Does a Ryzen 9 5950 need an AIO or is a dual fan EVO 212 good enough.

Pulled the trigger on a AMD Ryzen 9 5950X which should be delivered by the end of May. I have a Cooler Master EVO 212 dual fan heatsink fan combo. I do have an aversion to water cooling as an Electronics guy by trade it was never a good mix. I have a budget of up to $200 for a heatsink fan assembly. Do I need one? How hot is the chip? Currently have a 2700X CPU and it runs about 40C @ 4.2 Ghz idle and 78C @ 100% Prime 95 hammering. Please let me know what you think.
Thanks Tony.

Indianatone said:

Pulled the trigger on a AMD Ryzen 9 5950X which should be delivered by the end of May. I have a Cooler Master EVO 212 dual fan heatsink fan combo. I do have an aversion to water cooling as an Electronics guy by trade it was never a good mix. I have a budget of up to $200 for a heatsink fan assembly. Do I need one? How hot is the chip? Currently have a 2700X CPU and it runs about 40C @ 4.2 Ghz idle and 78C @ 100% Prime 95 hammering. Please let me know what you think.
Thanks Tony.

Short answer...

This is how the coolers stack up.

Hyper 212 EVO (push/pull) OK, but nothing to write home about on that 5950X

Next up would be either an AIO or a Noctua dual fan setup. Like...
Noctua NH-D15 82.5 CFM CPU Cooler (NH-D15) - PCPartPicker



You can use your Hyper 212 Evo (push/pull) and then see how well it works.
Like run Cinebench R23 to test.

I was thinking about this. I know my case will take it easily.
Amazon.com

Indianatone said:

I was thinking about this. I know my case will take it easily.
Amazon.com

Just... no.

That Noctua I linked is the best air cooler you can get.
It also comes in black.

Noctua NH-D15 chromax.black 82.52 CFM CPU Cooler (NH-D15 CHROMAX.BLACK) - PCPartPicker

Those are 140mm fans pushing 82cfm at 19db
Here's a pic of that fan on an ATX form factor motherboard.

So here is how it went.
Installed the 5950X and used it for about a week with the Cooler Master 212 dual fans. The CPU would throttle down to 3.7 Ghz. So I ordered the Noctua NH 15 in brown. I don't care about the colour as my case has an aluminium black side to it. No more throttling and lower temps by 20C. Then the issues with the motherboard started. Lost the network. Common issue with Asus X470 motherboard so that is going back as the ZXr sound card stopped working in sympathy. Ordered a new X570 Tuf Gaming Wireless and reinstalled the lot and it all works OK. That was a rather expensive CPU upgrade, $550 CPU $200 for motherboard $100 for heatsink. Will send the strix board back to Asus. I hope they have improved as every motherboard I got RMA had a different failure on it. So short answer is unless you live in Northern Canada and Alaska or maybe Iceland and Scandinavia the 212 is not up to the job.

@Indianatone





Btw... those ASUS X570 TUF motherboards... are built tough.