>>158686
yea except this makes no sense at all, OP in that post said his CPU never hit thermal bottleneck, all he did was apply a no-performance loss undervolt and he was chillin'

any tiny copper low-profile cooler like an AXP90-X47 FC will be able to sustain a beefy high-cache count 8 or 12-core processor like the 9800X3D up to 130W~ without any thermal bottleneck, so the "performance bottleneck" is literally non-measurable
mind you we are talking about some of the fastest if not the fastest CPUs above 6 cores right now, if you need more than this you're probably thinking about building a workstation in which case size is likely something of no concern here (as has been the norm since the 1980s, have you ever seen a small Silicon Graphics workstation? workstations are rarely small.)


the only time you'd need a "water block" (you don't, an AIO is fine, waterblocks are for schizophrenics and XOCers, and I don't differentiate between schizophrenics and XOCers) is if you're getting a CPU like the 9950X3D which can boost up to 220W~, and even then - there's still tiny miniITX cases that support AIOs, and you wouldn't need more than a small midrange 240mm AIO like the NZXT Kraken stuff, and those are shit AIOs, you can go even smaller if you want

regardless, an RTX 5090 + Ryzen 9 9950X3D setup (essentially the fastest consumer computer you could build right now in terms of hardware latency) can be made to be effectively smaller than an office Dell OptiPlex, and it will operate at stock without any problems with thermals.