Quote Originally Posted by oj88 View Post
Speaking of CPU coolers, the first aftermarket CPU cooler I ever bought in the early 2000's was a Thermaltake Volcano 11+. This was paired to an Athlon XP 1800+.

At max 3,400 RPM, it cools it just fine, even when slightly overclocked. But man... that Volcano 11+ is noisy as hell! Sold it a week later and reinstalled the stock cooler.

Learning from that mistake, I've since made deliberate efforts to make my future PC builds as silent as possible. That said, my current PC cooling go-to parts are:

CPU coolers: Noctua
Fans: Noctua or Arctic

I use a Noctua NH-U12P SE2 on my Xeon home media server and an NH-U14S on my Ryzen 5 main PC. Case cooling are either via Noctua P12 (flow-optimized) or Arctic P12 (static pressure optimized) fans. Everything is super silent, even at full load.

Never preferred liquid-cooling. IMO, it has one too many parts and a solution that creates more potential problems.

yeah cpu cooling and overclocking used to be fun. i used to have an athlon XP as well, could probably overclock 50% (i don't remember). back then you could get a celeron 300 to run at 450. celeron 600 to 900.

amd x2 555 Black Editions could be overclocked, and on top of that enable the two dormant cores to turn it into quad core

but now chips like this ryzen 5600G don't have any headroom left. i think you could only add around 100mhz so i won't bother. this is a lot less than i got when i first overclocked my amd K5, 100mhz to 117mhz