14 DAY TRIAL // Expected as the overclocker's dream, the upcoming Core i7-6700K “Skylake-S” shows us it will have the same drawback as the currently available K-series CPUs: bad internal thermal interface.
As the Skylake-S series is apparently out at large among corporations and Intel partners for application testing and CPU replacements for different hardware, leaks start to appear on what they look like or what sort of things have they hidden under the lid.
On Chinese forum Coolaler, pictures of the Intel Core i7-6700K processors show us that it continues to wear NGPTIM or Next-Generation Polymer Thermal Interface Material, a sort of thermal paste placed between the die and the heat spreader. So in other words overclockers might not like this.
NGPTIM is a rather new addition from Intel as it was added by the tech giants on the Core i7-4790K and Core i7-4690K “Devil’s Canyon” microprocessors and proved countless times as being at best on par with the Indium-based alloy that was soldered together on dies. Since the Ivy Bridge, however, Intel replaced the Indium solder material with a thermal protective paste that is considered less effective than the previous alloy.
Even the Soviets had it better
Tests made by KitGuru showed that the effectiveness of the NGPTIM is even worse, and sometimes comparable with old Soviet thermal pastes! The only way of overclocking your K-series would be by actually removing the NGPTIM and replacing it with other heat spreaders. Intel apparently took notice and started to bring a special polymer interface material in the Core i7-4790K and Core i5-4690K “Devil’s Canyon,” but it's still not as effective as the Coollaboratory Liquid Pro compound, for instance.
Another issue coming with the leaked photo from Coolaler is the size of Skylake-S' die that apparently is too small to be cooled down effectively. A thermal paste like the notorious NGPTIM will clearly mean disaster for the enormous overclocking potential of the Skylake-S.
Apparently, from what we know, Intel Core i7-6700K integrates four cores with Hyper-Threading and features 4.0GHz frequency, 4.20GHz maximum Turbo Boost clock-rate, 8MB last-level cache, a dual-channel DDR3L/DDR4 memory controller with 1600MHz or 2133MHz support, 95W TDP, Intel HD Graphics 6000-series integrated graphics core as well as LGA1151 socket packaging.
The chip will probably hit the market in August.