Slashdot Mirror
Intel Skylake CPUs Are Warping Under Mounting Pressure From Third-Party Coolers (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: It's been discovered that some third-party heat sinks can physically damage Intel's new Skylake CPUs, along with the pins in the accompanying motherboard socket. The problem has prompted at least one cooler maker to change the design of its Socket 1151 heat sinks and it wouldn't be surprising if others soon followed suit. The apparent issue is the substrate Intel used for its Skylake chips. A close-up shot of a Skylake CPU sitting side-by-side with a Broadwell processor (Google translation of German original) shows that the substrate is noticeably thinner on Skylake, and thus prone to bending from the force that some third-party heat sinks exert.
Intel has addressed the issue by saying, “The design specifications and guidelines for the 6th Gen Intel Core processor using the LGA 1151 socket are unchanged from previous generations and are available for partners and 3rd party manufacturers. Intel can’t comment on 3rd party designs or their adherence to the recommended design specifications. For questions about a specific cooling product we must defer to the manufacturer.”
I have to wonder why such high pressure is necessary. With appropriately flat and smooth surfaces on the chip and the heatsink, and a properly thin and even layer of thermal paste, it shouldn't be necessary to apply much more pressure than that required to hold it all in place.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
They don't. The pressure rating for Skylake is the same as Broadwell, 50psi. Which ensures a good contact. What is likely happening is that some aftermarket coolers used more pressure because they're huge, heavy hunks of metal and needed more force to keep from lifting away, and those worked with the stronger substrate that Broadwell and earlier had, but not with Skylake.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Actually, non-overclocked Skylakes do ship with a stock cooler. The first Skylake processor released was the 4790K (K=overclocked) and does not ship with its own cooler. Non-Ks do, though.
Likely they're intentionally trying to deform the surface to fit, and to compress and thin the thermal paste.
You want a thin, fully-contacted surface to maximize thermal transfer. Intel likely made the substrate thinner to increase thermal transfer: 1 inch of highly-thermally-conductive silver is a better insulator than 1 micrometer of highly-thermally-conductive silver (hell, a mile of silver wire is a better electrical resistor than a layer of silver foil stuffed between two terminals). Silicone substrate isn't particularly thermally conductive, and thick silicone substrate is even less so.
Because the CPU surface isn't perfectly flat but *is* flexible, pressure will help conform it to the (also not perfectly flat) heat sink surface. This squeezes some of the thermal paste away, and compresses out voids to increase contact surface area. If you assume more is better, you'll naturally conclude that crushing the CPU into dust will give you better contact.
If Intel puts out a specification saying 50psi is rated contact pressure for correct heat sink function, you might decide to put 90psi on it. It works. You ship that, Intel releases a CPU that can handle 70psi instead of 140psi, they don't bother telling anyone because the CPU's spec is still 50psi, and shit starts breaking.
Amusingly, Intel could have glibly put every cooling system manufacture on a list of warranty-terminating equipment ages ago. They could have said, "Hey, we tested all these EXXXTREME COOLING jet fans and they dump 120psi onto our chips like the Hulk putting our balls in a vice. You strap that to the CPU and it fails, we're not responsible." It's fair for Intel to claim that unknown third-party equipment can destroy their hardware; can they quality control third-party equipment? They could, and they could stamp their name on it. That's how motherboards are made, and the board manufacturer is still liable if their board is mis-manufactured (now, if Intel passes the design and the design is flawed, Intel's certification makes Intel liable--Intel is negligent here; if the manufacturing is not within tolerance to produce properly-working equipment and it pumps out flawed boards, it's the manufacturer's fault).
These things happen. It sucks when they do.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Intel ships heat sinks and fans with all their retail-packaged CPUs. If you're buying a bare CPU from their OEM line, (perhaps from a local build-your-own shop, or many of the online sellers) they come without coolers.
John
It sounds a bit like you didn't install the Intel boxed cooler correctly...
4790K is not Skylake, but Haswell refresh codename Devil's Canyon. It has a different thermal material between the core and the heat spreader.
I think the the "K" version of the 6700 is the overclocked version so it does not come with a cooler as most overclockers will buy a 3rd party one. The poster had the non "K" version which is not meant to be overclocked.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.