Yes, in this specific case it not a big deal, and they make some surprisingly effective passive coolers today. However, I have run into this issue in the past.

As to running a larger air cooler without a fan. That’s heavily dependent on case airflow. High speed case fans really defeat the purpose of a passive cooler.

You don't really need any case airflow at all, it just depends on how much performance you're willing to sacrifice. Case in point, you can run cinebench on an 8700K without any cooler at all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yA0oo12rbiM

For something a bit more practical, if you're willing to get creative you can passively cool CPUs while getting fairly high performance too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-z9PidYH4E

Those are just NH-D15s, completely standard coolers with mounting brackets for pretty much every consumer socket out there.

That second video uses fans see 5:40. Lots of closely spaced thin fins actually produce less cooling without good airflow. There are real engineering reasons passive coolers have significant air gaps between the plates.

PS: In terms of sacrificing performance, let’s agree to avoid the absurd. Or as the guidelines put it: Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

It uses fans, however IIRC the fan curves are such that they only kick in if you render videos or do something else that 100% uses the CPU, and even then they are fairly quiet. And again, if you simply limit the clock speeds and voltages, you could disable the fans completely. (Or you could just disable the fans completely in the first place and let the automatic regulation take over.)

>Lots of closely spaced thin fins actually produce less cooling without good airflow.

That is true, however Noctua coolers tend to have a fairly big gap between fins, because they are designed for very low RPM use.

>In terms of sacrificing performance, let’s agree to avoid the absurd.

Not sure why you think it's absurd - the video just shows that there is no real minimum amount of cooling required anymore, at least with Intel CPUs. Obviously you're going to have to sacrifice some performance if you go passive only.

Although I'm not even sure anymore what we're even talking about. All consumer CPUs use the same sockets. All these coolers are available for every modern consumer or "pro-sumer" platform.

> All consumer CPUs use the same sockets.

Motherboard’s use a small set of different mounting brackets for CPU coolers. But the physical CPU socket depends on several things including the physical size of the chip and thus the amount of surface area you want in contact with the the cooler.

In case you where unaware actually running a CPU at 100C will drastically lower it’s lifespan. You encounter similar issue if there are significant temperature differences across the chip. Which is why packaging includes a metal plate over the CPU even though it reduces cooling. However, this is a real tradeoff which means the contact area must be reasonably close to design spec.

Yes, bracket, not socket. What are we talking about again?

Selecting and then using passive CPU coolers. I am saying both the bracket and socket are important when choosing a cooling.

For example, when introduced there was no aftermarket passive cooling available for the AM4 socket.

Really of the 5 considerations “Does it fit the mounting bracket?” is probably the least important. Fitting the motherboard and case are mandatory. Fitting the socket and TDP have a little wiggle room. However, with mounting brackets you can generally get something to work as long as you keep firm contact and it does not wiggle around it’s fine.

Aren't you just testing the processor's internal overheating protection in that case? It might not shut down the system, but throttle itself into a snails pace.