Investigating Intel's CPU Socket Problems | Thermal Grizzly Contact Frame Benchmark

[Music] let me show you something important so this is a set of a couple dozen pressure tests that we ran on intel 12th gen cpus and the reason we ran these is because in our lab testing we discovered an interesting trend where as you can see here here here and basically in all of these tests the entire right half including the die area of the cpu ihs is lacking pressure and that shows up here on an actual cpu the reason for all of this is because of this this is the intel ilm or the independent loading mechanism that is on motherboards to secure the cpu in the socket but it provides uneven pressure across the surface of the ihs and that is a problem that's why today we're investigating this by swapping the intel stock ilm with this aftermarket option the thermal grizzly cpu contact frame we're gonna be testing these for pressure and for thermals to see how they perform and if the issue of bending intel cpus magically goes away before that this video is sponsored by lynnode lynnote is a linux server hosting provider that gn has used for nearly a decade now for its own servers alongside dedicated website hosting linux makes it easy to cut out third-party vpn services to build your own vpn that you fully control easily configured via the interface lenota also has hundreds of guides for custom servers including game server apps like rust minecraft cs go and guides to host your own video calling servers to eliminate third parties lyndon is a great way to take back control of software and your hosting and gamers nexus viewers get a 100 credit for 60 days on new accounts at linux.com gamersnexus or click the link below now this might not look like a 35 piece of metal but it has tight machining tolerances that are meant to resolve the issues of the intel ilm we've deconstructed one here so you can see that it has just two core pieces and then a couple of screws so with the contact frame it's supposed to be solving the cpu bending that the intel stock ilm is accused of causing here's how that's happening the intel independent loading mechanism or the ilm is this thing it's pretty simple the mechanism uses an obvious lever and spring design to apply an intimidating amount of pressure to the cpu to hold it into place but the lever isn't the only spring point the footing towards the bottom of the socket also behaves in a spring-like fashion it flexes and intentionally warps as pressure ramps to conform to the surface of the cpu and the socket itself but in a way that doesn't permanently bend the socket in theory inside the socket there are a few black pads to help take the bite out of the contact between the metal of the socket retention kit and the cpu ihs all of this pressure it's important intel has 1700 pins in these sockets and if those pins don't directly contact the right pads on the cpu at the right pressure you can have instability or loss of functionality this is actually something that thermal grizzly warns against with its own kit that we're reviewing today because they warn that over-torquing it causes potentially bad contact with pins that could reduce memory frequency or clocking potential and that's the most common loss it's typically memory channels or poor memory stability with poor contact at even just one pin whether from pressure that's too low or from debris in the socket we might lose an entire memory channel we could also lose the frequency range or less obvious losses but if you really look at the socket it only has three real points of contact it contacts here here and up here at these two flanges to a single bar coming off of the lever for the independent loading mechanism and that's why there's this huge amount of play side to side in the socket you can secure it all the way off to one side the other side right in the middle it doesn't really seem to settle in one particular place so all of that pressure is getting applied up here initially which is causing flex in both the board and the socket and if you look at the cpu when applying pressure you can see it sink deeper into the socket as the pins depress and make contact with the patch we've noticed that the lever is just slightly pushing down a little bit harder on the right side of the socket and that's tested across multiple boards the spring design applies unevenly high pressure to the ram side of the cpu which causes a slightly lower surface than on the i o side and by slightly we're talking basically microns of difference here this results in a few things mainly it reduces overall thermal performance of the cpu we'll look at that later in some charts as a result of the uneven pressure right in the middle of the cpu where the die is and too little pressure towards the ram from the actual cpu cooler to the ihs the left side receives the highest pressure with this ilm design with the coolers we've tested which means that the cooler cold plate itself will have uneven contact pressure across the ihs this could cause small air gaps that get filled by thermal paste and while that's the job of thermal paste it's ideal that the air gaps are relegated to imperfections on the surface of the ihs and the cold plate and not a result of the mounting hardware itself additionally this design can cause higher core to core thermal deltas when working with extreme cooling solutions some cores on the cpu will run cooler than others as a result of the mounting pressure or density of the thermal paste layer becoming particularly noticeable in xoc environments so let's prove the problem with some testing from the lab our pressure testing uses a chemically reactive film that we then scan with a national institute of science and technology traceable scanner that our viewers funded with their patreon support at patreon.com gamersnexus where you can get bonus videos we just published a new one and via our gn store purchases at store.gamers. thank you to our patreon supporters and purchasers for helping us out for the