server is not nearly as demanding or threaded across all of the CPUs. The NH-U12S TR4-SP3 with its single fan remained warmer than the other configurations but still very good operating temperatures without any risk of throttling while using two fans certainly led to much better results. While the NH-U9 TR4-SP3 is the smallest, its performance was quite good and certainly great with this being the heatsink that will fit within 4U height requirements.

In the case of the NGINX test using AB, it's single-threaded, so the EPYC 7551 is only minimally loaded. The results continued to be impressive for all three Noctua air coolers allowing the 180 Watt EPYC 7551 to be cooled with ease.