Lovers of silence are lucky. ASUS carried out a demonstration in which, using a passive heat sink (without fans) of Nocturnalthey managed to cool an almighty (and very hot) AMD Ryzen 9 9950X passively, keeping its temperature below the maximum allowed even with a consumption of 225W on the processor.
The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X is one of AMD's high-end processors. With 16 cores and 32 process threads using SMT technology that run at a maximum speed of 5.7 GHz, this processor has a default TDP of 170 watts, and AMD itself states on its site that it recommends cooling it using high-end liquid cooling to keep temperatures at bay.
The first heatsink capable of passively managing a Ryzen 9 9950X
It's one of those situations where manufacturers say “let's see how far we can go”, and it worked out pretty well. Use a Noctua passive heatsink (they don't say which one, but it's obviously a Noctua NH-P1 see images) and one of the new ASUS ProArt cases, managed to keep the processor below 95ºC (which is its maximum operating temperature) even when subjecting it to loads that put the processor consumption at around 225W .
The exploit was published by Tony Yu, the CEO of ASUS China, with whom he logically intends to promote his new box from the ProArt family, a box with a wooden aesthetic which, in truth, looks very elegant , and which seeks to offer good performance and aesthetics but above all get away from this aesthetic full of RGB everywhere that is so fashionable currently. Oh, and of course, the whole problem with using a passive heatsink is that they claim it's very quiet, of course.
The fact is that it's quite an achievement to have managed to put a high-performance PC with one of the most powerful processors on the market passively cooled, which means that it has no fans and is therefore absolutely silent . Logically, a lot of the credit must also be given to Noctua, with its excellent NH-P1 passive heatsink, a heatsink that literally consists of 1,180 grams of copper and aluminum and which costs around $120, a price that does not It's not for nothing crazy when compared to current liquid cooling solutions.
Another curious fact is that the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X, a processor which, as we mentioned previously, has a TDP of 170 W, was set to a maximum consumption of 225.8 W during the test, maintaining a temperature that reached 95.2°C but Thermal Throttling did not. done, as they explain. The proof is that when running Cinebench on the computer, all cores were set to 5.5 GHz, the maximum operating frequency for all cores (you already know that the maximum of 5.7 GHz is for a single core in single-threaded tasks).
Of course, the CEO of ASUS China indicated that this is all just a test to see how far they can go, and that he doesn't recommend doing it with a Ryzen 9 9950X. However, it says that a hardware configuration like the one they used could easily handle a Ryzen 7 980X3D, which has a slightly lower TDP, at 12oW.
