Saturday, October 7th 2017

German Company to Sell Binned Core i7 8700K With 99.9% Silver Heatspreader
For those users who thought they'd like some silver with their Intel, german webshop Caseking has a product for you. The company has taken the binning concept that we've already seen with other webshops, which pass the onus of the silicon lottery towards themselves, and taken it to the next level. Caseking will offer Core i7 8700K products that have not only been binned towards achieving guaranteed speeds of 5 GHz, 5.1 GHz and 5.2 GHz, but they're also retrofitting these binned 8700K processors with a 99.9% purity silver heatspreader to improve operating temperatures for these guaranteed-overclocking processors.Caseking is basically testing batches of i7 8700K processors, delidding them, and then applying Thermal Grizzly's Conductonaut liquid metal thermal grease and the aforementioned silver heatspreader to improve operating temperatures as much as they can be. The company is doing this in partnership with overclocking poster child der8auer, and brands the silver IHS with both Caseking's and Der8auer's logo. The silver heatspreader versions of the Core i7 8700K are being sold as the Ultra Edition, and Caseking are asking a hefty premium for their binned CPUs: €690 will get you an 8700K that is guaranteed to clock up to 5.0 GHz, €750 will guarantee 5.1 GHz, and the premium of premiums (for now, we'd imagine) 5.2 GHz overclockable processor will cost €870.These are some hefty, hefty price premiums to be sure; however, the company really is taking many risks out of their prospective buyer's hands, in that they not only won't have to bet on the silicon lottery to get some good results, but also won't have to run the risk of delidding their six-core Intel CPU. There's also an Advanced Edition (stock heatspreader with Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut) and a Pro Edition (Niquel-plated heatspreader with Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut) available, for lower prices than the silver options.
Sources:
Caseking, via Guru 3D
109 Comments on German Company to Sell Binned Core i7 8700K With 99.9% Silver Heatspreader
I agree that some parts of the VRM Disaster video were a bit over the top and/or not explained well enough. The 2nd video with all the clarification should have been included in the first video already. I think that would've prevented a lot.
Fact is that we have/had quite a lot of problems in the past at Caseking with insufficient VRM cooling in our systems. Especially when you have cases with not so good air flow and using AIOs. Forwarded that multiple times to the different vendors and things just got worse and worse.
I'm glad that it's going in the right direction now tho. Thanks man :) Appreciate that. See the reply to the first quote It's a premium product. Ofc the difference is only few °C but we also offer 5.2 GHz with stock IHS so it's just for people who want the best of the best no matter of the costs. That's not correct. We order CPUs for binning/System Integration and they are treated completely different from the normal B2C business. All of the CPUs for binning get laser engraved first depending on the SKUs we are working on. So for example a CK Crown for delidded CPUs but not pretested. Pretested CPUs would get a "der8auer Advanced Pretested" logo.
Then we take the CPUs and delid them all at once and replace TIM with Liquid Metal. Simply because there is often a production variation from Intel and we have to make sure we don't miss and good CPUs. The behavior of delidded CPUs is also different from stock CPUs. Delidding often helps to lower the vCore by another 40-50 mV. Also it helps to make sure we don't run into any temperature limit. A CPU running with stock tim at 5.2 GHz would always hit 90°C+ and would hardly be stable in these conditions. Temperature helps a lot in terms of stability.
So as the CPUs are already engraved and delidded it's absolutely obvious that they can't go back to the normal B2C market. That's why we have B2B partners that get the "trash" at a reduced price and the loss of this is obviously calculated in the price of the pretested chips.
Hope this clarified things a bit :)
They are not going to charge everyone $15 more just so some people can get a better overclock.