I'm pretty sure that I read somewhere a thicker base to a ln2 pot actually reduced temperatures, but I can't seem to find it. Maybe it was talking about a slow vs fast pot, which wouldn't really hold true for ambient cooling methods.
That's entirely possible - when you're working wiht a cooling medium that's that cold, you probably want a buffer in between it and the cores in order to have
some control over thermals. Also, the boiling of the LN2 if done directly on the die would be a
serious problem for cooling, as you'd have wildly fluctuating temperatures.
Of course, an LN2 pot isn't an IHS, nor is it a thermal interface as much as it is
a cooler. It does the same job that your heatpipes and fins on your heatsink do - dissipate heat into another medium - just through boiling LN2 instead of heating air. And since the medium is sub-ambient and the main problem with it is
too much cooling, you don't have the problem of heat soaking IHSes and coolers that you get wiht ambient coolers - turning the slow heat transfer of thicker pieces of metal into a useful buffer slowing down fluctuations rather than a hindrance for effective cooling. But this is due to the specific nature of LN2 cooling, and not anything even remotely transferable to other types of above-ambient cooling.
This guy gets it.
Yes some pots have a higher temp gradient than others. Temp swing on processors you're trying to heat up with LN2 can be difficult with processors or mainboards that have a cold bug. So bigger heavier pot takes longer to heat up. It also takes additional LN2 to bring the larger pots down to temp. The theory works in the opposite direction as well. However a CPU cannot heat an LN2 pot that quickly because of the surface area of the die it's self. Which is why they install a plate.
Yes, if we're talking LN2, which fundamentally changes how cooling operates in the first place - where the main problem is no longer dissipating heat, but rather
not cooling too much. That makes it fundamentally incomparable.
IHS = Integrated Heat Spreader. It's a must.
If they released only lidless chips, you wouldn't see processors much over 100w because a clipped on air cooler doesn't have the mass to store some BTU before dissipation. Anyone that's done extensive overclocking with socket A would understand this idea if they had tested with a plate vs naked. Almost always the plate helps. Even with an air cooler.
That depends - delidded cooling can absolutely be good, but getting perfect contact with a tiny bare die is essentially impossible, especially given how fragile they are, so an IHS helps immensely with clamping a beefy cooler to the chip. Your LN2 pot, assuming it's pure copper, would still technically transfer thermal energy between the die and LN2 more efficiently without an IHS - but clamping a giant, >1kg copper pot to a 10x20mm die and expecting good contact? When good contact means microns of height difference across the die? That's not going to happen.
So plates you guys get. But don't nit pick the thickness. That was to accommodate for not having as much surface area they could have made with a different chip design, larger than 40mm.
No, the thickness is to make up for the lower Z-height of the LGA socket while maintaining AM4 cooler compatibility, as without it the vast majority of AM4 coolers would no longer have been compatible with AM5. Nor is it nit-picking - the chips
would run cooler with a thinner IHS. But as I've been saying all along: as long as performance is there (which it is), then it doesn't matter. The chip doesn't care if it's 95°C or 75°C, and boosts happily until that limits. People would be more comfortable with lower temperatures, but whatever. The IHS isn't ideal, but it does what it needs to do.
