Running a high-end processor in your gaming rig usually requires some serious cooling and therefore fan noise, but cooling specialist Noctua may be about to remove noise from the equation with a new CPU heatsink.

As Tom's Hardware reports (translated), at Computex 2019 Noctua is showing off a prototype fanless heatsink which it claims can passively cool an Intel Core i9-9900K. That's an eight-core processor running at up to 5GHz with a TDP of 95 watts. Noctua tested its new heatsink by using it to cool a 9900K in the hot conditions of the Computex show floor for several hours. Apparently it happily sat at 95 degrees throughout.

Massive 1.5 kilo fanless heatsink at Noctua. 1.5mm thick find, 7 pipe. It'll cool a 9900K passively pic.twitter.com/stsSFoDQVp — Richard Swinburne @ Computex2019 (@ricswi) May 28, 2019

So how do you cool such a high-performance processor without need of a heat-dissipating fan? You use a lot of aluminium, copper, heat pipes, and fins! The images above come courtesy of Richard Swinburne's Twitter account (via FanlessTech) and offer a great view of what the heatsink looks like and how big it is.

The base of this prototype heatsink is copper, which is then attached to a block of 1.5mm aluminum fins with six heatpipes welded to them. The whole unit weighs 1.5KG and doesn't require a fan to function, but can benefit from adding one. Noctua says that adding an inaudible 300rpm fan can greatly improve the cooling capabilities from 120 watts of heat dissipation up to 180 watts. In other words, it should cope with cooling any chip you care to use.

There's no word yet on when the final product will be ready for launch or how much it will cost when it does. It will ship with NT-HZ thermal compound in the box, is 100 percent RAM compatible on LGA115x and AM4 motherboards, and uses an asymmetric design for better PCIe clearance.

Anyone who wants to build a quiet gaming rig would do well to keep an eye out for this impressive block of cooling potential.

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