ROG STRIX Z690-E Gaming and Cooling Options

[kewlniss]

Hey there!

I was going to start building my machine today, but the very first thing I opened after the Mobo itself was the LGA1700 adapter from Noctuna. There it wanted me to go to the a very helpful site that I never saw before...
https://ncc.noctua.at/motherboards

And unfortunately, my NH-D15 is not compatible because of the VRM heatsink.

Now it appears my options are to:

1. Remove the plastic over the VRM heatsink (unscrew from bottom of Mobo)
2. I could change the orientation of the NH-D15 90 degrees, and blow it out of the top of my case. I do have holes at the top of the case (Cooler Master H500) so that would be fine, but rotating the cooler would have it pulling air right from the GPU. That doesn't seem ideal.
3. I could replace the NH-D15 with a NH-D15S which doesn't cool as much but is compatible.
4. Get an appropriate ASUS AIO. Not sure what that should be right off.
5. As part of 2 - rotating 90 degrees, I could get a vertical GPU adapter for the case - or potentially switch to a case that has that option out of the gate, as I'd lose all my PCI slots otherwise.


So my question is this... If you were in my shoes, what would you do? (I'm open to other options, I'm not thinking about as well!)

Now, I've not fooled with water cooling as honestly it frightens me that something could break and leak and cause bad damage. I also have seen debates about air cooling vs water cooling actually being cooler. It seemed to me that air cooling was just as cool, if not cooler ... and there was no H20 that could potentially wreck my machine.

Regarding option 2, At the moment, I plan on using my 1080 Ti GPU but want to upgrade to 3090 Ti early in the year assuming I can get my hands on it when it comes out late January. If I'm lucky enough to get any 3060 + from NewEgg shuffle, I'd do that too, as I expect my chances of getting a 3090 Ti close to launch is about impossible.

My goals are to have the CPU as cool as needed to last 7 to 10 years. Doesn't have to be crazy cool, but I do want it to last and not be running hot.

-- Edit --
I forgot to mention that I'll be using the i9 12900KF CPU.
---

Thanks for any tips on what you would do.

[derpderp]

I rotated mine 90 degrees.

[kewlniss]

derpderp wrote:
I rotated mine 90 degrees.

Awesome, how is your CPU temps and what Case and GPU do you have?

[derpderp]

kewlniss wrote:
Awesome, how is your CPU temps and what Case and GPU do you have?

3090 in a Thermaltake Core P5. Playing right now and it's bouncing between 55-59C. Overclocked at 5.5 GHz.

[kewlniss]

derpderp wrote:
3090 in a Thermaltake Core P5. Playing right now and it's bouncing between 55-59C. Overclocked at 5.5 GHz.

Oh man, thanks that really helps!

[Banditt1976]

Personally I would never use an air cooler on such a powerful processor. AIO should be a minimum cooling solution, especially if you are able to acquire the rtx 3090 ti graphics card. I have an AMD 5900X CPU overclocked with boost speeds of up to 5.1 GHz cooled by a ThermalTake Floe DX RGB 360mm system installed on the top inside of the Corsair 5000X case. With this setup the CPU idles around 45 C and never reaches 80 C which is still within normal thermal limits for this processor. I have not had my system shut down automatically because of excessive temps. AMD I know runs hotter than Intel processors do so I'm sure you would probably get lower CPU temps than I do. I wouldn't quote me on that since I really don't know much about the new Alder Lake processors and the PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 RAM that also come into consideration regarding temps and system stability. I have an ASUS Rog Strix 3070 graphics card that is also overclocked to 2000 MHz and idles around 30 C and maxes out in the mid 60s C when under full load which does not affect my CPU cooling negatively at all.

[kewlniss]

Banditt1976 wrote:
Personally I would never use an air cooler on such a powerful processor. AIO should be a minimum cooling solution, especially if you are able to acquire the rtx 3090 ti graphics card. I have an AMD 5900X CPU overclocked with boost speeds of up to 5.1 GHz cooled by a ThermalTake Floe DX RGB 360mm system installed on the top inside of the Corsair 5000X case. With this setup the CPU idles around 45 C and never reaches 80 C which is still within normal thermal limits for this processor.

Thanks for this!