Lovers of silence are in luck. ASUS has carried out a demonstration in which, using a passive heatsink (without fans) of Noctuathey have managed to cool an almighty (and all-hot) AMD Rzyen 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 top-of-the-range processors. With 16 cores and 32 process threads thanks to SMT technology that operate at a maximum speed of 5.7 GHz, this processor has a default TDP of 170 watts, and AMD itself indicates on its website that they recommend cooling it using liquid cooling high-end to keep temperatures at bay.
The first heatsink that can handle a Ryzen 9 9950X passively
It has been one of these situations where the manufacturers say “let’s see how far we can go”, and it has turned out quite well. Using a Noctua passive heatsink (they don’t say which one, but it’s obviously a Noctua NH-P1 seeing the images) and one of the new ASUS ProArt boxes, have managed to keep the processor below 95ºC (which is its maximum operating temperature) even subjecting it to loads that have put the processor’s consumption at about 225W.
The feat has been published by Tony Yu, the CEO of ASUS China, with which he logically intends to promote his new box from the ProArt family, a box with a wooden aesthetic that, in truth, looks very elegant, and that seeks to offer good performance and aesthetics but above all get away from that aesthetic full of RGB everywhere that is so fashionable now. Oh, and of course, the whole issue of using a passive heatsink is because they advertise that it is very quiet, of course.
The fact is that it is quite a feat 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, much 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 that costs about €120, a price that is not for nothing crazy when compared to current liquid cooling solutions.
Another curious fact is that the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X, a processor that, as we mentioned before, has 170W TDP, has been set to 225.8W peak consumption during the test, maintaining a temperature that has reached 95.2ºC but which Thermal Throttling has not done, as they explain. Proof of this is that when running Cinebench on the computer, all the cores were set to 5.5 GHz, the maximum operating frequency for all cores (you already know that the maximum 5.7 GHz is for a single core in single-thread tasks. ).
Of course, the CEO of ASUS China indicated that all this has only been a test to see how far they could go, and that he does not recommend doing it with a Ryzen 9 9950X. However, it does say that a hardware configuration like the one they have used could easily handle a Ryzen 7 980X3D, whose TDP is somewhat lower, at 12oW.
