Tony Yu (via HXL), Asus China's general manager, created a "fanless" Ryzen 9 9950X PC featuring Asus components that seemingly performed better than the same chip operating with a liquid cooler. Yu benchmarked the system in Cinebench R23. Temperatures were also in check, running at up to 95 degrees Celsius.
Yu recorded a Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 42,451 points at a maximum operating temperature of 95 degrees Celsius. For context, we tested the Ryzen 9 9950X at launch with a Corsair H150i RGB 360mm AIO liquid cooler and saw a multi-threaded score of 41,929 points in the same benchmark. However, the two test systems don't share the exact specifications or testing environment, and it's unclear if Yu used performance-boosting settings like PBO or a modified curve, so there are bound to be performance deltas. Nonetheless, seeing how the Ryzen 9 9950X performed so well is still interesting. After all, it used Noctua's NH-P1 passive CPU cooler, so we didn't expect the chip to overheat.
