Ryzen 7000 CPUs have a serious heat spreader problem
AMD’s new Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 CPUs look undeniably cool with their spider-leg-like integrated heat spreader (IHS). But, it pains me to say it: In my time with these chips, I’ve developed a real dislike for the design.
Contents
- Heat paste issues
- Stop scratching my cold plates!
- Who needs an IHS anyway?
- Watch this space
The convoluted, atypical shape means that cleaning off all the heat paste when changing CPUs or coolers is almost impossible. But in our testing we’ve found two instances of Ryzen 7000 CPUs actually scratching and damaging the cold plates of our coolers. That’s just not cool.
Heat paste issues
Let’s start with the obvious issue I mentioned up top. The unique design of the Ryzen 7000 IHS absolutely loves grabbing and holding onto old heatpaste.
It’s shaped this way to provide direct-air access to some of the sensitive components around the CPU, with a thicker IHS in the center to help offset the difference in height between the traditional AMD PGA AM4 socket and the new LGA design of AM5 socket used with Ryzen 7000. This ensures cooler compatibility between generations, a very welcome feature for a generation that already demands a new motherboard and RAM.
But the problem with this shape is that it is very easy to end up with thermal paste getting stuck in the grooves, and their thin shape makes it hard to remove. This doesn’t necessarily matter with most heat pastes, as they’re thermally not electrically, conductive. But if you’re using liquid metal or another conductive thermal interface material, then this could be a real problem.
It’s also not very aesthetically pleasing to have old thermal paste gunking up your chips and, on a small scale, that paste could act like insulation along the side of the CPU, worsening its thermal transfer properties.
We’re not the first ones to encounter the problem of overflowing heat paste getting stuck in between the segments of the IHS. It’s so prevalent and was so obvious early on, that Noctua made the Noctua NA-TPG1, a thermal paste guard and cleaning set.
Maybe we should have bought one of those for our test systems from the get-go.
Stop scratching my cold plates!
Perhaps more problematic is the fact that the Ryzen 7000 CPUs have scratched up two different AIO coolers we’ve been using for testing — on two entirely different test rigs, used by two different writers, on two different continents. The physical location of the CPUs and their coolers doesn’t matter, but I want it to be as clear as possible that this isn’t just user error.
Digital Trends reviewer Jacob Roach and I have both had the same issue with repeat Ryzen 7000 testing leading to some quite nasty scratches and uncleanable blemishes on our respective AIO coolers from the polished copper cold plates.
One of these coolers hasn’t been tested with anything but Ryzen 7000, while the other survived multiple generations of CPU testing completely unscathed until the testing of Ryzen 7000 began to wear it down.
That’s the two different AIO coolers in the gallery above with comparable, if slightly different, damage.
We haven’t nailed down exactly what the problem is here, but it would seem likely that slightly uneven load across the cold plate from the unique IHS shape is causing indentation around the edges, which over time is leading to damage of the cold plate.
In the case of one of them, uneven mounting pressure seems to have skewed the damage to one side, but there’s still a lot of scratches from only a few days worth of testing.
Who needs an IHS anyway?
During our reviews of the Ryzen 7000 CPUs, we’ve blamed the added thickness of the IHS for the high temperatures of the chips, with most hitting 95 degrees on the core mere seconds after loading them with anything strenuous. Indeed, overclockers around the world have been having amazing success in delidding, or grinding down the IHS to make it thinner, with some reporting temperature drops of as much as 20 degrees.
Curiously, this doesn’t seem to have a huge impact on performance, but it does ward off the problems of heat paste spread and cold plate scratching.
It just comes at the expense of potentially destroying your processor during the delidding process, and needing to be extremely careful with how tightly you mount your cooler.
We don’t recommend you try delidding unless you’re particularly confident and can afford to buy a new CPU if you break your existing one during the process, but it remains an option for those concerned about AIO damage.
Watch this space
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends
Despite Ryzen 7000 CPUs being available in the wild for a couple of months now, this isn’t an issue I’ve seen repeated elsewhere. I’m glad in some ways that my colleague experienced the same problems, as at least I can rest assured that I’ve not just been handling my new AMD CPUs too vigorously, or simply overtightening the screws.
