Adding some juice

I'm giving her all she's got, Cap'n!

Throwing caution to the winds, we now up the ante. VCore goes up to 1.315v, SOC up to 1.15v, LLC to Level 3, and the all core clock ratio goes to 3.8Ghz. This is enough, in Cinebench R15, to get me a multicore score of about 1750. I have actually broken the 1800 barrier before, with the chip @ 4Ghz, 1.44v, and my old cooler giving everything it had to give. I was proud of that. The above will still, however, put a fairly significant strain on the cooler, as power usage will increase significantly, potentially really pushing the max. TDP rating of the Leto.

So, how does the cooler perform? Before, in the previous segment, I voiced my concern that I feared that the cooler had met its match in an overclocked R7 chip. Now, my system did not lock up, or crash due to thermal instability, but it was clear the lil' Leto was struggling. The 1700X reached a fairly toasty 57.4 degrees Celsius. The system was 100% ok, however, and WPrime carried on churning out 0 error results for the three requisite runs. It was also clear that by the end of run three, the cooler had begun to tame the CPU, and temperature rises were leveling off almost entirely. Please remember that due to the offset present, the system would be reading the temperature as 20C higher than this, which is why coolers act like they do on Ryzen CPUs.

This is where we also began to see the clear limits of the included 120mm fans. The overclocked run saw the Leto peak at approximately 36.5dBa. Remember that decibels are not a linear scale, and an increase of just 3dBa is going to be noted by anybody listening. At this noise level, the cooler was clearly audible, and it was evident the fans were running at beyond the point at which they could maintain a relatively quiet profile. There was a notably unpleasant 'buzz' at this speed (which I estimated to be approximately 80-85%, given the automatic PWM curve in the BIOS), and it was entirely distracting.

Again, before you are all disappointed, bear in mind that this is a budget orientated 120mm slimline cooler. It is not, under any circumstances, meant to be cooling an overclocked, 8 core, 95+ watt TDP CPU. Ever. The fact it tames the 1700X to the degree it does is praiseworthy in itself. So, whilst I cannot go and give this cooler an ecstatic performance grade, it did pass the test. The system was stable, and despite the noise, the temps had essentially leveled out to the point where I don't believe they would have risen anymore, given more goes of WPrime. With all that said and done, shall we carry on to this review's conclusion?

OC - Idle

OC - Load