Can a Budget Air Cooler cope with an i7 9700K running at stock speed - Coffee Lake Upgrade

Описание к видео Can a Budget Air Cooler cope with an i7 9700K running at stock speed - Coffee Lake Upgrade

This is not a Benchmark video.

The point of this video is to see if a very modest budget CPU cooler can handle a Coffee Lake refresh or 9th Generation ‘K’ chip running at stock clock speed.
This may be a common upgrade path for many users now, as the price of 9th gen chips, either new or used, is becoming very reasonable - and I could not find the answer on YouTube, or on the net more broadly.
I built a Coffee Lake or 8th generation Intel system in June 2018
I use some Music Production software that is optimised for Intel - and while I could have been a pioneer and used AMD, I just wanted it to work, so I stuck with Intel.
This software does use multiple cores, however it benefits most from a high single core speed.
The software manufacturer lists some minimal system requirements, and also suggests what minimum single core speed you should aim for.
Apart from that I just surf the web, play some undemanding games at 1080p, and do some moderate video rendering.
I had a budget back in 2018 of around 1500 Australian Dollars (about a 1000 US dollars) to meet these minimum system requirements, and I attempted to build in some ability to upgrade the system in the future where.
At the time I chose an Intel i5-8500 as the processor. The i5-8400 was just below the recommended single core speed for a strong system, so I went with the 8500 as it just reached the level I wanted to achieve.
The motherboard is an Asrock B360M Pro 4 – I feel this is a slightly higher quality B360 board, with a pretty reasonable power delivery over the average B360 motherboard in comparison.
My system has 16 Gig of RAM, and a GTX 1050ti video card.
I didn’t want to use the stock Intel CPU cooler, as it is not of a very high quality, and is a bit noisy when pushed. So I chose a very low priced, perhaps even ‘the bottom of the range’ cooler – the Cooler Master Hyper 103. The other option was the Antec A30, which was about the same price. The Hyper 103 cooler is very quiet, and does its work very well, although keeping the i5-8500 cool is a fairly undemanding job.

Fast forward almost 3 years and I am in the market for an upgrade.
The requirements are the same, a fast single core speed is the main consideration, and multiple cores a secondary advantage.
The obvious choice is the i7 9700 non K chip, as I can’t overclock on a B360 board. It gives 2 more cores and 2 more threads, with a reasonable increase in single core, and all core speed.
The difference in price however for the 9700 non K chip, and a i7 9700K chip is now not very much, and the K chip has an even higher base clock, and a higher single core and multi core speed.
Intel puts their best silicon into the K chips, and for me and the minimum requirements I have, even at stock clock speed, it becomes a real consideration.
The fact I cannot overclock does not matter, straight out of the box, this is the fastest i7 chip in the range (actually. the KF chip – without onboard graphics - is actually very very slightly faster, but I prefer having the onboard graphic’s as a backup, just in case). The K chip will also drop straight into my motherboard with a relatively easy BIOS upgrade.

So very quickly I decided to get either the 9700 or 9700K chip for my CPU upgrade, then the question was “ will my CPU cooler be able to cope with either chip” as both are much more powerful than the i5 8500, and I expected they would be much ‘hotter’ chips, when being pushed hard.

I expected at idle and under modest loads my Hyper 103 would probably cope OK, but at higher loads I was not sure, and almost everyone offering an opinion said to use the ‘four heat pipe’ Hyper 212 as the bare minimum – these suggestions however were often to allow for overclocking on the K chip, which does not apply to me. My Hyper 103 is only a ‘three heat pipe’ model, and is not as tall as some of the higher priced coolers, so it has a smaller surface area.
It does not have to cool an overclocked chip though.
So I searched on YouTube and the internet for others who had done a Coffee Lake upgrade and in particular put a budget cooler on K chip running at stock clock speeds. I thought there would be many, and perhaps there are, but I could not find any tests for this upgrade. I did find some people who were considering doing a similar upgrade, but have not shown their results of doing this upgrade.
So finally, this video is showing that yes this cooler the "Cooler Master Hyper 103" - bought for AU$30 (~US$22) in 2018 - does appear to be able to cope with an i7 9700K running at 100% on all cores at stock speed (with no overclock).
I hope this video is helpful to someone out there.

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