But two corroborative data points are more of a coincidence than a pattern, so more research into this phenomenon is required if we’re too get to the bottom of the issue. I’d be interested to see whether nickel-plated copper would fare better, with its anticorrosive properties aiding in resisting the damaging effects of the Ryzen 7000 IHS.
Perhaps there’s a mounting process where you can get away with not tightening the screws all the way to reduce that edge pressure from the IHS while still maintaining cooling performance. Perhaps AIOs and coolers with more screws and springs could provide more even mounting pressure too.
If any of you have come across this phenomenon yourself, though, do let us know. We’ve love to know we’re not alone here.
Editors’ Recommendations
-
New AMD laptop CPU destroys its predecessor, winning by 90%
-
AMD’s Ryzen 9 7950X3D pricing keeps the pressure on Intel
-
How to rewatch AMD’s CES 2023 keynote from today
-
CES 2023: AMD Ryzen 7000 laptops CPUs go up to 16 cores
-
AMD’s new 65W processors fix Ryzen 7000’s biggest problems
CPU heatspreader examined in detail — do we now have to redesign the coolers for AMD and Intel? | Basics | Page 2
The Ryzen 1xxx and 2xxx
Commonly, AMD CPUs are often referred to as convex heatspreaders, which is only partially true.
Because on the one hand, a lot of the older models are already relativized after assembly and a burn-in, where nothing remains of the curvature after a certain usage period of only a few hours, and on the other hand, Ryzen CPUs of the current generation offer completely new perspectives in chiplet design. Bulge yes, but completely different. But I’ll get to that in a minute.
Let’s first look at the first-generation Ryzen 5 with the big die, once a CPU before assembly and once after. We see in the first gallery the measurement of the unused CPU. the same way you put them in the first time. Fittingly, I have created a second graphic with a superposition that illustrates the position and size of the die:
The curve over the horizontal section is interesting here, because it shows the curvature very clearly. In the end it is a bit more than 0.02 mm, which is about twice as much as one should aim for with the thinnest possible layer of thermal paste (but usually not achieved anyway).
From this point of view, everything is still within the green zone and it doesn’t matter whether the radiator bottom is concave or not. For the elongated, rectangular bulge alone clearly speaks against an almost always conical finishing of the base.
But what happens after warming up and the first hard hours of operation? The IHS deforms extremely, the solder seems to be pushed away and the shape changes from convex almost to concave! So it is easy to squeeze and proves once again that a smooth and above all very stable radiator bottom is actually the best solution. What you can and should do would be to check the radiator bolting and possibly tighten it slightly. It should be able to easily squeeze out the now excess paste. Again, I have a gallery with original measurement and superposition:
And now look at the curve! The fact that everything can be pressed so wide is certainly also due to the inside of the IHS, which is relatively thick above the die, but otherwise much thinner-walled.
Here we are only in the range of less than 0.01 mm, which is completely negligible for the cooler bottom surface and the thermal paste. It’s considered almost level! Let’s look at the horizontal section again….
…and then the diagonal one:
But what you can see well in the measurements in the gallery: the IHS of the CPU curves upwards more clearly at the edges at the top and bottom. I could not reproduce this in all cases, but a test with a straight edge shows that this effect depends mainly on the cooler used. It does not occur when the flat and stable cooler bottom significantly overlaps the IHS on the sides, but usually only with circular AiO coolers, which also come with a convex Intel curvature. That, in turn, deforms such a Ryzen in a rather unpurposeful way. How such an IHS of a decapitated CPU looks from the inside, very your same.
Ryzen APUs 2xxx and 3xxx
The older APUs I have recorded exemplarily as used specimen with in the attached picture gallery, because here the used heat conductive paste, a very similar IHS form with still more pronounced elevation over the die and a deviating chip positioning come to the effect.
But even the APUs lose most of their camber after a short run, and it’s all self-explanatory in the end if you’ve read the above.
The diagonal measurement reveals that a concave radiator bottom would even be completely counterproductive here, because the four outer corners are also raised and protrude upwards.
