Exclusive Sandy Bridge-E to ship without cooler

How many of you rely on aftermarket coolers for your CPU? We dont know anyone that thinks Intels stock coolers are great and when details reached us of Intel not shipping coolers with its upcoming Sandy Bridge-E processors we were at first surprised, but considering the target market it makes a lot of sense.

The upcoming Core i7 processor from Intel, the 3820, 3930K and the 3960X will all ship without a cooler in the box. That said, Intel has decided to offer own brand coolers for the platform, its just that they wont come in the box with the CPU. We cant really see why anyone would buy an Intel cooler over a third party cooler as not even Intels high-end heatpipe cooler for its current and past Extreme Edition models were all that great. Some of the third party cooler makers will have products ready at launch, but worst case scenario, we might be looking at a cooler shortage at launch.

On top of this, were hearing that although the rated TDP is 130W these beasts are consuming closer to 180W and thats without even overclocking them. In fact, according to PSU design guidance weve seen, Intel is telling power supply makers to make sure their Sandy Bridge-E PSUs can cope with a peak current of 23A on the 12V2 rail and based on an 80 percent or better efficiency rating of the PSU.

As such it might be a very good idea to invest in a water cooling kit if youre planning on going Sandy Bridge-E, especially if youre planning on pushing the boat out and overclock. The bad news for LN2 crowd is that at least early samples of Sandy Bridge-E is suffering from the dreaded cold bug, although this might have been fixed in later revisions of the processor.

On top of all that it looks like the quad core 3820 model has been delayed and will arrive later than the 3930K and 3960X, although we dont know exactly when Intel intends to release it to the market. Intel is currently working on the C1 stepping and this should be what ships in the end unless there are any unforeseen issues with the latest stepping. So in other words, good news all around…