On Thursday, 24 July 2025 01:53:22 British Summer Time Alexandru N. Barloiu wrote: > On Thu, 2025-07-24 at 02:38 +0200, whiteman808 wrote: > > Hello, > > > > I'm saving money for building PC. I'm going to do a lot of compiling. > > I'll use this PC as binary package server for multiple machines in my > > home network. > > I'll also host many virtual machines for various purposes on this PC. > > > > Target budget for only PC (not peripherals, additional devices) is > > 5000 EUR. > > > > Do you think AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5965WX is a good choice for > > doing lots of compiling stuff on Gentoo? > > > > Do you recommend to use all in one cooling or invest into custom > > water cooling system? Is it true that heat cooling isn't a good idea > > in > > my case? > > > > whiteman808 > > I would like to make 2 points. > > First about cooling. Don't believe the hype. They are both the same > thing. Both cooling solutions are a mixture of a liquid and air. Only > difference is the pump and the amount of liquid. But even water > solutions use a fan to cool down the liquid, and even normal coolers > have pipes with liquid in them that do exactly the same thing. > Personally I am partial to Noctua NH-D15. Its a monstrous cooler. And > its safe from a liquid perspective. That thing can cool anything. The > downside of it is that it doesn't fit in most cases. its 175 mm high.
The pros & cons between air and water cooling are well covered and commented on all over the interwebs. There also a lot of tests and measurements to back claims of one Vs the other; e.g.: https://www.relaxedtech.com/reviews/noctua/nh-d15-versus-closed-loop-liquid-coolers/1 I broadly agree with Axl's comment on cooling. For normal everyday desktop workloads an AIO water cooler will not provide any significant benefit compared to a similarly priced air cooler, other than lower noise levels at maximum performance. However, the topic is rather nuanced and there are notable differences between cooling components and CPU/GPU power outputs. First let's differentiate between AIO and custom water cooling systems. Although AIOs and air coolers are comparable, with AIOs having an edge both in higher temperature dissipation and lower noise at maximum power output, an expensive custom water cooling system will perform better than any air cooling system today, in terms of temperature differentials at extreme performance levels. A custom water cooling system can also water-cool your GPU, which you may need if you're an avid gamer, engage in crypto-mining, or undertake heavy media transcoding. If you overclock, or you tune your AMD's PBO to maximise CPU power usability, a water cooler will deliver better performance during a continuous maximum CPU power draw. When you are cranking up all cores on protracted monster emerges, like chromium/qtwebengine, then liquid cooling will have a measurable edge. On the other hand, a water cooling system has the major disbenefit of a limited life span. AIOs come with a 3, 5, or 6 years warranty for a good reason. The components they use have a higher probability of failing soon after the warranty expires! They may fail gradually, e.g. by their puny water pump becoming noisier, or they may fail suddenly and without warning. They could fail and spring a leak all over your expensive MoBo, PCIe ports, M.2 SSD and graphics card. An air cooler may also fail, but without collateral damage the cost of just replacing a cooling fan and carrying on where you left will be much much much lower. > Second point. Number of cores is fine. Prolly dont need that many. What > will be a problem will be the memory. You need around 1GB per thread of > memory for normal C, and about 4GB of ram per thread for C++ stuff. So > for 48 threads multiplied by 4 = 192 GB of ram. For something like > webkit-gtk or chromium or spiderweb or rust or any other number of > packages. GCC too. Especially if you put LTO on as well. > > I would invest in a CPU with less cores/threads (maybe 9950x3d = 36 > threads) in favor of maxing RAM. In which case that is about 96GB. With > a 870x chipset board. Nice balance. And have to keep in mind that your > CPU alone is half the money you want to invest. But you will need a > bunch of RAM which is very expensive. A mobo. A cooler. A power supply. > Its a lot to start with a cpu that is already half your budget. Go > lower imho. Good luck and enjoy your machine. > > axl I tend to go by the old muscle car saying, "... there's no substitute for cubic inches!" On your PC the cubic inches translate to cores x frequency. More cores and higher frequency = faster emerge. However, as Axl warns the bottleneck becomes the amount of RAM needed to support the parallelism of your CPU cores. So what to do? I tend to opt for the higher amount of cores commensurate with a proportionate increase in price, which means I won't buy the latest and greatest advertised CPU. I also wait until the price drops during sales. Sometimes, later MoBo models increase the amount of RAM they can power so checking what the MoBo can feed may help overcoming the RAM limitation. If you're building a system to keep in the long term I suggest you buy as many cores as you can afford with enough RAM for now, with plans to increase it later on when RAM prices tend to fall.
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