They won't be limited in overclocking due to poor thermal interfaces

Jul 29, 2014 09:38 GMT  ·  By

When Intel moved from Sandy Bridge to Ivy Bridge processors, it unpleasantly surprised overclockers by using a low-quality thermal interface material, effectively crippling the chances of extreme overclocks. Now, though, the company is showing it has learned its lesson.

Thermal interface material, TIM for short, is a paste or grease that connects the open CPU die to the integrated heatsink that goes over it. The IHS as it were.

TIM is used to make the link between a cooler and the top of that IHS as well, but even the best one available on the market can only do so much for a CPU that is only half-adept at pulling heat out of the CPU cores and sending it out to be drained by the cooler.

When enthusiasts took the high-end Ivy bridge chips apart back in 2012 and found the low-quality TIM underneath, Intel earned quite a bit of flak for it.

It was quick to promise that it would use better TIM for the Haswell range, and sure enough, it has. Now, Haswell-E based processors are approaching, the kind that will only be used on mighty workstations and overclocking test benches.

As it happens, OCDrift website got their hands on one of the chips, and they were quick to pick it apart. What they found was even better than TIM: the CPU die is actually soldered directly to the IHS with a strong epoxy.

Soldering the CPU die to the IHS enables a much better heat conductivity than if TIM was used to fill the gap, meaning that the Core i7-5960X and its fellows will be setting some high OC records indeed.

Unfortunately, there is still a way to go until the chips come out. Intel does not plan to release the Haswell-E line until September this year (2014), and it's only the end of July.

Also, even if they come out in September, it might not be at the beginning of the month, and shipments will take days to weeks to carry out. And with the colossal prices that the monsters will surely bear, few people will actually afford them.

Nevertheless, they are coming and they promise much. The flagship is called, or will be called, Core i7-5960X and will have 8 cores, 16 threads (Hyper-Threading technology), a base clock of 3 GHz, and a top Turbo clock of 3.3 GHz. Quite a bit less than quad-core and six-core units, but that's to be expected from an 8-core die. Besides, the whole point is for users to tweak the living lights out of it manually.