Intel’s upcoming Arrow Lake CPUs might run into cooling trouble

By Jacob Roach Published October 3, 2024

By nearly all accounts, Intel is gearing up to release its 15th-gen Arrow Lake CPUs in a matter of weeks. The new generation, which will compete for a slot among the best processors, will use the new LGA 1851 socket, and the redesigned package might be problematic when it comes to keeping the CPU cool.

According to famed overclocker and YouTuber der8auer, the hot spot on Arrow Lake CPUs is “quite a bit further north,” meaning that the hottest part of the CPU is situated at the top of the package. Different hot spot locations is nothing new — for instance, AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X has a hot spot more toward the southern part of the package — but it’s something that cooling companies will need to account for in order to get the best performance.

The issue comes up with compatibility. The LGA 1851 socket is reportedly the same size as the LGA 1700 socket, meaning most existing CPU coolers should work with the new socket, short of (maybe) a new mounting mechanism. Previous Intel CPUs use a monolithic design, meaning the hot spot is situated near the center of the chip. Arrow Lake, however, brings different dies together, similar to how AMD’s recent Ryzen CPUs are designed. That’s moved the compute tile — the hottest part of the chip — up on the package.

Hopefully, the move won’t hurt cooling performance in a meaningful way for existing coolers. The integrated heat spreader (IHS), CPU mounting block, and thermal paste all work together to create a solid bond between the CPU and the cooler to spread out heat as much as possible. Still, der8auer says that “for ideal cooling, a shift of the cooling center is required to fight the hot spot. It also means that rotating the block 180 degrees would harm performance.”

For overclockers looking to squeeze the most performance out of their hardware, the shift in hot spot makes a big difference — der8auer says that a custom water block with the input port at the north of the chip and the output port at the south would be ideal. For regular users, it might not make a difference in performance. That really comes down to how much heat the CPU generates.

As we’ve seen with the Core i9-14900K and Core i9-13900K, Intel’s latest flagships demand a lot of cooling power. Even with a powerful all-in-one (AIO) liquid cooler, Intel’s latest flagship can reach 90 degrees Celsius (or higher) under a full workload. If Arrow Lake chips come with similar power demands, the orientation of your CPU cooler could make a difference in performance — when we’re dealing with a few degrees between full performance and thermal throttling, that orientation matters.

We should know more about how Arrow Lake CPUs are designed soon. Rumor has it that Intel will reveal the new range of chips on October 10, with a release date coming later in the month.