CPU 7800X3D Experience and Discussion - this thing is great but can run hot

wertzius

SFF Lingo Aficionado
Original poster
Sep 13, 2022
102
70
Hey - a summary of my experiences in a SFF build.

I switched from the 7600X to a 7800X3D in my Dan A4 with a Noctua L9a with Duct.

Running with PBO -35 stable, CPB enabled.

Everything went great - the CPU is super efficient in gaming, hitting not more than 50W and 75C in most of my titles with 120Hz FPS limit - Cinebench yields around 94% of multicore performance with the cpu sitting at 89C with sustained power draw of 82W like expected - so fine so good. 1 core, 2 core and 4 core performanc eis above average - 8 core is just a bit too much for the cooler so it has to calm down abit but 94% is absolutely acceptable and i have no regular all core workloads.

But TLOU shader compiling absolutely kills the CPU. The power draw barely hits 70W but the temps shoot through the roof - even surpassing the hard 89C limit - Tdie shoots up to 95C within 15s leading to a hard shutoff - very bad feeling. It seems that Tcase is used for the temp limit and Tdie is able to surpass that. Also there is a seperate temp limit for the Vcache - at 70C or just below of that - i won't figure it out again exactly (hard shutoff)

I had to set 80C as thermal limit in BIOS - so Tcase stays at 80 - Tdie reaches 85C and the Vcache stays below 65C.
I still get 99% of gaming performance and all the cache benefits - I game mostly games like ANNO series, Cities Skylines , and so on...

Also very interesting to me was that the die temps are not directly related to the power draw - it seems that special calculations produce significant more heat than others. I know that phenomenon from Intel chips and AVX code pretty well but have never seen such significant real life differences. Some examples without lowered temp limit:



OCCT88W85C
Cinebench82W89C - how it should be
TLOU shader compiling65-70W95C - hard shutdown


Hope you find it interesting and i am heavily interested in further experiences.

I got very bad responses in the AMD subreddit - people just don't get the point of making a SFF build work that shouldn't work or just do not read the post at all.

Link:

Often i got links to Noctuas website that the L9a is not capable of handling the baseclock of the 7800X3D - which is just untrue. With CPB disabled (CPU stays at baseclock) temps never even exceed 80C with out any limits - just boosting is the problem. I figured out that limiting the target temp is way more effective than limiting all core boost clock or manipulating single core boost limits - this way i just get the maximum performance possible without any temp problems anymore.
 
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alexep7

Cable-Tie Ninja
Jan 30, 2017
184
139
TLOU shader compiling has effectively surpassed all CPU and GPU stress testing softwares, what a mess
 

HydrAxx747

SFF Lingo Aficionado
Feb 23, 2021
98
117
Ah, you even come here to get bashed by another community, you must frankly be a masochist, a lot of people have already answered you on AMD's Reddit but you didn't want to listen to reason and you got made massively dislike as this is not allowed. Seriously, don't expect better here and it might even be worse.

So to finish, I repeat it to you once again your Noctua L9a is not enough to properly cool your Ryzen 7 7800X3D because the L9a is designed to cool up to 65 Watts of TDP (75 Watts at best by optimizing the air flow ) and the base TDP of your CPU is 120 Watts without PBO activated. So your problem is insoluble, except by changing your heatsink for a more efficient model or maybe by switching your 7800X3D to ECO Mode 65W via the bios (and even then it's not even sure because of the thermal excess due to the stacking of 3D-VCache technology).
 

wertzius

SFF Lingo Aficionado
Original poster
Sep 13, 2022
102
70
You might not know that but a tdp rating and and the actual power draw are 2 completely different things.
You might not know that but activating ECO mode sets the PPT actually to 87W - not 65W - so it just changes absolutely nothing in my examples above.

I have no problem - i already solved it as written above - just sharing my experiences and want to know other experiences as the number of SFF people with the 7800X3D will grow.

Bashing is fine as long it is reasonable - people not actually reading the post - bashing me for complaining (i do not complain anywhere in my post) - and people without any clue about what they are talking about aka Fortnite Kiddies screaming "Bruhh, you need an AIO!!!!!" are not part of that.
 

HydrAxx747

SFF Lingo Aficionado
Feb 23, 2021
98
117
You might not know that but a tdp rating and and the actual power draw are 2 completely different things.
You might not know that but activating ECO mode sets the PPT actually to 87W - not 65W - so it just changes absolutely nothing in my examples above.

I have no problem - i already solved it as written above - just sharing my experiences and want to know other experiences as the number of SFF people with the 7800X3D will grow.

Bashing is fine as long it is reasonable - people not actually reading the post - bashing me for complaining (i do not complain anywhere in my post) - and people without any clue about what they are talking about aka Fortnite Kiddies screaming "Bruhh, you need an AIO!!!!!" are not part of that.
I have been a computer maintenance technician for more than 20 years in a subcontracting company in one of the largest countries in Europe which repairs laptops (office, pro and gaming) for ASUS, ACER, LENOVO, etc... and I've been into overclocking and home-made watercooling since 1995 (on Intel 80486 DX-33MHz) so I think I know enough about computer cooling and obviously much better than you, so too bad for you if you don't anything and does crazy things, it makes you wonder if you might not be related to Anatoly Diatlov, the chief engineer responsible for the chain of catastrophic choices that led to the explosion of reactor no. 4 from Chernobyl, enough joking, in any case I don't give much of the longevity of your poor and innocent Ryzen 7 7800X3D which should be not far from its maximum thermal enthropy, pure component waste.​
 

wertzius

SFF Lingo Aficionado
Original poster
Sep 13, 2022
102
70
A computer technician that does not know the difference between TDP and PPT. Very impressive.
Also reluctant to renew his 30 year old knowledge about CPU temps, boost behaviours and thermal limits.
This will help you: And surely the CPU will just vaporate at 80C.