Air Cooler Comparison

Blows air like all the others but looks cooler doing it!

Much Better to install then a Air cooler

Awesome performance but runs a bit hot. Nothing a good air cooler can't handle though!

This chip comes close to the performance of the X-version. Except with lower power and temperatures. An air cooler can handle this cpu, no problem.

Ever since top vents started coming into vogue, I've longed for a case like this to make an appearance, and it's everything I wanted. The key differentiator of this case compared to most other, modern cases is that it has no vents on the top. For air cooling, this is ideal because you want air to go through the CPU cooler and out the back, not go out the top and skip the cooler entirely or come in from the top and screw up the flow direction. There is a slope in front of the top-mounted PSU that forces the incoming air from the empty space at the top of the front fans down into the CPU cooler. Then the GPU area is fed by additional fans on the bottom to ensure there's plenty of fresh air. This amount of airflow allows you to run the fans at pretty low speeds, being almost silent at 60% in the front and 40% on the bottom, while not significantly reducing the cooling potential. There are mesh filters in front of both sets of fans, keeping the interior a lot cleaner than it would be without them. The panels pop off nicely with some sort of magnetic or tension mounting. Overall, the design of the toolless access and working inside this case feels like an improvement over the Meshify C case I had before. Of course, there is one compromise. If you want non-nvme drives, it only has room for a couple on the rear of the motherboard panel, and there's not much airflow in that area, so I'd hesitate to use a spinning platter hard drive. At this point, I only use nvme drives and a separate NAS for storing media, so that's no problem for me.

Coupled with a Noctua NH-D15 air cooler and everything at stock/default settings, I encode hour long videos using. The CPU was at usage 96% capacity, temp at 65C with the CPU fan at 575 rpm and all cores running at or above 4.2GHz. Haven't tried overclocking yet, but looks like plenty of room. Certainly is great performance straight out of the box

Very happy with the Elements External drive with it sitting on a laptop cooler blowing air up through the drive. Stays at 42 C in a 23 C room. I would not be happy with the drive temperature otherwise. Had to assign a drive letter in Windows 7 to the external drive to access the drive. No issues after that

A powerful gaming CPU that is extremely capable. However, if you're an SFF builder, be prepared for how warm this CPU runs. Nothing that can't be handled with a proper AIO cooler, but if your ITX case only supports air cooling (i.e. Fractal Terra), then selecting an appropriate air cooler and applying curve optimizer may be essential to bring down the standard operating temps to something you can tolerate. Also, I agree with Dongun's review comment about the increased boot times. Bottom line: Highly recommended CPU.

This cooler pushes a good volume of air. It is well built and is able to operate tilted up or in the flat position. Rear legs provide two tilt heights. The front stoppers are a little tall and stick up a little too far for relatively thin laptops and to get in the way. But my laptop stay put firmly when the cooler is tilted to the first position so it has not been a real issue. Very happy with this cooler.

With a good air cooler (Noctua) I haven't seen this CPU exceed 63C even at sustained full load. Total power consumption of my whole system was also only around 150W during a full load of all cores. The high core count isn't needed for most of my applications but I did max them out to 100% during a Lightroom Classic export task, which this CPU tore through making full use of parallelism. In general the system I built with this CPU is very responsive. The only question is whether you will use this many cores regularly and, if not, you might want to consider one of the other CPUs in this series.