Both Intel and AMD include heat sinks (called “stock”) in some of their processors, but both manufacturers have a very different vision and policy in this regard; while AMD has revamped its entire range and has several versions depending on the TDP of the accompanying processor (and showing quite decent performance), Intel maintains its poor heatsink which, in fact, is not included in “K” processors for overclocking. Why do they adopt this policy?
The stock heatsink that Intel includes in its non-overclockable non-K processors has a theoretical TDP of 65 watts, but even with low TDP processors it turns out to be almost insufficient except for active cooling and case airflow be very good. Intel has not renewed its heatsink for decades, which is clearly insufficient for the thermal requirements of modern processors, and in fact it no longer includes it in K processors, those with the multiplier unlocked to be able to overclock easily.
Intel stock heatsink is insufficient
The first reason why we understand that Intel does not include its stock heatsink with the K series processors is precisely because of its ineptitude at the time of dissipating the heat they generate. This heatsink of the brand consists of a mere block of aluminum sheets in a circular shape, without even a copper core to favor heat transmission from the IHS of the heatsink, and cooled by a noisy small fan.
In the era of Haswell processors, Intel slightly modified their stock heatsinks, adding a copper core and raising the height and therefore the amount of aluminum heat sink in order to improve cooling. However, the result was equally disastrous, since these heatsinks barely manage to keep the processors at an acceptable temperature even at rest.
These heatsinks can be “sufficient” for low-power processors, and even so the temperature is quite high and almost reaches the upper limits of safety with the processor at full load. In our tests, Intel’s stock heatsink with an Intel Core i7-8700K processor at idle reaches 60ºC with an ambient temperature of 24ºC, and as soon as we put the processor under load, the temperature shoots up and the PC shuts down for safety .
Obviously, Intel does not include the stock heatsink in its K processors because it would not be able to keep them at a good temperature at any time, forcing users to resort to third-party heatsinks to be able to cool their own processors.
Costs, R&D and market, why doesn’t Intel improve its heatsinks?
While AMD has invested time and resources in designing its range of Wraith heatsinks , which even being far from being the best on the market are enough to keep any of its processors at good operating temperatures (remember also that they have 5 different models even with RGB lighting), Intel doesn’t seem to want to spend time or money on upgrading its range of heatsinks.
Intel is not interested in competing with AMD for its stock coolers; its users are already used to the fact that when they buy a K-brand processor they will have to have enough budget to add a suitable third-party heatsink to their shopping list, and the company seems happy with that.
This is strange, since due to budget and capacity, no one doubts that Intel has greater potential than AMD to develop a suitable product to cool its processors; In fact, in the past, the company sold – in conjunction with Asetek – a liquid cooling heatsink with a 120mm radiator for some of its processors, but that was forgotten and was never known again.
Obviously, this Intel project was discarded, and it seems that since then the company has lost interest in continuing in those directions. Thus, it seems that the trend is and will continue to be that Intel will not include stock heatsinks in its K processors, first because they do not want to invest in it, and second because including the heatsinks that it has at the moment would be absurd since they are clearly insufficient.
