My AIO leaked and nearly killed my system. Thankfully it was off and unplugged at the time.
Anywho… I ordered a Noctua NHD15 off of Amazon but it won’t be here till tomorrow. So I have a box cooler that came with my girlfriends 9th gen unlocked SKU. I decided “What the hell? the worst it can do is not work and I’ll toss it till tomorrow when Noctua comes”.
Happy to report that although I had to turn off boosting and set the CPU at a default of 3.6ghz all cores for now, it is most def possible to use the box cooler on a 9900 SKU CPU despite what seemingly common sense would tell you. It’s running at a warm 44-47C under load with some thermal grizzly applied generously across the IHS.
Thought I’d post this here because to be honest, I expected it to either thermal throttle almost immediately or keep the CPU at like 80C under idle. I’m sure someone will say “LOL fire hazard waiting to happen!” or that they knew this.
While I don’t encourage doing it (in fact, I actively discourage doing it), you could actually still run the machine without a HSF at all. You’d need more than your 1GHz underclock to make it happy (default boost clock for the 9900 is 4.6GHz for all cores, or 4.7GHz all cores for the K) and it would still want to throttle down to almost nothing, but it would work.
The factory HSF is adequate for normal usage scenarios. It won’t react well to stress tests or creation loads, but this isn’t a server or HEDT chip - it’s not sold for that purpose (though it’s definitely being sold knowing that it will get used for it). You only need something more exotic if you plan on pushing it harder than just playing games or normal office-type stuff, or overclocking (in which case all bets are off).
I’m really only using it until my NHD15 arrives today from Amazon. But I thought I’d point out that the 9900 SKUs will actually run relatively OK with it in a pinch if that’s all you have for a day or two.
Unless you’re hitting a limit somewhere the CPUs will continue to function in a limited state
This is how CPUs have been for like the last 15 years or so.