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Intel Skylake CPUs Are Warping Under Mounting Pressure From Third-Party Coolers (hothardware.com)

Posted by Soulskill on from the try-cooling-it-with-a-sky-lake-instead dept.

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.”

2 of 115 comments (clear)

  1. Well, stop requiring such high pressures by kriston · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Well, maybe Intel should stop requiring such high pressures on the heat sink/heat spreader interface. Surely there's a more efficient way to handle cooling. This idiocy started with the Pentium 4 and needs to stop.

    --

    Kriston

  2. It's Intel's fault by MetricT · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This would matter less if Intel would include a usable heatsink with their CPU's. I have worked in high performance computing for over a decade, so putting a heat sink on isn't exactly some exotic task to me, but I couldn't get either of my home OEM Haswell heatsinks to hold onto the motherboard, they would both pop off after the slightest bump. So I *had* to use third-party heatsinks.

    Intel should make backplates with threaded mounts mandatory, and should ensure that their OEM heatsink is capable of actually staying on the motherboard and keeping the CPU from thermally throttling during a Prime95 run. If the user needs a third-party heat sink due to overclocking or unusual case geometry, that's fine, but their OEM heatsink should work properly for 95% of users. But it doesn't.

    Doing the right thing at Intel's scale couldn't cost more than a dollar (a little extra aluminum/steel in the right spots), yet they mysteriously cheap out. Even AMD's stock heatsink is better.