Passively cooled AMD Ryzen 9 9950X hovers at 95 degrees without any performance drop, but there is a catch

Fanless systems aren't exactly a dime a dozen but passively cooled PCs with powerful internals are certainly a rare breed indeed. In a recently shared video, Asus demonstrated a new ProArt workstation case, named the PA401 Wood Edition, with a passively cooled Ryzen 9 9950X CPU. As impressive as it sounds, there's a catch in the details.

In the video, a 16-core Ryzen 9 9950X with default TDP settings was shown hovering at a toasty 95° Celsius with a peak power draw of 225 watts. Cooling was handled by a Noctua NH-P1 passive cooler. The video also portrayed the system's gaming performance, which was mostly smooth sailing and the system performed well enough. Moreover, a Cinebench R23 run was also showcased, revealing no signs of a drop in peak performance.

However, as mentioned previously, there is a snag in this story - although the CPU itself was passively cooled, there were plenty of fans cooling the rest of the system, including the GPU, along with a case fan right in front of the CPU heat sink. This means that the system had plenty of airflow, and will most certainly not be nearly as silent as a true fanless system. Interestingly, Apple's Mac Pro, even the Xeon-W generation, does not have actively cooled components either and instead relies on three large front-facing fans which keeps the individual heat sinks cool under load. The Mac Pro was widely praised for its silent operation, so it seems Asus might be aiming at something similar with its ProArt PA401 case.