Replacing the stock Ryzen Wraith Stealth cooler with an ID-Cooling SE-224-XT

A year back, I’d rebuilt my desktop with some components from home and most others bought here. I was pretty happy for the most part - however, there was one aspect that kept annoying and worrying me - the temperatures. I noticed that the temperatures were running hotter than usual. Idle temperatures were more than 80 degrees, and full-load temperatures crossing 90 degrees.

To reduce the temperatures, I tried various options including BIOS updates, adding in some new intake fans and changing the fan curves but those did not help. I didn’t experience any performance or thermal throttling problems, it was still annoying to see the temperatures so high. After running the processor in this state for a year, I figured it is high time to change the stock CPU cooler.

Abhay recommended the ID-Cooling SE-224-XT as a good budget cooler. I’d never heard of ID-Cooling till now, but Abhay knows his components. A quick search showed the cooler had good reviews - plus it was going for a great price (106 Lei instead of the typical price of 140 Lei).

The box pack was quite comprehensive - it had the CPU heatsink, the fan, and an accessory box. The accessory box had mounting brackets, screws, standoffs, retainer clips for the fans for both the Intel and the AMD processors.

Installation #

Installing the cooler was easy, but when I removed the existing stock cooler, I was stumped. The location where I was supposed to place the standoffs had larger-than-expected screw threads. Removing the second side panel made me realize that the backplate had fallen off when I removed the existing cooler.

I mounted the backplate, cleaned up the crud off the processor. Then put some fresh thermal paste (also included in the accessory box) and mounted the cooler on the processor. Mounting the fan was a bit more difficult - there were no screws to tighten. Rather some retainers had to be clipped-on to the edges of the fan and tacked onto the sides of the cooler.

With the first boot, the temperature difference was immediately noticeable - the idle temperatures were down to mid-50s and under load. After running some Civ 6 benchmarks, the temperatures averaged around the mid-60s, not exceeding 75 Degree Celsius. I also tweaked the fan curves so that the fans turn on / increase the speed at higher temperatures so that the system runs a little bit quieter.

Overall, I’m happy with the ID-Cooling SE-224-XT and would highly recommend it. Even without a discount, the cooler is reasonably priced and performs well.

Gallery #

Catch the pics below in the Gallery