ASUS showcases passively cooled Ryzen 9 9950X CPU in their new ProArt PA401 chassis

ASUS passively cools AMD’s most powerful AM5 CPU inside their new ProArt PA401 chassis

ASUS China’s Tony Yu has released a video showcasing an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X CPU with passive cooling inside the company’s new ProArt PA401 Wood Edition PC case.

AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X was cooled using Noctua’s NH-P1 passive CPU cooler. The heatsink was used with no attached fans, though ASUS’ ProArt PA401 Wood Edition case did have multiple fans installed.

(Image from ASUS China on Bilibili)

Below, AMD’s 9950X CPU is shown reaching temperatures of 95 degrees using Noctua’s passive cooling solution. These are crazy low thermals, given that this is a 16-core CPU running at its full speeds.

Note that AMD redesigned the thermal lid design for its Ryzen 9000 series. This change has had a huge impact on Ryzen 9000 series thermals. AMD says their new thermal lid design can drop CPU thermals by up to 7 degrees. This change is likely what made passive cooling possible on AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X.

(Image via @9550pro on Twitter/X)

Below, we can see that AMD has achieved a multi-threaded score of 42451 on AMD’s 16-core Ryzen 9 9950X. This is higher than the score we achieved for this CPU in our review, highlighting that ASUS has not lost any CPU performance by using passive cooling. Regardless, it should be remembered that this PC does have several case fans. That means that the system itself isn’t passively cooled.

This setup makes us wonder how far we could push passive cooling with modern PC components. Sadly, there are no mid-range or high-end GPUs that use passive cooling. That alone limits our options when building a passive gaming PC. Regardless, it would be an interesting project.

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