And apparently, yes that is possible as heat protection kicks in and the APU clocks down. It was Twitter user, Fritzchens Fritz who got the funky idea to see if it was possible to run the processor all naked, that's right no cooler. He did just that, put a heat camera on top of, and started to observe the quad-core under load to see what would happen.

Well, first thigns first, it's didn't melt. Fritz did make a bit of a tweak though, he protected the processor by using used the Renoir Mobile Tuning tool to set the maximum temperature to ninety degrees Celsius so that the processor would survive this experiment of his. Also, for his test environment, he used a 120mm fan at a a bit of distance, which blows warm air away to some extent. However, the cooling block is completely removed from the Ryzen APU.

As you might or might no know, Ryzen 3 4300U has 4 cores, 4 threads, and 320 shader cores active in the GPU. The CPU normally runs between 2.7 GHz and 3.7 GHz, the integrated graphics chip at a 1400 MHz (max). Due to the unusual circumstances, you can imagine that the chip has not been able to match the default of these values. Under load, the APU throttled back from 15 watts to roughly 7 watts while playing Crysis 1. The CPU clock speed was hovering at give or take 1.4 GHz with the lowest frequency measured at around 750 MHz. The GPU fluctuated between 1.6 GHz but at one point dropped to even 6 MHz.

The processor ran roughly 60 to 70 degrees in a state of Crysis, which considering it has no cooling is pretty impressive. Fritz also ran other benchmarks like 3DMark Time Spy, however, that did not go well as the system is was too limited due to the lack of cooling. FurMark however, was stable :) At least we know that the APU is protecting itself properly, even under these weird conditions. Check the video below.

AMD Ryzen 3 4300U can play Crysis, even with the CPU cooler removed