Der8auer admits he 'messed up' with underperforming Thermal Grizzly Heatspreaders and Direct Die coolers

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Affected products have been delisted until a fix is found.

Pressure-sensitive paper used to test CPU die contact for different designs for Thermal Grizzly's Heatspreader.
Pressure-sensitive paper used to test CPU die contact for different designs for Thermal Grizzly's Heatspreader. (Image credit: der8auer on YouTube)

Yesterday, der8auer speaking in his capacity as CEO of Thermal Grizzly, released a statement on YouTube apologizing for the underperforming Intel High Performance Heatspreader (HPHS) V1 and Intel Mycro Direct Die V1 units, which were recently released touting cooling improvements of up to 15 degrees Celsius. Some defective units, however, precipitated thermals even warmer than the default CPU configurations.

In the video, Der8auer immediately apologizes for the underperforming products and signals his hopes of finding the underlying reasons why. The description of the original video also immediately directs those who have experienced these issues to the official Thermal Grizzly support page. Until the issues are resolved and Der8auer figures out the exact cause, the products are no longer available to purchase.

As the video progresses, Der8auer gives viewers a deeper view of the manufacturing process behind their latest Intel HPHS and Mycro Direct Die units. The manufacturing floor is where diagnostics are being run on the designs to help iron out what caused these issues, and Der8auer highlights having tested over 50 different designs with the same underlying backplates/bottom structures.

As it turns out, Thermal Grizzly Heatspreaders and Mycro Direct Die liquid cooling surfaces share bottom structures, whether they are made for AMD or Intel. The contact frames for both are also made from aluminum.

Quality control methods shared in the video include placing the copper bottoms of Heatspreaders and Direct Dies under a device used to measure exact height differences and evenness and the use of pressure-sensitive paper to verify good contacts between the CPU and cooling surface. While Der8auer is able to express confidence in the Heatspreader and Mycro Direct Die V1 for things like thermal paste distribution, he makes clear that these products won't be sold again until the exact cause of the underperforming units is determined.

Fortunately, most users who would even consider buying these products shouldn't have too much trouble working around technical difficulties, especially if Thermal Grizzly lives up to its CEO's words and makes impacted customers whole. After all, delidding your CPU is about as far from an amateur's project as it gets. At least it isn't a truly disastrous issue threatening the functionality of the chips in question.

In any case, it's unlikely that we'll be seeing the proposed RGB or AMD versions of these products until the issues with the original Intel models have been confidently identified and fixed.

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Christopher Harper
Christopher Harper
Contributing Writer

Christopher Harper has been a successful freelance tech writer specializing in PC hardware and gaming since 2015, and ghostwrote for various B2B clients in High School before that. Outside of work, Christopher is best known to friends and rivals as an active competitive player in various eSports (particularly fighting games and arena shooters) and a purveyor of music ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Killer Mike to the Sonic Adventure 2 soundtrack.

15 Comments Comment from the forums
  • bit_user
    Based on my humble experiments with backside cooling, I wonder if that would be a fruitful direction for him to find the next set of cooling performance enhancements:

    https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/how-much-does-cooling-the-underside-of-the-motherboard-cpu-typically-help.3844807/
    As I mention in that thread, there are particulars about my situation that yielded such large improvements. Also, I'm dumping most of the heat directly to the case, which wouldn't be a good idea with a much higher-power CPU. But, there's still a lot else you could do.

    For instance, I think someone could probably design a CPU socket that's more thermally-conductive and use it on a motherboard with a heatsink that you can mount on the motherboard backside, directly underneath the CPU. Some cases have a cut-out that could accommodate it.

    Also, he's known to work with case manufacturers, whom he could encourage to focus some airflow directly on that spot.
    https://lian-li.com/product/pc-o11-dynamic/
    Reply
  • PEnns
    Just an observation: In case anybody is wondering how to pronounce his name (Der8auer):

    It is Der Bauer, which means The Farmer in English.
    Carry on. ;)
    Reply
  • dos_box
    PEnns said:
    Just an observation: In case anybody is wondering how to pronounce his name (Der8auer):

    It is Der Bauer, which means The Farmer in English.
    Carry on. ;)
    To fully understand the name you would need to be German. Der Bauer means something like farmer/peasant/person that owns land and has livestock or crop. It can also be used as a slightly offensive word, for someone of low intelect or someone of the working class, but often in a more mocking way and thereby often used for a standard type of guy. So it's not too offensive.

    But the twist here is the literal translation. Der Bauer literally means The Builder (which is in German a farmer). But the literal translation is when you understand the true meaning. He is building computer systems. That's the twist here in my opinion. So it's more of a word-game.
    Reply
  • Amdlova
    Long long time Ago gotcha a full aluminum case... put a huge thermal pad on back of the mothetboard and sandwich it with the case... droop almost 8 degrees celcius on a 3770k at 5.2ghz
    Reply
  • bit_user
    Amdlova said:
    Long long time Ago gotcha a full aluminum case... put a huge thermal pad on back of the mothetboard and sandwich it with the case... droop almost 8 degrees celcius on a 3770k at 5.2ghz
    How big was the "huge thermal pad"? Like 50x50 mm or 250x250 mm? I assume it was also about 5 mm thick?

