“But Can It Run Crysis?”. We have been hearing this phrase since the release of 2007’s Crytek first-person shooter Crysis, underscoring the reputation the game has obtained for it’s steep system requirements at the time of release. The phrase has slowly evolved into a ‘snowclone’ with time.

Now, one twitter user @Fritzchens Fritz, who has been known for posting photos of several die shots of CPUs and GPUs in the past, has actually managed to run an AMD Ryzen 4000 APU without any cooling solution attached to it.

He posted a video of an AMD APU running with no cooling whatsoever, and he ran through the entire Crysis benchmark. Strangely, the board running this chip did not immediately shut down due to heat, but the fact that it got through the entire Crysis benchmark run is an impressive feat. According to his discovery the processor can survive without any cooling (not even passive cooling).

The Ryzen 3 4300U Renoir APU was used in his experiment. The Ryzen 3 4300U is a four core and four-thread “Zen 2” processor having a base clock of 2.7 GHz and 3.7 GHz boost clock speed, and five Radeon Vega GPU cores, which equates to a total of 320 “stream processors”. The chip was tested under stressful conditions where it was provided with no active or even passive cooling for that matter.

There was no CPU IHS to carry off the heat from the die which made the test even more demanding, but the processor survived. This feat was achieved using the “Renoir Mobile Tuning” tool that sets the original temperature limit to 90C. The thermal camera figured that only one of the two CCXs was active during the test.

The processor was found to be stable in Cinebench R15 and “Crysis” benchmark, during the experiment’s 10-minute runtime loop. The CPU ran for 10 minutes before the video cuts off.

From the infrared thermal imaging, we can see the APU die remains a bit cooler than the PCB where the heat is being dissipated. But since there is no cooler attached, the CPU has to maintain some sort of thermal balance and because to this, the scores in Cinebench R15 are a bit low, at just 124 points on a single-core and 327 points on all-core test, and 395 in 3DMark Time Spy.

But apart from the Cinebench R15 and 3DMark Time Spy scores, it was the Crysis benchmark that made this short test even more interesting. Despite no cooling solution, the chip was able to run a complete loop of the Crysis benchmark without any issues. So you can solely think about what it might probably do in a laptop with a sturdy cooling system. But even without any cooling solution, the AMD Ryzen 4000 Renoir APU can definitely run Crysis !

“This little test shows how good the overheating protection for AMDs new Ryzen Renoir APU performs. The little tool ‘Renoir Mobile Tuning’ helps to set the original temperature limit down to 90C. Thermal resolution is 384×288. The 120mm fan runs at 5V and produces a low and constant airflow,” FritzchensFritz explains.

Crysis running on AMD Ryzen 3 4300U ‘Renoir’ APU

Metal Messiah

Hello, my name is NICK Richardson. I’m an avid PC and tech fan since the good old days of RIVA TNT2, and 3DFX interactive “Voodoo” gaming cards. I love playing mostly First-person shooters, and I’m a die-hard fan of this FPS genre, since the good ‘old Doom and Wolfenstein days.

MUSIC has always been my passion/roots, but I started gaming “casually” when I was young on Nvidia’s GeForce3 series of cards. I’m by no means an avid or a hardcore gamer though, but I just love stuff related to the PC, Games, and technology in general. I’ve been involved with many indie Metal bands worldwide, and have helped them promote their albums in record labels. I’m a very broad-minded down to earth guy. MUSIC is my inner expression, and soul.

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