Normal
Confession time: my body says Noctua, but my heart says "be quiet!" Agreed. I can get my 3700X (also a 65W part) with L9a pretty warm in torture test scenarios like Prime95 or AIDA64, but in most situations it's fairly cool. The TDP doesn't mean quite what most people expect it to mean; I treat it the same way I do battery life numbers for laptops and smartphones, where there's either an implicit or explicit asterisk that it's a number coming from whatever specific testing configuration, methodology, and definition the company uses, and not a guarantee of x number of hours in the worst-case scenario.No company wants to market the worst-case figure, especially when there's no standard workload or configuration. TDP is sufficient as a base, ballpark number, but always have to look at reviews or run your own tests. I always shop with either thermal headroom from cooling option in mind, or otherwise I am prepared to drop core voltage/clockspeed to reduce heat.
Confession time: my body says Noctua, but my heart says "be quiet!"
Agreed. I can get my 3700X (also a 65W part) with L9a pretty warm in torture test scenarios like Prime95 or AIDA64, but in most situations it's fairly cool. The TDP doesn't mean quite what most people expect it to mean; I treat it the same way I do battery life numbers for laptops and smartphones, where there's either an implicit or explicit asterisk that it's a number coming from whatever specific testing configuration, methodology, and definition the company uses, and not a guarantee of x number of hours in the worst-case scenario.
No company wants to market the worst-case figure, especially when there's no standard workload or configuration. TDP is sufficient as a base, ballpark number, but always have to look at reviews or run your own tests. I always shop with either thermal headroom from cooling option in mind, or otherwise I am prepared to drop core voltage/clockspeed to reduce heat.
