Watch AMD's 96-Core Threadripper Pro 9995WX Get Overclocked With A BMW M4 Radiator
If you're willing to pay for the 2.5× extra power, the 9995WX absolutely dominates in Cinebench.
The stock 9995WX is already a monster, pulling 306W at 3.3–3.5 GHz all-core under Cinebench R23 with a multi-core score of almost 130,000—nearly triple that of the consumer-grade Ryzen 9 9950X. But flip on PBO (Precision Boost Overdrive), and it hits 180,308 points at 4.7 GHz all-core, gulping down 800W in the process. It also manages a 23% uplift over its Zen 4 predecessor (the Threadripper Pro 7995WX) at default settings, which is impressive, and much larger than the gains we saw going from Ryzen 7000 to Ryzen 9000 on the desktop. The score of 180,308 is nearly 4× the 9950X's performance; in Blender's rendering tests, it eclipses the 16-core chip by a factor of five.
When Geekerwan went for broke with manual overclocking, the custom "super watercooler" built from a BMW M4's 600×350mm intercooler radiator and a pair of 30cm Toyota Highlander fans let the CPU run a staggering 4.89 GHz across all 96 cores. There was a catch, though: power draw spiked past 2,000W, enough to trip their 1600W Seasonic PSU and overwhelm even that car-grade cooling loop. As Geekerwan notes, liquid nitrogen is probably the only way to hit 5 GHz, as thermals were a problem too—the waterblock simply can't draw heat off of the CPU fast enough.
Beyond raw benchmarks, the 9995WX showed its workstation chops in real workloads. It finished a CPU-based Houdini simulation just 4 seconds slower than a dual-socket, 256-core EPYC 9754 setup, and it ran Blender's CPU tests at speeds comparable to a Radeon RX 7900 XT GPU. Even large AI models weren't out of reach; it could load a 671B-parameter DeepSeek model into its 256GB memory, although throughput was bandwidth-limited to ~6 tokens/sec. Geekerwan laments the lack of overclocked RDIMM memory, which could have helped a lot here.
Gaming, though, isn't its strong suit. Despite solid multi-core turbo clocks, thread scheduling inefficiencies and relatively poor memory latency kept it well behind the Ryzen 9 9950X in titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and Cities: Skylines 2. Geekerwan's funniest test came when he uninstalled the GPU drivers entirely and forced Windows to software rasterize GTA V. Windows' Direct3D reference renderer is horribly inefficient and limited to just 64 threads, but the 9995WX still managed a hilarious ~10 FPS at 1080p with simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) disabled.
While the Threadripper Pro 9995WX's price and power consumption put it well out of reach for most, Geekerwan's video is an honestly stark reminder that today's CPUs are often spec'd way, way below the actual power that they are capable of drawing. We usually see it with consumer-level chips, like "Phoenix" (nominally rated for 28-54W) drawing over 150W when unlimited, but 2 kilowatts from a CPU alone feels like a new record to us.
If this topic interests you, you should definitely watch the full video above for the full battery of tests—or simply to be amused at Geekerwan's enthusiasm for the BMW-based cooling solution. If you don't speak Mandarin, there are English subtitles on the video.