first set of tests we tested with the intel pentium g7400 the i9 12900 kf the i9 12900 9k non-f the i7 12 700 and the i9 12 900 ks that gives us a total of five cpus to test against which allows us to have better sample size since the ihs itself matters here we have a mountain of existing data for coolers on our am4 cbu cooler test bench so we have a strong understanding already of the cold plate designs and which would be the best used here to get you all introduced here's just one pressure scan from the test set we'll overlay it on top of an intel cpu just to help illustrate things overall you're looking at relatively low pressure compared to some other tests we've done in the past but the edge closest to the ram doesn't even detect on our scan the cpu only has good pressure over half of the die and half of the ihs that's horribly inefficient and indicates an issue with the ilm as we already know the cooler and the mounting hardware are known good and provide a relatively even mount we eliminated the cooler as a variable with additional test data here's the first set of results the i7 12700 that we tested produced extraordinary results with a thermal grizzly frame it's at nearly perfectly full coverage sands a slight reduction in pressure in the center the overall increased coverage and reduction in the off cancer mount is more beneficial thermally than that missing central coverage the stock intel ilm was lacking coverage centrally and toward the ramp showing that the thermal grizzly contact frame does what it claims it does work this shows an intel i9 12900 ks the left has the ilm from intel presenting lacking contact centrally and at the bottom half of the cpu the thermal grizzly frame is on the right this one produces smooth and even contact across the entire center of the cpu most critically and it also improves contact except at the topmost edge but the loss here is far outweighed by the gains everywhere else so far this is an improvement this one shows the i9 12900 non-k cpu the intel ilm shows the same lacking contact overall though one of the two passes fared better than previous results the thermal grizzly frame produces a demonstrably even pressure distribution creating almost a perfect rectangular representation of the alder-like cpu underneath this is a matter where ihs runs around variants is impacting the result of course and that's exactly why we spent two days running this many pressure tests on this many cpus but even with the sample size we have and all the re-tests we have it's clear that the contact frame is doing a better job evenly distributing the load thermals are up next so for this we ran all of our testing on a gigabyte z690 master motherboard you can see this in some of our installation footage we took and we ran a minimum of three test passes with two to three complete remounts per socket type so we'll do multiple test passes for the first mount and then we add additional amounts after that so through all that we only had a variance on average of about one degree celsius and the cpu ran to steady state thermals before pulling the average over a few hundred rows of data per result so we're averaging averages over hundreds of rows which gives us very accurate data the result showed an improvement in the thermal grizzly contact frame of about seven degrees celsius reduction and that's a real improvement that is far outside of variants we didn't even need to lap the cpu to achieve a seven degree reduction so that's a big change for just a socket swap the maximum core temperature pulled down by about eight degrees celsius giving us more thermal headroom for overclocking when you look at the max single core temperature and our clocks are limited ultimately by the hottest core when overclocking so quarter core deltas and maximum single core temperature matter the corticore delta increased by about 1.4 degrees but it's still a very wide gap at 20 degrees for the average delta core to core at any given interval in the test this is what lapping would help you improve more than anything else and as a reminder for these numbers the average core temperature and the max core temperature those are over ambient so it's a delta t over ambient where we're taking out the ambient temperature measured every second of the test from these presented results except for the corticore delta because that would be dumb so bringing it back to that side-to-side wobble we saw a second ago where it goes like this we were curious when doing the testing and so i asked mike to try securing this with a bias of the ilm towards the vrm towards the ram and then as centered as he could get it and the result is this set of data it's very simple we didn't even bother scanning it so for this one the cpu is oriented like this and the ram is that direction towards you so this has the i9 12900 ks for all tests we socketed it with the bias away from the ram and the result looks very similar to the result with the bias towards the ram a little bit of a shift here in some of the pressure profile but especially if you look at these two we did two passes of each they are very similar so slight change but not much functionally the same centered same thing we have largely the same type of result this is the best out of all the contacts we did for this set of tests but still has lacking pressure compared to the contact frame that we tested with earlier this intel version of an ilm on the desktop cpus though it's not the only way that it's done in fact intel itself does it a few different ways but so does amd for threadripper so we'll grab two more boards to help show other approaches to designing an independent loading mechanism first of all on the intel x99 and x299 class of board which is this one here you can see that the way they used to do it since this is a dead platform now was by doing actually two levers on opposing sides clamping diagonally opposite each other and this is one of the best sockets we had ever worked with at least up until threadripper so these