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posted by cmn32480 on Saturday December 05 2015, @06:28PM   Printer-friendly
from the same-designer-as-the-iPhone-6 dept.

Found this at HotHardware. From the article:

It's been discovered that some third-party heat sinks can physically damage Intel's new Skylake CPUs, along with the pins in the accompanying motherboard socket. The problem has prompted at least one cooler maker to change the design of its Socket 1151 heat sinks and it wouldn't be surprising if others soon followed suit.

The apparent issue is the substrate Intel used for its Skylake chips. A close-up shot of a Skylake CPU sitting side-by-side with a Broadwell processor shows that the substrate is noticeably thinner on Skylake, and thus prone to bending from the force that some third-party heat sinks exert. It also poses a problem for the tiny pins in the socket area of Skylake motherboards.

Sounds like something to be careful of when building that new rig. Has anyone experienced the issue?

takyon:

Update - 3:08PM: This just in from Intel...

"The design specifications and guidelines for the 6th Gen Intel Core processor using the LGA 1151 socket are unchanged from previous generations and are available for partners and 3rd party manufacturers. Intel can't comment on 3rd party designs or their adherence to the recommended design specifications. For questions about a specific cooling product we must defer to the manufacturer."

And so it would appear this is an OEM 3rd party manufacturer issue, rather than a generalized issue with the processor(s).


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  • (Score: 2) by sjames on Saturday December 05 2015, @08:23PM

    by sjames (2882) on Saturday December 05 2015, @08:23PM (#272260) Journal

    The specs from Intel are unchanged. There were some out of spec heatsinks that just happened to work OK with older CPUS. The new CPU is less forgiving of out of spec heatsinks but works fine with old heatsinks that are in spec.

    So it's the 3rd party's fault for having a heatsink that was never in spec.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by MrGuy on Saturday December 05 2015, @11:04PM

    by MrGuy (1007) on Saturday December 05 2015, @11:04PM (#272295)

    The specs from Intel are unchanged

    Assertion supported solely by Intel's statement.

    There were some out of spec heatsinks that just happened to work OK with older CPUS.

    Unsupported assertion. Where is the evidence that the working heatsinks were out of spec?

    The new CPU is less forgiving of out of spec heatsinks but works fine with old heatsinks that are in spec.

    Unsupported assertion. Where is the evidence the failing sinks are out of spec? Where is the evidence that the CPU's DO work with in-spec heatsinks.

    So it's the 3rd party's fault for having a heatsink that was never in spec.

    Logical conclusion that follows if you accept these assertions as factual.

    I'm not saying you're not correct, just that I don't see evidence to support this argument presented here.

    Intel's statement (which supports the first assertion) is a statement from one of the parties in a dispute over who is to blame for an engineering issue claiming it's the other party's fault. I'm personally skeptical of taking their unsupported word for it. The second and third assertion are [citation needed] to me. They may be true, they may not.

    • (Score: 2) by sjames on Sunday December 06 2015, @06:49AM

      by sjames (2882) on Sunday December 06 2015, @06:49AM (#272409) Journal

      Intel's statement (which supports the first assertion) is a statement from one of the parties in a dispute over who is to blame for an engineering issue

      It is also a statement from the party that actually wrote the spec and published it. Although I don't have a copy, it would be so very trivial for any ticked off 3rd party to show the change if it existed that it would be the world's dumbest lie. They're smarter than that.

      It's a story that has been repeated so often in the industry that I don't find it at all difficult to believe, though I would welcome evidence to the contrary.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 06 2015, @12:21AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 06 2015, @12:21AM (#272305)

    As far as I can tell, the specs are indeed unchanged, but they don't specify the disputed parameter.

    According to the article, Intel is saying that the 6th generation has the same specifications for mounting pressure as did earlier generations. I found the "Thermal Mechanical Design Guidelines" (TMDG) for the 4th generation of processors. [intel.com] This looks like it's meant to be the go-to document for designing coolers, but I found no mention of the "maximum mounting pressure" that the article says is specified. I didn't find any different TMDG document for newer processors that use the LGA1151 socket (they exist for those using the LGA2011 socket).