AMD Threadripper 2990WX Cooling Performance - Testing Five Heatsinks & Two Water Coolers

The Thermaltake Water 3.0 360 RGB is a $125~160 closed-loop water cooling system that was included back with the original Threadripper 1950X launch kit. The radiator features three 120mm fans.

Besides the Cooler Master Threadripper heatsink, AMD also included the Enermax Liqtech TR4 240 with the Threadripper 2 review hardware. This AIO water cooling solution is compatible with TR4/SP3 sockets and has two 120mm fans on the radiator and a rated 500W+ cooling capacity. The water block with the Enermax Liqtech TR4 240 is larger than the Thermaltake water cooler in order to provide complete coverage of the heat-spreader on EPYC/Threadripper processors.

The weakest air cooler included for testing was the Dynatron A26 that is designed to fit within 2U height requirements. The Dynatron A26 2U is rated for only 180 Watts cooling capacity of Threadripper/EPYC but was tested anyways for seeing how it would perform and the thermal throttling impact. This heatsink can be found for about $40 USD.

With each of these heatsinks / water coolers, a variety of benchmarks were run in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software while it was also recording the CPU core temperature. The ambient room temperature and other environmental factors were maintained the same throughout this benchmarking process. The raw performance results are also included with these thermal results to see in what scenarios there was any thermal throttling.