work by pressing in actually you can only release one side specifically and it's not that one so you release over here first the pressure is all applied down here by this much longer bar that sits within this footing grabbing it so you release that pressure then over here release the pressure and again much longer bar here then we have on the desktop class cpus applied across a wider surface area and counter to the original bar comes up and it's released simple enough additionally the contact patch is much wider we have contacts here along the bottom of the ihs and it's a much wider or larger surface if only because the cpu itself is larger but that helps to distribute some of the load more evenly than we see in modern desktop parts and the problem with these desktop parts this these didn't used to be this big they were typically around 1100 pins now they're up to 1700 pins and they're going to 1800 and that is why we're seeing some of the challenges we're seeing with that uh somewhat medium-sized ilm now all of that is contrary to this one the threadripper ilm where instead of all the stuff we just looked at it makes complete contact around the entire edge of the ihs this is easily the most secure cpu socket we've worked with in a long time it's got the three contact points for the screws but the metal itself applies pressure everywhere and then you can even see this serious spring down here to assist with some of that tension and then there's the clamps that you use for the actual install for dropping the cpu which is footed right here into the socket so those are other options for socket design that don't have quite the same problem as this one over here but they're much more expensive and that's what it comes down to so for intel doing the cheaper ilm that they do now well it's cheaper so it allows them to get into boards that are closer to the 70 price range thermal grizzlies at 35 it's really not bad especially if mass produced by a company like intel it's the machining that costs money and the fact that thermal grizzly does low volume compared to a company that makes millions upon millions of sockets so that's what part of the cost is but the bigger issue with something like this with the idea that intel why doesn't intel just put the thermal grizzly contact frame or something similar on its desktop products it's just a danger for the user because most average users you don't want to trust them to have the pins that exposed and to have to tighten the screws to the spec that this requires so that's the issue it's not hard for people in our audience especially but for the average mainstream user it could be a challenge and to assist me in demonstrating that challenge i am going to recruit mike from our lab team to show the installation process of the contact frame and to talk about some of his concerns with it mechanically as an end user and just in general because it wasn't all easy it's not something we recommend for everybody even though there is an improvement okay let's talk about the installation now the installation is not complex in fact far from it it only requires four screws but there is a lot of potential for damage or doing it wrong one of the points of uh one of the risks of doing damage is to the socket now de bauer recommends leaving the cpu in the socket during installation and i certainly found that to be advisable while doing the installation having those pins exposed while you're moving screws over or moving the frame over the socket itself is definitely risky because if you drop it and you bend those pins it's very hard to get them correct again the other point of contention or the other potential risk when installing this is too much torque or too little torque now the manual calls for .03 to newton meters now that's a very small amount of force and it's hard to replicate without tools now de bauer and thermal grizzly have advised a certain technique that we're about to go over here so all the intel 1700 boards are going to have an uh plate on the back of the motherboard that's held in place by the four screws you just removed so as you can see i still have the liquid freezer two mounting bracket hardware still installed what that's doing for me is it's holding the back plate in place so that it doesn't fall and that way i don't have to hold it and try to install the frame while holding the plate up from the bottom i think that's the only good way to do it if i'm being honest i've got that all set up so let's go ahead and put our contact frame down now the best method that i found was a combination of what the bower advised and a little bit of a tweak on my part what we're going to do is we're going to back the screws out counterclockwise so we're like we were taking them out until we feel the threads fall into place now if you're mechanically inclined you've probably heard of this or done this before and that just prevents cross threading and of course you definitely don't want to cross thread these or muddy up the threads because it's going to make torquing it properly very difficult so i'm going to go ahead i'm going to back this screw out and i here and feel it fall into place and i'm going to give it 90 degrees and i'm going to go diagonally across to the other the screwdrive you know caddy corner to the one i just did and i'm going to do the same thing here fall into place give it 90 degrees one of the reasons i'm clocking the screws is so that i know that they're all threaded and equally right now if i were to just start tightening down until the until i felt some amount of resistance the frame is going to walk up and down i found that to be it gave me inconsistent results when i was mounting the frame so now i know that each screw has about 90 degrees on it and i'm going to continue to just add a set amount of rotation to each screw so i'm going to go ahead and move to 45 degrees of rotation and i'm going to go around to all four screws until i feel some very light resistance and i now feel that resistance on all