Intel includes a free cooler with many of its chips. Most of their non-K and F variants almost always come with a stock cooler. These coolers will let you get going for quite some time until you decide to upgrade to a much more capable aftermarket solution. Although some of Intel’s designs have been called “horrible”, let us check out all of the thermal designs the company has come up with.
What are the Intel Stock Coolers?
Intel has come with several stock coolers over the years. This includes the small heatsink with an 80mm fan on top of it. These coolers come with the part number “E97379”, and were included with several Core i3, Core i5, select Core i7, Pentium, and Celeron processors for quite some time. These coolers do not perform well and have been widely regarded as the worst you can get from the company when it comes to cooling solutions.
The E97379 cooler was manufactured by Foxconn and has been ditched by Intel for quite some time now.
Intel came up with a more capable design with their 10th generation “Comet Lake” processors. These coolers looked much better compared to the original cooler from several years ago and had more heatsink mass for optimal thermal performance. These coolers had the part number TS15A. They were cylindrical air coolers, much like the E97379 cooler, but were much heavier. The included fan was upgraded to a better performing model, and the cooler was painted full black to make them look stealthier.
With 12th generation Alder Lake, Intel has shifted to their Laminar coolers. This lineup features the first Intel cooler to come with any form of lighting. The RH1 cooler, that comes bundled with the Core i9-12900 and the Core i9-12900F has a blue accent lighting around its rims. The other newer design, the RH1, comes bundled with several cheaper Core i3, Core i5, and select Core i7 chips. This cooler misses out on any form of lighting and is a turned version of the RH1.
Intel has been appraised for revamping its stock coolers, which received a lot of backlash over the years. These newer coolers perform much better than the older solutions which reached their TjMax values (the maximum temperatures a processor is rated for by the manufacturer) within seconds of applying full load.