I never understood why stock coolers have to be so bad. It's not like intel or amd don't have the engineering ability to do the same kind of work noctua does, so why don't they?
They are made to be good enough without costing a lot (some Noctua coolers are more expensive than a whole CPU) and usually address only the lower-level enduser market, where a difference of $5 can be an important percentage of the price. But they did evolve. At least for low-power CPUs the Intel stock coolers are not noisy and work well. The AMD Wraith coolers are on par with some of the good 3rd party coolers.
This is the correct answer. Often, Intel and AMD actually partners the design to someone else (probably Delta (Electronics, not the airline!), Foxconn, or Nidec) then the partner knocks down the design for three things a) cheap, b) reliable and c) meets the minimum power dissipation requirements. Acoustic performance is an afterthought if it's even considered (most of the time it isn't).
A company focusing on one thing will always beat a company "focusing" on a hundred things. Noctua basically focuses on various cooling components, and only that sector, meaning they have deep expertise in that. Intel I can't even begin to list how many different things they are doing, while their main focus is processors. They have deep expertise in processors, but you can't expect them to be able to beat a single-purpose company like Noctua at their own game.
Granted, single-focus vs multi-focus is not the only factor, as sometimes multi-focus companies prove to us, but it is a great factor.
As skocznymroczny has noted, the AMD stock cooler is perfectly Ok - I have it in my desktop PC too and you can barely hear it unless you're playing games. But these coolers are the baseline - if Noctua and others want to stay in business, their coolers have to be better (quieter, better performance, cooler-looking) than the stock coolers. Which sometimes comes with limitations - e.g. coolers that are too big for certain cases, while the stock coolers have to work for the widest possible range of cases, boards etc.
Mine wasn't (3400 series Ryzen CPU). Well its performance was perfectly fine, the fan noise was far louder than what I found acceptable. However instead of replacing the whole cooler I just replaced the fan and have had zero problems with either noise or cooling since.
Same experience, recently got my first AMD CPU (5700G) and found the fan pretty bad noise-wise. Replacing it with fairly cheap retail made it completely silent, to the point I actually have problems noticing whether the PC is on (before POST).
This actually surprised me, because I never had such problems with stock Intel coolers. The CPU itself is amazing, though.
They don't have to. I have been running ryzen 5 1600 on a stock cooler and have no complaints. The cooler is bulky and completely quiet on idle/desktop work. It can be heard when playing games, but it's noise is drowned by the GPU fan anyway.
