Guess I can share some of my experiences from running the Aquanaut on my 5800X.
First off, just to be clear, the 5800X is a pretty hot running CPU - being a single CCD 105W TDP / ~140W boost CPU it has far, far higher thermal density than the other Zen3 CPUs, both the 65/78W 5600X as well as the dual-CCD 105/144W 5900X and 5950X. That makes it by far the most difficult Zen3 CPU to keep cool. I run mine completely stock in an ASRock B550 Phantom Gaming ITX.
Also, I don't really have any useful comparisons to make. Now that I have QDCs in the loop I might swap my old EK block back in at some point (and just use the Aquanaut as a pump for that testing), but that's far too much work for me to realistically do in the near future. Comparisons are also made extremely difficult through the heaps of other variables in play - a GPU in the loop, the amount of radiators, fans and fan speeds, not to mention the fluctuating thermal loads inherent to contemporary CPUs and their dynamic boost algorithms. I also have my setup tuned for silence most of all, which necessitates allowing for higher temperatures when there's a 275W GPU in the loop and only a single 240mm radiator with 1400rpm max fans. The PWM response of my DDC fan is also rather unpredictable (the same PWM number can result in 2-300rpm difference depending on whether it's slowing down to that number or speeding up to it). My fans and pump speed are controlled by water temperature in order to avoid rapid fan/punp ramps, so CPU thermals are by design allowed to spike quite significantly in my setup.
With the caveats out of the way, how does the Aquanaut fare? I guess I would say "fine". To expand a bit on that:
- My desktop usage temps, with the pump at ~1200rpm and just a single fan on the rad running at ~800rpm, sit in the mid 40s to low 50s. Spikes from opening an application or something similar can easily send them into the mid 60s, before settling down again. Note: this is a
very low pump speed. There are very noticeable temperature improvements from increasing pump speed to 2000-2500rpm.
- While gaming, the whole loop heats up a lot more, so the pump and fans obviously run faster, and all fans in the system (two on the rad, two exhaust in the case) are on and running, and the pump ramps first to ~1800rpm and then ~2500rpm depending on thermals (there are some weird resonances at in-between speed, hence the stepped approach). CPU temperatures when gaming are typically in the 60s, but I've seen peaks around 80. This is of course hugely dependent on the game in question, and is also massively affected by the GPU pumping 275W of heat into the loop, significantly raising the base temperature possible for the CPU. My radiator fans don't ramp to full speed until the coolant after the radiator reaches 40°C, which it pretty much never does, so they're typically running at 1100-1200rpm while gaming.
- CPU-intensive loads like Lightroom exports can make thermals spike pretty high, and I've seen it pass the 80°C under these conditions. But again, due to the fans and pump being controlled solely through liquid temperature, it's slow to compensate for this by design. There's no doubt it could handle these spikes better with slightly higher pump and fan speeds.
Here's a screenshot of Aquasuite while I'm writing this post, on the desktop, with a ton of Firefox windows open, a few game launchers and other stuff in the background, as well as a few Word documents and Outlook - that's about as "idle" as this PC gets.
This is a pretty specific setup, so it's probably not very applicable to people's use cases, but the main takeaway is. It's pretty simple, really: don't expect miracles. This is a competent cooler that does its job decently and provides compact mounting for a high flow rate pump - my GPU temperatures have actually dropped noticeably with this setup, despite the previous setup having a less power hungry CPU (1600X)
and an additional 120mm rad that I could no longer fit. It doesn't run the CPU at crazy low temperatures under high loads, but it can allow for impressively silen setups in compact builds if that's what you're after.
. Just don't want after about 50 posts down the thread, users will get confused and everybody starts trying to mod, thinking the original will leak...
And what about fans rpm at full load?
