A YouTuber has taken his AMD Threadripper Pro 9995WX for a wild ride by cooling it with a car radiator to see how fast it could go. The results are impressive, as expected, though a lot of potential is lost due to the CPU’s water block limitations. Let me explain.
During his review of the flagship Threadripper Pro 9995WX CPU, YouTuber Geekerwan went on a side quest to see how far this chip can go when cooled properly. To do so, he leveraged the capabilities of a BMW M4 radiator and pump. To get an idea of the cooling surface area on hand, the car radiator measured 600x350mm, which is about five times the size of a regular 360mm PC radiator. Besides, if it can handle a 500bhp car, it surely can cool a CPU, right?
Well, it can, but there are other bottlenecks, unfortunately. The CPU water block, for instance, is one limiting factor, unable to remove heat fast enough. The pump was rated for 1,200L/h, which seems a lot until you factor in the pipe maze it will have to push water through. For reference, PC liquid cooling setups powered by the well-known D5 pump max out at 1,500L/h. That said, this flow drops below 150L/h after adding the restrictiveness of the pipes, tubes, and water block. Lastly, to push air over this massive surface area, PC fans are a no-go, thus Geekerwan used two Toyota Highlander fans, which alone consume 100W.
In any case, with his setup, Geekerwan managed to push the 96 cores of the Threadripper Pro 9995WX up to 4,891MHz, netting him 187,153 points in Cinebench R23. Though not to the level of Liquid Nitrogen cooling, this is nevertheless faster than the previous overclock by SkyWalkerAMD, who claimed 186,800 points, also using liquid cooling. During this operation, the 12 CCDs (Core Complex Dies) of the CPU ranged between 66°C and 87°C. That said, these figures may not be accurate as we don’t know for how long the YouTuber maintained full throttle to properly heat the chip.
As you can guess, pushing so many cores to the max demands a lot of power, with HWinfo reporting a whopping 2,000W (SVI3 TFN) peak power and 1,251W PPT (Package Power Tracking). Note that while the former is impressive, it reports very brief spikes; the latter is more accurate for measuring power consumption.
In any case, Geekerwan demonstrated both the benefits of proper cooling and the limitations of current cooling systems. Despite the massive radiator, it wasn’t enough to offset the limitations imposed by the CPU’s heat density and the water block’s heat-transfer speed. However, even so, the results are great, showing that Threadripper Pro isn’t playing games, both literally and figuratively.
