i7 7700K disappoints with poor TIM under IHS

If you were following news of the i7 7700K, you would have known the i7 7700K can hit rather high temperatures when it goes up to 5 GHz. However it seems like it could be a case of poor TIM under the IHS, resulting in suboptimal thermal transfer between the CPU die and the heatspreader. If the heat doesn’t get transferred to the IHS, then even the greatest cooling solutions will be rendered moot as they can only wick away heat from the heatspreader’s surface.

RichUK, an AnandTech forum member, put his retail i7 7700K to the test. With the i7 7700K running at 5 GHz with 1.344V, cooled by a NZXT Kraken X62 running in silent mode, the i7 7700K hit maximum temperatures of an almost critical 96°C, but was otherwise stable in Prime95 v27.9 before delidding.

After the delid and replacement of the stock TIM under the IHS with Coollaboratory Liquid Ultra, maximum temperatures dropped by a whopping 30°C, which clearly shows the inadequacy of the stock solution. This is a retail unit too, not an engineering sample which may have certain issues yet to be ironed out.

Intel has been using TIM under the IHS instead of solder since the Ivy Bridge generation, which has not seen much favor in the overclocking scene. This bit of news might cause enthusiasts who were looking to squeeze the most out of their Kaby Lake CPUs to abandon ship, especially when news of AMD’s Bristol Ridge APUs having solder between the die and IHS has emerged, with the high probability that AMD’s Ryzen will follow suit.

Pokdepinion: This bit of news is not really a surprise, as Intel has been doing this for quite some time, and drops in temperature has been observed every time. Let’s hope AMD gives them the necessary motivation to deliver a better solution.