Fanless systems are not exactly everywhere, but there are some passively cooled PCs with strong components that are quite uncommon. Recently, Asus showcased a brand new ProArt workstation case called the PA401 Wood Edition, which features a passively cooled Ryzen 9 9950X CPU. This sounds really impressive, but there are some important details to consider.
Performance Under Pressure
In the video, the 16-core Ryzen 9 9950X was shown running with its standard TDP settings, reaching a high temperature of 95° Celsius and drawing a maximum power of 225 watts. The cooling solution for this setup was a Noctua NH-P1 passive cooler. The video highlighted the gaming performance of the system, which appeared to be generally smooth, and it handled tasks quite well. There was also a demonstration of a Cinebench R23 test, showing that there was no noticeable dip in peak performance during the run.
The Catch
However, as previously noted, there's a little hitch in this story - while the CPU itself was passively cooled, there were several fans in place to cool the rest of the system, including the GPU, and a case fan located right in front of the CPU heatsink. This indicates that the system had sufficient airflow, and it won’t be as quiet as a true fanless setup. Interestingly, Apple's Mac Pro, even the Xeon-W models, also doesn’t have actively cooled components and instead uses three large front-facing fans to keep the individual heat sinks cool during heavy use. The Mac Pro earned a lot of praise for its quiet performance, suggesting that Asus may be trying to create something similar with its ProArt PA401 case.
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