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Comment by hailmike | Hacker News Reader

I find the included cooler for the 3600 not so great. I bought one the month it came out, and was hitting pretty high temps when creating h264 using only CPU. I tried applying paste before buying a better cooler. I think 3600x and up have much better coolers.

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Yeah, the X series processors come with the Wraith Prism which is a really nice cooler. My processor isn't overclocked but the fact that I've never seen it get above 55 degC with the prism is impressive.

>never seen it get above 55 degC with the prism is impressive.

Pretty sure I've seen 75+ on mine 3700x

For most cases on the 3600, you need a separate cooler to get longer life from the CPU. I was getting warnings when playing some games with the stock cooler. Good thing they only cost about $30.

Do modern CPUs fry themselves like the ones from 15-20 years ago? I thought they just throttled down when approaching their limits, and extra cooling is helpful for allowing CPUs to boost clock speeds for longer.

AMD seems to design their components to get all the way up to 95 and sit there. It happened in the stock cooler for the 3600, and it happens on my 5700xt, even though I went for one of the nicer cards. It's still below the safe junction temperature, and it won't fry, and it can even run just fine like that for several hours.

The downside is that there is evidence that such high temperatures increase electron migration (or something similar) in the chips themselves, leading to not infinite lifetimes. I want this computer to last 10 years, so I bought an aftermarket CPU cooler for $30 to keep temps closer to 50 degrees

Not generally in the short term, but over the longer term increased heat is going to make it more likely that the chip fails prematurely.

Of course, if you do something like not attaching the heatsink at all, it's plausible that heat could spike fast enough to cook the chip before throttling or overtemp protection can kick in/shut the system off.

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