Exclusive: Sandy Bridge-E to ship without cooler (+ extreme power requirement + coldbug)

Strange news. Is Intel not confident that their own stock cooler will be able to cope with the heatload of this bad boy? Also, what's up with the extreme power consumption requirements. And coldbug drama? (ed: nah, it's already fixed in the newer silicon revisions)

I guess we'll just have to wait ...

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, it's just that they won't come in the box with the CPU. We can't really see why anyone would buy an Intel cooler over a third party cooler as not even Intel's 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, we're hearing that although the rated TDP is 130W these beasts are consuming closer to 180W and that's without even overclocking them. In fact, according to PSU design guidance we've 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 you're planning on going Sandy Bridge-E, especially if you're 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.