Cooling AMD EPYC With Noctua Coolers: NH-U9 TR4-SP3, NH-U12S TR4-SP3, NH-U14S TR4-SP3

With these heatsinks being specially designed for the TR4/SP3 sockets, installation is a breeze with simply having to engage the screws to the TR4/SP3 socket.. No fiddling around with different screws or adapters for the more universal heatsinks, but a quick and easy installation for these ultra high-end coolers.

Noctua backs all of these heatsinks by a six year warranty. All three of these heatsinks are rated for up to 180 Watt CPUs as found with the EPYC line-up.

Testing of these Noctua EPYC heatsinks with the 7551 processor was done with the GIGABYTE MZ31-AR0 workstation motherboard. All three of these heatsinks fit fine with this motherboard and didn't cause any obstructions around the DDR4 Registered ECC memory sockets or any other installation difficulties. Though the orientation of the socket with the Gigabyte motherboard in turn ended up being slightly less optimal in that the CPU heatsink fans were not able to pull/push air from front to back of the chassis but rather going from left to right.

The NH-U9 TR4-SP3, NH-U12S TR4-SP3 (with and without a second fan), and NH-U14S TR4-SP3 were all tested on this AMD EPYC 7551 system while using the NT-H1 thermal compound and maintaining the same ambient room temperature, etc. Besides the CPU heatsink/fan, this Rosewill case was configured with two Noctua NF-F12 PWM cooling intake fans and two NF-R8 80mm exhaust fans for ensuring sufficient ventilation for this system with the 32-core / 64-thread EPYC processor.

As of the Linux 4.15 kernel is support for being able to monitor the CPU core temperature via the k10temp driver on AMD Zen version 1 CPUs, including the EPYC family. This test setup was running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with the Linux 4.16 Git kernel.

The Phoronix Test Suite was monitoring the EPYC 7551 CPU temperature while carrying out a diverse range of benchmarks.