Friday, May 27th 2022
Thermal Grizzly Announces Contact Frame For Intel Alder Lake, Promises to Reduce Temperatures by up to 10º
Thermal Grizzly has developed a new Contact Frame designed specifically to fix bending issues present with Intel's latest 12th Gen, Alder Lake CPUs. Developed in partnership with overclocking extraordinaire Der8auer, the new Contact Frame promises to lower operating temperatures on Intel's Alder Lake. According to the company, this improvement is achieved by fixing that platform's independent loading mechanism (ILM), which has been proven to slightly deflect the integrated heatspreader (IHS), reducing its heat transfer capability.
As tested by Igor's Lab, the new contact frame for LGA 1700 reduced the operating temperature of Intel's Core i9-12900K by as much as 10.19 °C - from 70.48 °C without the Contact Frame and towards 60.29 °C after it was installed. The CPU was configured to run popular stress test Prime95, with Small FFT at a fixed 5 GHz frequency on its P-cores. The processor's E-cores were deactivated so as not to compromise the results, while the memory subsystem was run at DDR5-7000. Thermal Grizzly's Contact Frame isn't the only product in this category, and the company is introducing their product at €39.90 for the German and European markets (~$36). Enthusiasts have likely spent more in cooling upgrades that delivered a lesser final operating temperature improvement.
Sources:
Thermal Grizzly Contact Frame, via Tom's Hardware, Igor's Lab
As tested by Igor's Lab, the new contact frame for LGA 1700 reduced the operating temperature of Intel's Core i9-12900K by as much as 10.19 °C - from 70.48 °C without the Contact Frame and towards 60.29 °C after it was installed. The CPU was configured to run popular stress test Prime95, with Small FFT at a fixed 5 GHz frequency on its P-cores. The processor's E-cores were deactivated so as not to compromise the results, while the memory subsystem was run at DDR5-7000. Thermal Grizzly's Contact Frame isn't the only product in this category, and the company is introducing their product at €39.90 for the German and European markets (~$36). Enthusiasts have likely spent more in cooling upgrades that delivered a lesser final operating temperature improvement.
70 Comments on Thermal Grizzly Announces Contact Frame For Intel Alder Lake, Promises to Reduce Temperatures by up to 10º
Good times lol.. :toast:
If you had a good one, the mod will do nothing. A bad one, it could make a huge difference.
In his video, der8auer showed that using the same socket different CPUs can have different results.
But if you are saying its not for mainstream users, I agree completely. This product wont do them any good and the installation process is likely to end in disaster for some.
Still, compared to RGB lighting this product appears more useful than glue, duct tape and baking soda combined. On that note; how long until we see contact frames with RGB lights?
At some point the major manufacterers will stop laughing as they realise its not like shooting fish in a barrel. Its more like taking advantage.
How so
Intel is not building mother boards
The board flexing is just bad/ cheap socket design
They "mother board manufactures" could of made socket design for these and other "Z" chips like x299 or older x99 sockets are and none of this flexing nonsense would be an issue since these have built in back plates and front cooler mount plates that sandwich the board thus are quite a bit stronger.
ADL is shite above 150W anyway.
Intel designed the CPU, the IHS, and the reference mounting mechanism so it's fair to say intel messed something up here - it IS fixable by telling the manufs to tighten up those tolerances but that only helps part of the issue, seeing that new info about the CPU's themselves having so much variance
The worst thing that can happen is basically accidental delidding where the solder breaks (or partially breaks) contact with the die, because nothing a user can do will restore that. Over time any system that's flexing will end up with thermal issues that wont be resolved short of delidding it
In this case, it's just happening to a greater extreme and more often than before
We'll see this on AM5 now too, just probably to a lesser extent - it's a weakness to the LGA platform and it seems the bigger the socket, the greater the risk of wibbly wobbly bendy breaky