A Redditor has made of a Frankenstein of a passively cooled PC featuring a Ryzen 7 7700X CPU, RTX 4060 GPU and two massive Noctua NH-P1 heatsinks.
You Can Passively Cool AMD’s Ryzen 7 7700X & NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 4060 Using Noctua’s NH-P1 Heatsink As Demonstrated By Redditor
Prestigious_Gate_615, a Redditor on the SFFPC subreddit has defied the conventional methods of PC building by creating a system that is fully passive which means that it doesn’t use any fans. The build utilizes none other than Noctua’s NH-P1 heatsinks as the primary catalyst for passive cooling. However, he still used 3D-printed brackets to mount the whole system, to provide optimal contact area with the CPU and GPU, and to hold the build together.
Speaking of what the build is, it features AMD’s Ryzen 7 7700X CPU, along with NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 4060 GPU, hence making a statement that passive cooling can support modern-day components. Despite utilizing the lowest TDP GPU in NVIDIA’s Ada Lovelace lineup, the Redditor had to adjust the TDP to 90W, from its usual 115W, to achieve 80°C-85°C temperatures under 100% utilization.
Moreover, the Ryzen 7 7700X CPU is also set to “Eco Mode”, meaning that its TDP was dropped to 88W and its temperature limit set to 95°C. Dropping down power limits was necessary here, since despite Noctua’s bulkier heatsink, they can’t cool down the components adequately.
The build was placed on MSI’s B650I Edge WiFi motherboard, which was equipped with 64 GB of G.Skill Flare X5 6000 DDR5 memory as well. Following are the full system specs used by the user:
- CPU: Ryzen 7 7700X
- GPU: RTX 4060, Gigabyte Windforce OC
- Motherboard: MSI B650I Edge WiFi
- RAM: 2x32GB G.Skill Flare X5 6000 CL30
- SSD: 4TB Lexar NM790
- PSU: 500W Seasonic Prime Fanless PX
- Riser: Streacom RZ4
- Heatsinks: 2x Noctua NH-P1
The idea behind this was pretty interesting, but it does have limitations, mainly dealing with power consumption & temperatures, since passive cooling is certainly not a great idea, unless you are utilizing components that don’t draw much power. However, if you still desire to use passive cooling, you can slam your high-end components into Streacom’s SG10 case, which can support up to 600W cooling, without any fans.
News Sources: Reddit, FanlessTech, Videocardz