Normally, I'd be a bit more paranoid with my 9950X, but looking at the build, the mounting of the Noctua NH-U9S, and the mainboard involved makes this more worry significantly less.
Issues with the GMP build:
1. The thermal paste (likely NT-H1 or NT-H2, good paste) is wedge shaped in application and distribution. This looks like uneven pressure across the contact patch and is Not A Good Thing(tm).
2. The Asus Prime B650M-A WIFI II is a shitty board. Just because ASUS put their name on it doesn't make it good unfortunately. They run _hot_ and if you don't go into the BIOS and fix stuff then you're gonna have a bad day.
3. Running a 9950X full bore is gonna pull around 220W at the CPU not including anything else. If the BIOS settings are "hot"/OCed by default, you can get some much bigger numbers with respect to power consumption/heat dissipation.
4. The NH-U9S with 92mm fans is not gonna handle those loads. What should've been there was something like the NH-U14S. Hell, I'd contemplate going AIO as the cooler the CPU is, the better boost clocks you get. The case unfortunately will not fit any CPU cooler taller than 148mm which does limit CPU cooler compatibility...just spring for a wider case.
5. Just a minor thing, but them DIMMs are tall bois. Also, air on consumer-grade boards comes in across those DIMMs instead of like the server-grade where the socket (and RAM) are rotated 90 degrees.
Things that I don't like:
1. The CPU should have throttled, period.
The Register article: https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/29/amd_ryzen_twice_fails_in/
GMPLIB folks: https://gmplib.org/gmp-zen5
Edit: Point 3 is weird and hard for me to articulate. The graph shows the 7950X (not the more power-hungry 9950X) only at 73C, but the clock speeds are absolutely horrible when compared to the other B650 boards. If the 9950X is running at relatively normal clocks then there's gonna be a power issue. If the 9950X is being hobbled by the motherboard, you get okay temps but the CPU is not running at full speed.
#gmp #theregister #asus #zen5 #ryzen9950x