Fanless 65 W AMD Ryzen 9 7900 build performs almost on par with air-cooled 105 W Ryzen 9 5950X

With the 65 W non-X Ryzen 7000 processors from AMD now widely available, the guys over at Club386 tested the 12-core / 24-thread  Ryzen 9 7900, but they decided to make things more interesting and passively cool the processor. While there are some advanced silent cases out there that cost quite a bit, the Club386 team did not want to break the bank and chose relatively affordable components like the Noctua NH-P1 passive CPU cooler and the Fractal Design North case.

Not all the chosen components are passively-cooled, so this is not exactly a completely silent PC, but the idea here is to test the CPU performance first and foremost. The test bed also includes an Asus ROG Crosshair X670E Hero, 32 GB Kingston Fury Beast DDR5-6000 RAM and a 4 TB Crucial P2 Plus NVMe SSD. Without a dedicated GPU card, the system idles at 51 W and may reach 140 W in full load. As far as temperatures go, the CPU idles at 46°C and tops out at 87-90°C during a 30-minute Cinebench R23 test. As noted by Noctua, ‘the CPU might fall below base clock when used under continuous full load on all cores,” but the processor maintained peak frequencies between 4.2 - 4.3 GHz.

After multiple passes in Cinebench R23, the score settled to 23,916 points, which is ~2,000 points away from an actively-cooled Ryzen 9 5950X. With day-to-day productivity tasks, the temperatures barely go above 70°C. Unfortunately, the iGPU is not really recommended for any type of gaming, with a measly score of 756 points recorded in 3DMark Time Spy. One could overclock it, yet that would still bring little benefits. By adding an Nvidia RTX 4080 FE card in the mix, the airflow inside the case changes even if the GPU fans are not spinning too fast at full load, so the processor temperature is starting to hit the 95°C threshold more often. In this situation, perhaps cases like the Beast from MonsterLabo could prove more efficient, but then the system price would increased considerably.

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