The Ryzen Threadripper PRO 9995WX can consume over 1000W of power through manual overclocking and therefore, needs a much more premium cooling solution than mainstream AIOs. This is why a Tech YouTuber thought out of the box to boost the CPU's performance.
Geekerwan Swaps Regular AIO for an Actual Car Radiator, Coupled with Fans from Toyota Highlander to Achieve Nearly 5.0 GHz on All Cores
Since computer hardware, particularly CPUs and GPUs, are becoming more power-hungry, the need for premium cooling solutions is essential, especially for high core-count CPUs like the Threadripper PRO series, which often deliver close to 100 cores on the flagship SKUs. Still, achieving high clocks and maintaining them for long becomes an issue. However, Geekerwan had other ideas and swapped the regular AIO with an actual car radiator because why not?
Car radiators are much bigger than the mainstream AIO radiators and aren't limited to 360mm or 420mm size. Also, their pumps are much more capable in pumping a lot of liquid every second, speeding up the cooling process. For this experiment, Geekerwan used his own car's radiator, which wasn't any regular car but the BMW M4, which has one of the best-performing radiators on the market.
A giant 600x350mm radiator was installed on the Threadripper PRO 9995WX, which offers roughly five times the surface area of a 360mm radiator.
The pump of this radiator can achieve a flow rate of roughly 1200 litres per hour, which is almost 10 times the flow rate of high-end 360mm AIOs. But to cool down such a huge radiator, one would also need gigantic fans because even 200mm PC fans aren't enough. So, Techlander deployed Toyota Highlander's 300mm huge fans, rated at 100W, which deliver massive airflow to get the job done. The result was impressive, with all 96 cores pushed to 4.9 GHz, bringing about 187,153 points in Cinebench R23.
However, this is still far below the world record, which was achieved using the liquid nitrogen cooling setup we recently reported on. Also, the all-core clock achieved on that setup was 5.8 GHz, a staggering 900 MHz higher than with the M4 radiator. So, the radiator, despite offering such a huge surface area and an incredibly powerful pump and fans doesn't seem to challenge the Liquid nitrogen in any way.
So, what went wrong? It was found out that Geekerwan's setup resulted in an instantaneous jump in power consumption, where the 9995WX was consuming over 2000W, which is twice the power consumption with LN setup. Since this automotive AIO system isn't optimized to cool a processor quickly, the radiator remained cooled despite so much heat generation. Nonetheless, this was just a fun experiment and isn't the ideal way to cool a high-core-count processor. For 96-core Threadripper processors, liquid nitrogen is still the best way to achieve superior cooling and higher performance, but it's not for everyone.
