AMD's mighty 96-core Threadripper Pro has been overclocked with a car radiator and some big ol' beefy fans, and I am remarkably satisfied

Have you ever looked at a liquid cooling radiator and thought "I wonder if a car rad would work any better?" Me neither. However, you and I don't have the same brains as the folks behind YouTube channel Geekerwan, as they've rigged together a radiator and water pump from a BMW M4, some Toyota Highlander fans, and a water block to cool one of AMD's most powerful chips. And it works!

The CPU in question is the truly over-specced AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 9995W, a 96-core chip that's capable of pulling over 1000 W of precious electric go-go juice from the wall socket in its own right. It's technically got a max boost clock of 5.4 GHz, but as you might expect, that figure won't apply to all of those cores at once.

However, the Geekerwan team managed to push their sample to 4.9 GHz across all 96-cores using their jury rigged cooling setup, which is a remarkable achievement (via Wccftech). It's nowhere near as effective as a liquid nitrogen cooling setup, one of which was used by a different group of overclockers to achieve a world record speed of 5.8 GHz on the same chip—but then again, Geekerwan's techs didn't have to wear oversized gloves and eye protection, or risk freezing off delicate parts of their anatomy in the process.

That being said, the car radiator setup has some issues of its own. For a start, a car-sized radiator (even the remarkably small one used in the BMW M4) combined with a regular water block going into a car pump is, well, not exactly optimal for shifting the heat given off by an overclocked mega-chip, so much of the setup remained underutilised during the run.

The team also couldn't use regular PC fans to flow air through a radiator of this size, so they picked up a twin Toyota radiator fan setup from a seafood market. I think that's correct anyway, as I'm relying on translation here, but I like the idea of shopping for some tuna and spotting a clapped-out SUV behind a stall, before bravely asking "how much for bits of your engine."

The fans alone draw 100 W while shifting an astonishing amount of air, which makes them potential candidates for our best PC fan guide, if you ask me.

Anyway, while the setup had issues, it did provide a stable enough overclock for a Cinebench R23 run where the 4.9 GHz figure was achieved—along with a staggering 2000 W+ instantaneous power consumption figure.

Yep, this setup appears to have confused the bejesus out of the chip and motherboard's power regulation systems, and bested the capabilities of the water block itself. We do these things not because they are easy, etc. So, while I don't see this particular liquid cooler catching on with enthusiasts, it's been a valuable learning experience for us all nonetheless. Can you use a car's watercooling system to overclock a CPU? Yes. Should you? No, no, and once more for good measure, no again.