    I actually found someone selling a 40x40x6 mm thermal pad, for this purpose. I could've just used that as is, but the thermal conductivity of copper is a couple hundred times as high as thermal pads, so it's better if you can use copper (or even aluminum) to fill most of the gap.
    Reply
  • mitch074
    bit_user said:
    How big was the "huge thermal pad"? Like 50x50 mm or 250x250 mm? I assume it was also about 5 mm thick?

    I actually found someone selling a 40x40x6 mm thermal pad, for this purpose. I could've just used that as is, but the thermal conductivity of copper is a couple hundred times as high as thermal pads, so it's better if you can use copper (or even aluminum) to fill most of the gap.
    The main problem is the conductivity - traces at the back of the socket would need insulation, which would defeat the purpose.
    Reply
  • jp7189
    bit_user said:
    Based on my humble experiments with backside cooling, I wonder if that would be a fruitful direction for him to find the next set of cooling performance enhancements:
    https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/how-much-does-cooling-the-underside-of-the-motherboard-cpu-typically-help.3844807/
    As I mention in that thread, there are particulars about my situation that yielded such large improvements. Also, I'm dumping most of the heat directly to the case, which wouldn't be a good idea with a much higher-power CPU. But, there's still a lot else you could do.

    For instance, I think someone could probably design a CPU socket that's more thermally-conductive and use it on a motherboard with a heatsink that you can mount on the motherboard backside, directly underneath the CPU. Some cases have a cut-out that could accommodate it.

    Also, he's known to work with case manufacturers, whom he could encourage to focus some airflow directly on that spot.
    https://lian-li.com/product/pc-o11-dynamic/
    That's a tough one from a general design/ manufacturing point of view because there's no standard (as far as I know) for clearance behind the motherboard, and pretty hard to get air flow back there on most cases. Maybe the cooler backplate could have attachment points for an optional modular sink.

    This also could be interesting from socket reinforcement point of view as you could torque both sides together to keep bending forces equalized and possibly improve contact.

    I was recently playing with an SP5 socket which retention frame is not strong enough to get contact on all 6096 lga pins. It relies on the heatsink pressure at specific screw torque. That has me thinking of a 12900k which had both cooling issues and memory channel performance issues (theorized it was from poor pin contact). If I had a backside sink to torque at the same time I was torquing the front side, i might have been able to get better contact on both the sink and the lga pins.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    mitch074 said:
    The main problem is the conductivity - traces at the back of the socket would need insulation, which would defeat the purpose.
    In the thread I linked, you can see my solution to this problem. First, I shaved off the leads and solder blobs poking through from the other side. Then, I painted the area with some non-conductive varnish (you sometimes see people talk about using clear fingernail polish, but I used a product specifically designed to withstand high temperatures and be non-reactive).

    Finally, I used thermal pad of the same thickness as the tallest surface-mount component being covered. This was about 0.9 mm, so I had to go up to a 1.0 mm thick thermal pad. I first tried it with 0.5 mm, because I didn't have 1.0 mm at the time. With the 0.5 mm pad, the heatsink made almost no difference, since it was barely making any contact.

    It was a lot more trouble than just using a 6 mm thermal pad and definitely voided my warranty on the motherboard. These are yet more reasons it would be better to have a motherboard specifically designed to support backside cooling.
    Reply
  • A Stoner
    The most likely culprit is that every CPU is different. Which is why Intel has such large tolerances built into their production cooling solution. Everyone complains that their solutions are not ideal, but none of those complainers take into account that intel is not hand crafting each individual component and carefully modding each piece to be a perfect fit.

    If they did that, they would only be able to sell a very few extremely expensive chips and most people would never get to own a computer, cell phone or anything else computish.


    Every peice that is put together has tolerance, every assembly adds tolerance, at the end of the day all those tolerances are added together, maybe given a fudge factor loosening tolerances for safety or ran through a process that can tighten those tolerances and ensure that 99.9% of assemblies will work. I have seen some components where performance is critical enough that a 90% scrap rate was the best the manufacturing process would allow, every component had to be nearly perfect. I have also seen where every component has to be measured, marked, and only assembled with matching component measurements. A time consuming and space consuming process where some components end up never being usable. These things only happen where the customer is willing to pay a very hefty premium.
    Reply
  • PEnns
    dos_box said:
    To fully understand the name you would need to be German. Der Bauer means something like farmer/peasant/person that owns land and has livestock or crop. It can also be used as a slightly offensive word, for someone of low intelect or someone of the working class, but often in a more mocking way and thereby often used for a standard type of guy. So it's not too offensive.

    But the twist here is the literal translation. Der Bauer literally means The Builder (which is in German a farmer). But the literal translation is when you understand the true meaning. He is building computer systems. That's the twist here in my opinion. So it's more of a word-game.
    You're right and it now makes more sense: I forgot that "Bauen" means to build in German. Mein Fehler.
    Reply