Ryzen 7000 Heating Issues
At 100% load, the 7950X is at 95.4C which is much higher than even Intel’s i9-12900K. Fret not, for this is not life threatening to the CPU but still alarming for many. Zen4 was architecturally designed to handle such high temperatures. One can thank the additional power consumption for these insane numbers. The R9 7950X at ~5.75GHz consumes round about 250W of power. This is much higher than any number AMD has proposed in the past few years.
A Solution
der8auer EN delidded or basically removed the IHS from AMD’s Ryzen 9 7900X to see how much of an impact it would have on the thermals. The overclocker then scrubbed off some of the solder glue remaining on the CPU and voilà, we now have a delidded 7900X. A custom Direct Die Frame was created using the process of ‘CNC Milling‘. After that, the CPU was simply put in place and screwed in with the custom frame.
The Results
To showcase the thermal results after removing the IHS, a graph was presented and it honestly is breath-taking. The IHS-less CPU even at idle remained at least a couple of degrees lower than its counterpart. After the 7900X was put under some stress, the difference starts to become more visible. A clear gap of ~20C can be seen across both variants of the R9 7900X.
Who’s At Fault?
Pouring the blame at AMD would be a rather amateur approach if we do not factor in heat dissipation. An IHS will almost always lead to higher thermals due to an added layer of insulation. Even if the IHS is made out of the most thermally conductive material, it will not be able to out-perform a direct die cooling solution. Besides, since these CPUs are guaranteed to handle such temperatures, we do not expect degredation in the first few years of use. All in all, AMD had to go all out this generation. Being handicapped to just ~105W with Zen3 drastically reduced the peak performance and juice their CPUs had packed in them. Maybe, in the future we’ll see better thermal results because 95C is surely scaring quite a lot of people at the moment.
