AMD Ryzen 3 4300U Laptop Processor Runs Crysis Without Cooler

A modder has unscrewed a laptop with Ryzen 3 4300U apu and removed the cooler. Even without a cooling block, the apu continues to work and Crysis can even be rotated. The maximum temperature has been set at ninety degrees with a tool.

Twitter user Fritzchens Fritz let the Ryzen 3 4300U laptop chip do its job and put a thermal camera above it. The processor in question is a quad-core, but all Ryzen 4000 APUs consist of a Zen 2 cluster with eight cores. With the Ryzen 3, half of it is turned off and the thermal images show that the bottom half of the cluster is inactive. Above the cores is the Vega 5 GPU.

Fritz claims to have used the Renoir Mobile Tuning tool to set the maximum temperature to ninety degrees Celsius, so that the processor survives the experiment. The test setup does have a 120mm fan at some distance, which blows the warm air away. However, the cooling block has been removed from the Ryzen apu in its entirety.

Due to the lack of cooling, the Ryzen apu runs at slower speeds than normal. The chip consumes a maximum of about 7 watts and the clock speeds fluctuate when running Crysis around 1.4GHz, normally 2.7 to 3.7GHz. The GPU also regularly clocks back to 6MHz. Despite its limitations, Crysis runs fairly smoothly in low resolution, at nearly 30fps.

Fritz also runs other benchmarks, including 3DMark Time Spy. That benchmark does not run smoothly because the system is considerably limited by the lack of cooling. However, the Ryzen apu continues to work stably without cooling, even during a test with FurMark. The experiment mainly shows the good protection against overheating of the Ryzen chip. The test also shows the potential of using the Ryzen apus in passively cooled systems.