AMD’s incredibly powerful new Threadripper Pro 9995WX doesn’t come bundled with a cooler. However, Geekerwan might have the perfect answer for this processing Goliath that can casually consume over 1,000W. The Chinese TechTuber decided to remove the radiator and pump from his BMW M4 high-performance coupé, to see how it could tame the heat from Shimada Peak.
AMD’s $11,699 Threadripper Pro 9995WX is designed to deliver breakthroughs, as the “World’s Fastest Workstation Processor,” according to AMD. Checking through the full Threadripper 9000 specs table we published last week, the 9995WX is right at the top, as the newest flagship, featuring the Zen 5 architecture, a 384MB cache, and boasting 96 cores and 192 threads, running at up to 5.4GHz - given the opportunity (power and cooling) to do so.
While it has a quoted TDP of 350W, if you want to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the 9995WX, you will turn to PBO and overclocking techniques. With these performance-enhancing technologies turned up to 11, the king of the Shimada Peak processors can quickly demand 1,000W of power, or much more. That’s a lot of heat to dissipate.
BMW (and Toyota) to the rescue?
Geekerwan asserts that the BMW M4 has “the best cooling performance in the world” for a civilian vehicle (machine translated). Holding aloft the radiator, ripped from his precious M4, he highlights that the hefty rad in his hands is about 600 x 350mm, or about the size of five 360mm radiators stuck together.
Geekerwan’s BMW radiator shenanigans begin around 7 minutes. Closed captions translated to English are available.
Of course, a suitable pump is also required to make the most of the BMW radiator, and naturally, the M4’s pump was also commandeered for this Threadripper 9000 cooling task. The M4's automotive cooling pump can push 1,200 liters per hour (20 liters per second!).
There’s one more essential to building an automotive AIO for a CPU, and that is the fans. Geekerwan didn’t opt for the typical Arctic, Noctua, or Cooler Master spinners, though. Here’s where Toyota came in, with a Highlander 4x4’s fans borrowed for pushing air through the M4 radiator. Two of these 30cm fans were used and required 100W alone to do their duty.
Still can’t beat a flask of LN2
Many of you will be expecting this, but Geekerwan explains that, while his “super water cooling” setup performed as expected, it was held back by the interface between the CPU cores and the AIO system. In other words, the automotive AIO setup that was assembled just couldn’t get the heat away from the cores fast enough to unleash the full potential of either. The CPU failed to break the 5.0 GHz all-core mark, and the radiator was “still cold” during Geekerwan’s testing.
Geekerwan uses the rest of his video to inform people with more money than sense that, for gaming, consumer CPUs like the Ryzen 9 9950X are still far superior to a Threadripper (but there may be exceptions, like Cities: Skylines 2).
The Chinese TechTuber generously highlighted Uncle Tony’s video (Chinese, Bilibili platform) of the Threadripper Pro 9995WX being put to the test under liquid nitrogen cooling, for those eager to gauge the ultimate performance of this CPU.
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