Comment by amluto

The 9950X is an excellent CPU at a reasonable price point and works perfectly fine with an ordinary air-cooled heat sink in an ordinary case without stupid numbers of fans. The TDP is just not that high.

source: my 9950X, happily running air cooled.

(Embarrassingly, I have an M4 Max that can almost match it in the CPU-bound workload I care about while sipping some 45W. The rest of the industry really needs to catch up with Apple on power efficiency.)