Heat spreader
A heat spreader (engl. For heat distribution) is a small cooling plate of a metal having good thermal conductivity such as copper or aluminum , which from the IC maker after the application of thermal grease on the the of a semiconductor chip is mounted.
Contrary to what the name suggests, the heatspreader serves less to distribute heat than more to protect the die from mechanical damage caused by the processor cooler (which must also be attached) . The presence of a heat spreader generally worsens the heat transfer.
In the BTX format , the processor cooler is screwed directly to the housing and can therefore neither damage the mainboard nor the CPU.
The heat spreader is used to distribute the punctual heat of the die over a larger area in order to be able to feed it more efficiently to the heat sink , also because the heat is not generated evenly over the entire surface of the semiconductor crystal, but at different points depending on the stress on the individual system parts arises. In addition, the cover should prevent damage to the sensitive semiconductor crystal (for example a processor ) during assembly.
With many processors of the older generation (for example the Intel Pentium 4 with Prescott core) the heat spreader was soldered directly to the die . With some current processors of the AMD Ryzen series (Raven-Ridge only) or Intel processors with Ivy Bridge , Haswell , Skylake and Broadwell architecture, the heat spreader and the die are glued together to save production costs. Some users of overclocked systems who want to achieve better cooling , exchange the thermal paste between the heat spreader and the die after some operating time (or if the manufacturer suspects the use of inferior thermal paste), which has shown improvements in cooling performance in measurements. For this purpose, the heat spreader is lifted from the circuit board of the chip with a tool, in the simplest case with a blade (for example a carpet knife). However, this procedure invalidates the warranty and carries a considerable risk of damaging the processor. The direct cooling of the chip with the heat sink (water or air cooling) after removing the heat spreader from the processor (in order to obtain only one, comparatively poorly heat-conducting transition between semiconductor and heat sink instead of two), however, has led to a deterioration in the cooling performance in measurements. In addition, the direct mounting of the heat sink on the die is often not possible without further modifications.
Heat spreaders come and a. used on the following processors:
- AMD K6
- AMD Athlon 64
- AMD Athlon 64 X2
- AMD Phenom
- AMD Phenom II
- AMD Opteron
- Intel Pentium III and Celeron in 0.13 µm technology with Tualatin core
- Intel Pentium 4
- Intel Core 2 series
- Intel Core 2 Quad
- Intel Core i series
- VIA C3
Metal plates attached to memory modules are also referred to as heatspreaders . These are intended as simple heat sinks to dissipate waste heat more quickly . However, the benefit of additional storage cooling is controversial.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Skylake without heat spreader: better cooling possible? Computec Media GMBH, March 5, 2016, accessed on July 27, 2017 .
- ↑ behead "Skylake"? Does it make sense? Watercool eK, accessed on July 27, 2017 .
- ↑ Kaby Lake-X and Skylake-X beheaded: Not soldered, difficult to behead, first pictures. Computec Media GMBH, May 30, 2017, accessed on July 27, 2017 .
- ↑ Volker Rißka: CPU heads with Delid-Die-Mate in the test: more clock and lower temperatures without risk. ComputerBase GmbH, December 25, 2015, accessed on July 27, 2017 .