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A CPU with no heatsink at all?

F60Outrunn
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Go to solution Solved by SnowyMus,

I do know the Raspberry Pi CPUs don't have heatsinks, though the whole Pi uses around 4-6 watts.

 

If you're fine with massive throttling, you could run an Intel CPU with just the IHS on it. Not a long time ago, one of my friends made the mistake of not putting on a CPU cooler on his i5-6600. After installing Windows just fine, he found out games like GTA V were running poorly on even low settings. He kept reinstalling his graphics drivers or using older drivers for an hour or so, thinking it was an NVIDIA driver issue. We later found out that he forgot to install a cooler on the CPU, resulting in a CPU bottleneck due to throttling performance. Once the cooler was installed, life continued as normal.

 

Unless your CPU has a TDP around the Pi's, you really need something to draw heat away from the CPU or it'll suck, plus running it that hot all of the time will most likely shorten its lifespan. This isn't something you can avoid.

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So this question may seem rather silly, but i was wondering with the low power variants of CPU's from AMD/Intel - i.e. 35w or lower, if you literally just had a modern efficient low power CPU on a motherboard with no form of heatsink whatsoever (just case fans are providing airflow to be nice in this scenario), would the CPU be able to perform without overheating to hell? 

i do not intend to try this by the way, just something i suddenly wondered, any answers will be appreciated :)

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you have to have some form of heatsink on the chip. There are heatsinks that are passive with no fans on them to help pull the heat away from the chip. 

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Are we talking 35w? NOOOOOO. It'll overheat in a matter of seconds.
Are we talking a watt? Maybe.
Are we talking half a watt? Probably. These chips exist, and have a matte top, rather than an exposed die.

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You would need a CPU that draws like 3 or 4 watts of power to be able to do that, and even then you probably should at least have a big fat piece of metal on the CPU.

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  • Solution

I do know the Raspberry Pi CPUs don't have heatsinks, though the whole Pi uses around 4-6 watts.

 

If you're fine with massive throttling, you could run an Intel CPU with just the IHS on it. Not a long time ago, one of my friends made the mistake of not putting on a CPU cooler on his i5-6600. After installing Windows just fine, he found out games like GTA V were running poorly on even low settings. He kept reinstalling his graphics drivers or using older drivers for an hour or so, thinking it was an NVIDIA driver issue. We later found out that he forgot to install a cooler on the CPU, resulting in a CPU bottleneck due to throttling performance. Once the cooler was installed, life continued as normal.

 

Unless your CPU has a TDP around the Pi's, you really need something to draw heat away from the CPU or it'll suck, plus running it that hot all of the time will most likely shorten its lifespan. This isn't something you can avoid.

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