HL8 Pre Purchase Questions

I ended up doing a custom build in the HL8 with Acrylic front which I detailed in the post linked below. Although I went for some upgrades, I also reused anything I could from the HL8 full build part list. This might give you some idea of what to expect temperature wise.

As mentioned, I went with the “Pro Max” build I outlined with a Ryzen 5 5600 plus five (5) Seagate Exos X14 12TB hard drives.

My HL8 Noctua fans are as follows with idle system:

  • Fan 1: Case (2x 120mm): 900 RPM
  • Fan 2: Case (1x 40mm): 2400 RPM
  • Fan 3: CPU (1x 90mm): 1400 RPM

And here are some of the temps I currently have at idle:

  • CPU: 37C
  • X570: 61C
  • MOBO: 39C
  • HDD: 37-40C

I have a few other observations I’ve had regarding the fans and the case:

  1. The smaller Noctua 40mm on the front of the case does very little in the way of the cooling. I was hoping I could use to help with the X570 chipset but I really have the crank the RPM’s up to around 4000 RPM’s to get any benefit. At that level, the fan is distinctly audible with a pitch higher than the other fans. I found I really need to keep it under 3000 rpm unless the system is under full load for an extended period of time.
  2. Even while running an extended stress test, my system does not thermal throttle and keeps max turbo speeds. CPU temperature is then reaching into the mid-80’s. The caveat here is that all the fans at that point are pretty much running at full speed to maintain keep it going like that.
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