Tuesday, May 30th 2017
Intel's Skylake-X, Kaby Lake-X HEDT CPUs to use TIM; Won't be Soldered
If you had your eyes on those new Intel HEDT processors, which were posted just today with some... Interesting... price-points, you'll be a little miffed to know that Intel has gone on and done it again. The few cents per unit that soldering the CPU would add to the manufacturing costs of Intel's HEDT processors (starting at $999, tray-friendly prices) could definitely bring the blue giant to the red. As such, the company has decided to do away with solder even on its HEDT line of high-performance, eye-wateringly-expensive CPUs in favor of their dreaded TIM.
The news have been confirmed by der8auer, a renowned overclocker. And as you have probably seen in our own VSG's review (and if you haven't shame on you and click that link right away), delidding Intel's CPU's and ridding them of their TIM can improve temperatures by up to a staggering 21 ºC (case in point, an i7-7700K). And that's a quad-core CPU; imagine an Intel Core i9-7980XE 18-core processor sitting under that TIM, and overclocking it to boot. Those are more than four times the cores under an equally bad thermal interface; add to that the likely presence of a thermally-insulating air-gap, and you can imagine where this is going. If you are planning on going for Intel's HEDT platform, you better take those delidding tools off your shelf.
Update: Check this video here for some more information. Turns out both Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X will make use of the referred TIM, but Skylake-X dies, which make use of a stacked PCB, won't be deliddable with current tools. A new tool is going to be developed by der8auer alongside ASUS for these chips.
Source:
Overclock 3D
The news have been confirmed by der8auer, a renowned overclocker. And as you have probably seen in our own VSG's review (and if you haven't shame on you and click that link right away), delidding Intel's CPU's and ridding them of their TIM can improve temperatures by up to a staggering 21 ºC (case in point, an i7-7700K). And that's a quad-core CPU; imagine an Intel Core i9-7980XE 18-core processor sitting under that TIM, and overclocking it to boot. Those are more than four times the cores under an equally bad thermal interface; add to that the likely presence of a thermally-insulating air-gap, and you can imagine where this is going. If you are planning on going for Intel's HEDT platform, you better take those delidding tools off your shelf.
Update: Check this video here for some more information. Turns out both Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X will make use of the referred TIM, but Skylake-X dies, which make use of a stacked PCB, won't be deliddable with current tools. A new tool is going to be developed by der8auer alongside ASUS for these chips.
72 Comments on Intel's Skylake-X, Kaby Lake-X HEDT CPUs to use TIM; Won't be Soldered
On Side Note I think there is a mistake on this chart. Look at the memory support for 7800X. Unless i7 7800X is unique its memory support is 1200Mhz effective.
But to do it with their HEDT line-up as well is just stupid and greedy.
8+11 = 19MB instead of 20 MB.
And caches are no longer inclusive. Which we don't know how well it would work. I think Intel did mistake of not having large L3 cache. These cores require larger data pool. And when these CPUs ran with only two cores active, large L3 caches wer VERY helpful. (Do you remember that mainstream CPU with 128 MB L4 cache?)
I'm not gonna be expecting liquid metal either knowing how stingy Intel is. On 4 digits priced CPU's. Then again, they should use TIM: One more reason to go with AMD instead...
The stock TIM Intel uses is among the more reliable already, and actually has a higher thermal conductivity than AS-5. That was why I was saying it makes zero sense to switch over to that specific retail TIM.
Liquid metal is overrated.
AS5 is shit.
Second, why is everyone jumping to conclusions? Has anyone seen benchmarks? Power draw? Temps?
good luck selling a shit ton of these intel, the potential for customer(admittedly uneducated) complaint here due to this memory slot wont work or pciex wont work is ridiculous.
oh look an official intel slide, showing what they planned with the added "shit threadripper you guys, tut" additions that you cant buy for another few months pretty much slapped on top.