The 65W versions should be trivial to cool silently, a $40 heatsink with a single low speed 12cm fan (500~600 rpm) does the job well with my CPUs.
For a 95W TDP you might need to spend a little more (like on those big Noctua heatsinks with 14cm fans), but silent air-cooling is definitely possible. (Water is always trickier, AIO kits will typically be a little noisier due to the pump).
In a smaller HTPC it can make sense to go passive but for an 8-core desktop workstation I'm not convinced it's worth the trouble. Your PSU and GPU will likely have fans, also with a PCIe SSD it's better to have some airflow.
It's now possible to build very high-performance rigs that run completely silently. Palit offer a fanless 1050ti; Asus Strix 1060/70/80 cards will run with the fans stopped under light loads. Fanless 500w PSUs are readily available, which will happily power an eight core machine with a GTX 1080. The brilliant Silverstone FT03 case uses a chimney-like vertical design that can create significant airflow through pure convection.
Passive cooling isn't for everyone, but the remarkable efficiency of modern components has made it a perfectly feasible option even for high performance workstations. You can choose whatever level of noise you prefer, from extremely quiet to dead silent.
The biggest reduction in computer noise I've noticed over the past ten years has been eliminating HDD chatter by switching to SSDs. I still have one older PC that I use occasionally that has an HDD, and it is pretty serious. You can feel when the filesystem is under load by the frantic vibrations of the arm moving across the disk.
Fans, in comparison, tend to be a steady thrum, and thus fade into the background in a way that HDD chatter doesn't.
I second this. Even without chatter a spinning HDD is quite noticeable while fans are not that noisy as long as you are able to keep them at moderate speeds.
It would be no longer fully passive, but I'm curious to see what the performance of that heatsink would be with a suitably-sized squirrel cage fan inserted into it. That is huge.
>I'm curious to see what the performance of that heatsink would be with a suitably-sized squirrel cage fan inserted into it.
Surprisingly poor. A large conventional heatsink like the Noctua NH-D15 has far greater surface area. The densely packed fins of a conventional heatsink perform poorly if you're relying on convection, but they will dissipate a lot of heat with even modest airflow.
6 core 140W 6800K I have under my desk is cooled with a Noctua NH-U14 - very quiet and max core temp I've seen under load (mostly video transcoding) is 54 degrees - that's about 30 degrees above my office room temperature.
AFAIK the Ryzen 1700 (TDP 65W) is supposed to come with a "Wraith" cooler from AMD and those new ones are apparently better than their shitty older counterparts from the Vishera days (I had one and I'm glad I switched to a near silent Arctic cooler).
Same here, the Artic Cooler was 20$ and the difference is dramatic. Cooler temps all around and near silent at modest loads, where the stock cooler was annoyingly loud.
For a 95W TDP you might need to spend a little more (like on those big Noctua heatsinks with 14cm fans), but silent air-cooling is definitely possible. (Water is always trickier, AIO kits will typically be a little noisier due to the pump).