With a little bad luck, the concave curvature in the middle is not even enough for a real contact between IHS and radiator bottom. Again, a curved radiator bottom would hardly be purposeful. So the two older Ryzen model lines and their matching APUs don’t benefit from a concave bottom, rather the opposite is true.
|
3DNews Technologies and IT market. News servers, clusters, supercomputers, industrial… First image of Intel Sapphire Rapids… The most interesting in the reviews
10/18/2021 [05:10], Alexey Razin Presenting Sapphire Rapids server processors at the end of August, Intel only casually mentioned the possibility of modifications with HBM-type memory integrated on the substrate, but did not show the corresponding samples.
Image source: Twitter, Tom Wassick According to Tom’s Hardware, a blurry image of such a Sapphire Rapids processor with the unambiguous «SPR» annotation was found in an Intel representative’s presentation for the IMAPS 2021 event. four familiar tiles with computing cores and eight HBM-type memory chips grouped in pairs. Strictly speaking, the proportions of the memory chips suggest that it is the HBM2E chips that are depicted. Since the tiles of the Sapphire Rapids processors have a certain autonomy — each, for example, uses two DDR5 memory channels, then the HBM2E chips are tied to the tiles in pairs, judging by the image. The Xeon processor of the Sapphire Rapids family, which got on the image, has a BGA design. This means it mounts directly to the PCB, bypassing the traditional CPU socket. These versions of Sapphire Rapids should find use in high-density server systems.
Although it is difficult to draw final conclusions from the available image, the tiles with the computing cores of this version of Sapphire Rapids show a rectangular shape, while in the official photos of conventional processor modifications they are almost square. It is possible that special crystals will be produced to create a version of processors with HBM2E memory. Mass production of the Intel Xeon processor Sapphire Rapids family should be rolled out in the second quarter, but versions with HBM2E memory may have a separate release schedule. Source:
If you notice an error, select it with the mouse and press CTRL+ENTER. Related materials Permanent URL: Tags: ← |
The first revelation of such a plan happened this month, with the filing of unofficial sources citing an Intel presentation. 
Thermal Grizzly High Performance Cooling Solutions
-
«For my top systems, Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut is the absolute best!»
-
«For overclockers thermal paste Kryonaut is the best product on the market!»
-
«The best thermal paste ever! Compared to others, Thermal Grizzly is very easy to use and extremely effective!»
DANCOP -
«Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut thermal compound is number 1, just like me»
Ian «8Pack» Parry, Overclocking World Champion
Ryzen 7000 Delid-Die-Mate is a tool for scalping AMD Ryzen 7000 processors.
In the «Direct Die» method, the processor cooler is installed directly on the processor dies and the processor I / O matrix. Rejection of the heat spreader in the cooling circuit can significantly optimize the transfer of heat from the matrix to the processor heatsink.
- Compatible with Ryzen 7000 processors
- Scalping tool
- Made from
aluminum
Why Scalp and Direct Die on Ryzen 7000? Scalping is the process of removing the processor heat spreader. In solderless package processors, stripping is typically used to replace the thermal interface material (TIM) between the processor die and heat spreader with high quality thermal paste or liquid metal before reinstalling the heat spreader.
However, since the Ryzen 7000 processors are soldered, this is not possible, as removing the indium solder will create too much clearance between the IHS and processor dies. Therefore, the Ryzen 7000 processors are primarily separated for the possible installation of a CPU cooler directly on the processor dies.
In the case of Ryzen 7000 processors, this will be an input / output matrix (IOD) and one or two processor arrays (CCD), the so-called chiplets. By ditching the heat spreader and installing a CPU cooler directly on the die, experience has shown that temperatures can be reduced by 10-20°C when a liquid metal such as Conductonaut is used as TIM. The corresponding tests were conducted by content creators and Tech-YouTubers Roman «der8auer» Hartung, a professional overclocker and engineer, and Jason «JayzTwoCents» Langevin.
The heatspreader of the Ryzen 7000 processors, in part, is responsible for this large temperature rise due to Direct Die technology. This was done to ensure that older AM4 compatible CPU coolers would also be compatible with the AM5 platform. In addition, the surface area of the Ryzen 7000 heat spreaders is significantly smaller at around 910mm² compared to AM4’s 1,300mm².