four corners okay so now now we're going to do the prescribed thermal grizzly method so what they advise is that you turn each screw 90 degrees earlier we marked our screws and this is also what de bauer and thermal grizzly recommend so i've got these witness marks on the frame and now i've got witness marks on the screws so i'm going to go around all four corners and i'm going to give it a 90 degree turn and that's it i had the most consistent results with getting it to post and boot using this method it's kind of it's a little step further as as far as attention to deca tale than what de baur and thermal grizzly recommended but it you know if you have the patience and i would recommend that you find some patience to do it this way you'll probably have good results obviously there's a lot of room for error with this if you over tighten the screws you're going to damage you potentially damage the socket and you're going to lose contact if you don't tighten them tight enough you're going to also lose contact and your system won't post overall the fit and finish of the product is is pretty fantastic i think i was personally impressed with the quality certainly the machining quality and the tolerances that they were able to achieve it's a piece of 70 75 aluminum it's anodized debaur talks a bit about how difficult it was to anodize this properly so that it's not conductive the logo and name of the product as well as the witness marks for timing your screws are laser etched so that you can feel that they are recessed so those aren't ever going to fade with wear although this won't be seeing much handling or wear once it's under a cooler so we've been critical about the installation but the other side of that coin is if they included a torque driver it would become a very expensive product and if they didn't do the witness marks here or give advisement on how to properly torque this product then it would become inaccessible to a lot of users so that wraps up the hands-on segment here the installation is definitely something to be wary of and certainly careful of when you're doing it but if you take your time i don't think it's it's that difficult and i think if you're careful you should you should come out all right and now we're going to go back to steve whether or not this thing is worth it first of all the contact frame does work we noticed when we were looking around there are some cheaper alternatives out there the thermal grizzly one it's about 35 so u.s right now there is a a group of cheaper don't know which one came first but cheaper alternatives that are in the 15 to 18 range now the only concern we have with those we haven't tested them we probably won't is uh that the tolerances might not be as tight and so you either sacrifice some of the gain or you might introduce some issues if you are actually overclocking or you cut some of that frequency off the memory because it's running a little bit tighter than you think it actually is based on how it all secures to the motherboard so uh it does work we saw about a seven to eight ish degree reduction just with the frame not with anything else so they also thermal grizzly has this lapping tool that you can secure the cpu into to get a cleaner lap if you're going to sand down the ihs and that's what would help with the core decor deltas where this frame it did not benefit quarter chord delta's we thought it might but ultimately that problem it's more in the thickness of the ihs and the variability and the thickness across the ihs where and we've shown this in the past like with our video with kingpin where the surface sands down faster in some areas than others and that's because the material is thicker there or thinner there depending on the concavity or if it's a convex cpu ihs so the thing you would have to do to fix quarter core delta concerns would be lapping and that's really only valuable if you're overclocking to a point where your single hottest core is limiting your maximum all core frequency because you have no more thermal headroom to keep pushing the voltage and the frequency up so if you're at 95 degrees already on your single hottest and your next two are say 75 or well 75 degrees would be a 20 degree chord core delta which is what we're seeing then that cuts off a ton of potential just on one core so that's the way to look at this in terms of pressure it absolutely redistributes the pressure in a much more even way and in theory it reduces some of the flex of the cpu as well because of that whether or not we would buy this well it's cool from an enthusiast standpoint this is it's sort of like the rocket cool ihs's those copper ones where this is kind of like a fun you're an enthusiast you like messing with your computer you want to do something on a saturday to burn some time and have an excuse to play with the computer without having to buy something expensive like a video card or a cpu or something like that this makes sense there it also makes a lot of sense and way more sense in fact if you do extreme overclocking anything with dry ice liquid nitrogen stuff like that that'll get far better value overall than uh normal consumer use where a couple degrees yeah that helps you know what else helps spending 35 dollars more on a higher end cooler and getting similar performance gains and maybe even a noise reduction at the same time so whether or not this isn't like worth it for most people but for the right enthusiast audience we think it does well uh and we'd be curious to see if intel or amd do anything in future generations to plan for these larger cpus with higher pin count as the ilms get kind of shown for where their weaknesses are so that's it for this one thanks for watching as always subscribe for more you can go to store.camerasex.net to help us out directly where you can get stuff like the mouse mats that i have on the table here or you can go to patreon.comgamersnexus to get behind the scenes bonus videos and we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 578,869

