Ncore V1: water block for processors without a heatspreader

A unique way of on-die cooling

There’s a new speciality for fans of liquid cooling and Intel processors: a water block created for delided CPUs. You may have already thought about a liquid cooler that would be installed directly on-die. Arek Tobiszewski has designed a block for this purpose, its very base serve as a heatspreader for LGA 1151 processors.

Arek Tobiszewski’s block for cooling “naked CPUs” is called Ncore V1, and the author is now looking for support via Kickstarter. The block is manually manufactured with CNC miller, but commercial production requires the acquisition of a professional machine. Ncore V1 is in the prototype stage, and Tobiszewski already sent few samples to HardOCP and various Youtubers, such as Linus Tech Tips, to test it. It seems that HardOCP commended the product (you can see disassembled block in the article).

Ncore V1 has a copper base, an acrylic cover, and a brass top with terminals for pipes. There is also a plastic regulator which allows to control the flow. However, the most interesting part is the base. It is designed specifically for on-die cooling, and it has a sophisticated mounting system that doesn‘t require any special mechanism or mounting holes on motherboards.

The base has a shape of a heatspreader. Its bottom has protrusions that snap behind the metal bracket (which is used with LGA 1151 socket mounting systems). This holds the whole block on the processor firmly enough. Installation is very fast thanks to this trick, and the absence of a mounting socket could be an advantage in compact computers, or when the board is somewhat unusual, or by allowing better access to the power supply circuit.

The Ncore V1 prototype has a base shaped as the bottom of a heatspeader on Intel chips. It cannot be even installed on CPUs that still have their own IHS. However, this should be different for the serial version. Instead of a molded bottom, a combination of a completely flat base and a sheet metal insert will be used to fill the space between the base and the substrate (PCB) of the delided processor. This will allow to mount the block also on processors with IHS, but by using the standard mounting system. It will serve as a tool for delid (like in this video), and it will be part of Ncore V1D package. Its advantage is the control over the pressure.

The solution for fixing and on-die cooling looks pretty decent. The liquid gets closer to the chip this way (according to the author up to 20×), and one level of heat distribution is eliminated. But the question is, of course, whether we will notice any significant difference in temperatures. HardOCP, for example, managed to achieve similar cooling performance with their conventional block, but Ncore V1 is still just prototype (the final version could be improved in many aspects). If you like this unconventional solution, you can join the Kickstarter campaig, Ncore V1 comes for £ 69 and V1D (with kit) for £ 89. The manufacturer is from Britain, and the product should be ready at the end of this summer.

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