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.
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.
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.
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.
See how you broke all that up into different quotes and stuff?? It really makes 6 conversations instead of 1.
Yes LN2 Pot is EXACTLY like an air cooler or waterblock.
BUT (the part about thermal storage comes in here....)
It's massive size and mass is where you STORE a temperature, which all temps above 0 kelvin are considered a heat.
But you couldn't explain why that Big ass plate works better with TEC cooling than the IHS plate that's soldered to a chip.
It's impossible to TEC cool a 2700X. I only know one person that's accomplished it though.
And it wasn't believing a smaller cold plate is better. Not at all. The opposite in fact. A small cold plate doesn't store enough thermal energy in either direction.
Be it you consider it being "cooled" off, or in my perspective heating it up with a little dash in front of the number, say like -25c idle or so.
Sure this blows my mind thinking about it. I've removed a lot of Top plates man. Probably just about every single chip I've ever owned or touched.... some 125 chips maybe.... I dunno, would have to look.
But proof comes in pudding, and I have some of that.
2700X 4ghz vs TEC -
Just before the run ended with load temp - and the score/idle temps... well near idle. w/e time it took to take the screen shot. This set up hit -30 with a water delta of about 50f **Tap to drain **Geothermal liquid cooling on the TEC)
The last picture was to "raise up" so I could contact the chip with my Dice Pot. And it's fun to show off an Xbox chip in a s939 board. And it did get frozen, -26c at load 3800+X2 Toledo.
Look at that nice big plate on lidless 2700x. Doing a fine job storing thermals. Decent temp gradient.
The leakage reduction was really decent too. On average this chip is 4000mhz 1.40v -
Here depicted at only 1.19v but under 20c load.
At idle on defaults, the CPU sits all core at it's maximum frequency 4350mhz. But even at load, because the algorithm isn't told it's frozen, runs 3.9ghz all core. So this below is done with a statically given overclock and v-core reduction. Obviously for testing, I'd rather do it myself. AI doesn't know what I'm trying to do here haha.
SO NO, I cannot agree that a smaller plate would be better even with an ambient water cooling because I've used the smaller plate in the pic from my previous post for that. It works better than the IHS plate and I can prove that with a 5.7ghz FX-9590 (hottest damn chip of all times, which I did de-lid also...) a larger plate stores thermal energy. Just enough to make a difference like you see below.
Hats off to the Nay sayers. It's all good, I ain't mad atcha.
EDIT: I'll include a short thread. It was moved quickly over from a forum that has closed, so it's not really as complete as it once was.
There is a smaller plate in this thread that I didn't get a picture of because it's in another box somewhere. Any how it's a little larger than the IHS plate.
The results, are not quite as good as the larger plate. Really had a difficult time with it actually, it would heat up pretty fast.
Well, it was a pretty smooth de-lid. The glue is cheaper and easier to cut. I noticed the adhesive on the cpu covering the PCB is much cheaper also. You can pick and peel it off with your finger
warp9-systems.proboards.com
Air coolers are meant to be operated at a higher temperature when they are most efficient.
Water blocks with larger cold plates or full copper work better. Not cheap, but additional surface area and thermal storage. Usually better at keeping temp spikes low as well. Because it takes longer to warm the block and coolant and then the radiators. When warm, the radiators are most efficient. So a water loop as a LOT MORE thermal storage than an air cooler and pretty much WHY they work better and AIOs sell like hot cakes. Most people just think water cooling is better, but don't understand why.
The you upgrade to a LN2 pot and it's got almost as much mass as the entire water loop in a giant chunk on top of the CPU. Thermally storing energy from LN2. Holes for additional surface area and depending on those two variables mass and surface area, is how your temp gradient will act.
So as you see, as you step up your cooling solution, you step up your available thermal storage. Be it a plate, or some coolant in a reservoir.
I think AMD should have gone with a much larger chip size than 40mm so they could not only increase the surface area of the chip, but it would have additional thermal storage as well.
HOWEVER!!!
I will agree at some point TOO MUCH or too large of a plate has it's down sides. I'm speaking about in comparison to the current AMD IHS plates released, they should have gone bigger. Probably should have, but hey, engineers design it and technicians repair it or make it better with some tweaks.
Enjoy