Report Claims Intel Core i9-9900K Will Finally Use Solder

There’s good news for enthusiasts and fans of high-performance processors, at least in theory. After years of relying on thermal paste between its actual CPU die and the integrated heat spreader, or IHS, Intel may finally move back to solder for its highest-end desktop microprocessors.

Delidding Intel CPUs started to become popular with Haswell, when it became clear that the integrated voltage regulator contributed to the chips running hot. Normally, enthusiasts think about thermal paste as something you apply between the top of the metal cap on the CPU and the bottom of your heatsink, but there’s an entire additional layer of material between the top of the CPU die and the heat spreader. If you’re wondering why Intel and AMD use heat spreaders in the first place, the answer is for protection. Trying to balance a heatsink on a tiny die and a few felt pads isn’t a task for the faint-hearted, as many a cracked Athlon core could attest. (AMD used to ship CPUs sans heat spreaders. It wasn’t great).

Using solder instead of paste is complicated and more difficult and undoubtedly somewhat increases manufacturing cost, but it also yields significantly better results. The conductivity of solder can be significantly better than that of paste. Of course, it’s effectively impossible for enthusiasts to test this, but Tom’s Hardware recently compared the Ryzen 2400G (which uses an excellent paste application, unlike other Ryzen CPUs, which use solder) against a liquid metal solution, Conductonaut. Practically speaking, this is as close as we’re going to get to showing the benefits solder can deliver, even if we have to use an AMD chip for our example.

Image and data by Tom’s Hardware. We would expect a larger gap between high-end Intel CPUs using paste versus solder, both because solder is better than liquid metal and because higher-end chips are more likely to be thermally limited in the first place.

Now, to the actual leak in question. According to Videocardz, Intel’s Core i9-9900K and possibly lower-end models like the Core i7-9700K and Core i5-9600K will all use solder, not thermal paste. Maximum turbo clocks are also higher on all three chips compared to eighth-generation cores.

The question is, what impact will this have on the CPU’s ability to hit higher clocks? And the answer, honestly, is “It depends.” It depends on how aggressively Intel bins the Core i9-9900K and its counterparts and what the characteristics of its silicon are. We can safely assume that solder should deliver lower operating temperatures and therefore less power consumption compared with the Core i7-8700K when all else is equal. But the two chips aren’t equal. If, for example, the Core i9-9900K has higher turbo frequencies than the 8700K at several stages, then the overall power consumption and thermals for the two solutions could still be higher.

The degree to which enthusiast overclocking headroom will improve over stock will depend on how aggressively Intel has attempted to capitalize on the advantages of moving to solder in the first place. But regardless, solder has been a massive ask from the enthusiast community since at least Haswell, and Intel is finally moving to deliver.

Now Read: Leaked Benchmarks Show Intel Core i9-9900K Crushing AMD’s Ryzen 7 2700X, Intel Will Drop Hyper-Threading from Core i7, and Intel is at a Crossroads