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, thermal grizzly, thermal grizzly contact frame, thermal grizzly contact frame benchmark, thermal grizzly contact frame worth it, alder lake, intel 12th gen, intel 12900k, intel 12900kf, intel 12900ks, replace intel socket, replace cpu socket intel

Id: Ysb25vsNBQI

Length: 24min 45sec (1485 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 26 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Hurray for Science.

I keep hearing that this is a non issue, and most of the temperature results are fine with the base ILM. But I personally bought the TG frame for peace of mind, and seeing that even distribution in the 3d scans at least validates my gut feelings.

I'm also sure you could find older cpu's that have non ideal distribution, but to me this is just another tweak you do, like setting ideal ram timings, buying certain thermal pastes, etc. It reminds me of AIO mounting techniques: the science behind it is important from the standpoint of being correct, even if the results aren't a huge net gain.

[u/Isolasjon]

Hmh, much more impactful than I would have thought. Not only for overclocking, but also for ITX-builds where every degree of extra cooling matters on both performance and noise. Interesting…

[u/jerryfrz]

I have low hopes on Intel rectifying this for Raptor Lake so the best bet is on board partners ditching the default ILM and just bundle their mid to high end SKUs with a frame inside.

[u/fingerbanglover]

Anybody else watch PC Centric from time to time? Guy built a beast rig but can't seem to get enough pressure to keep it from throttling. Hope he sees this video. Thermal Grizzly should reach out to him for sure.

[u/Put_It_All_On_Blck]

I dont know why they did all this work, only to test one cooler. As its commonly believed the performance gains depend on how flat your cooler is. Convex coolers (most sold) see much smaller gains than completely flat cold plates.

For example, when Igor did his testing with this same frame, one of the three blocks he tested saw zero gains, the other two blocks were flat and saw 6-10c difference. Luumi made his own frame and had a similar result, zero difference because the cooler he used wasnt flat (he states this too). Buildzoid also had very little benefit when using his AIO when doing the washer mod, but his lapped block saw bigger gains. And in Der8auers (who makes the TG frame) own video, he also states different coolers will have different results, and only uses a lapped block for testing to show a 7c difference.

I'd also like to point out, that even with the flat Arctic AIO, with the stock mounting mechanism the 12900ks was only doing 71c max core, 58c average. Thats very good temps to begin with, and while the frame certainly was a big improvement, it wasnt needed despite this being nearly the worst case scenario. The people that would benefit most from these frames are extreme overclockers, and people with anemic cooling systems to begin with, such as SFFPC builders trying to run a 12900k on a 120mm aio.

[u/SnardVaark]

The TG Contact Frame does not appear to be a reliable CPU retention bracket, since the bracket is installed with minimal bolt engagement at .03-.06N-m spring tension from the socket.

Once the CPU cooler is installed with significantly greater force, the spring tension on the CPU Contact Frame mounting bolts will be zero. As in, no torque at all. Loosely coupled by a few threads of 4 mounting bolts.

Which means that the Contact Frame mounting bolts will be subject to vibration from the fans and pump, and could conceivably back out over time. If the CPU cooler is subsequently removed in this scenario, the CPU and Contact Frame could be partially pulled from the socket, possibly damaging the socket pins.

The Chinese Contact Frames that are anchored firmly to the ILM mounting backplate do not have this defect.