The Laminar RS1 cooler will be discontinued. A better one will replace it though
Perhaps it says something about the state of the desktop PC market: a few years ago, AMD invested in improved stock coolers for the first Ryzen processors, and then Intel did something similar for Alder Lake processors on the LGA 1700 platform. It didn’t last long though, both have since abandoned further improvements and people buying an aftermarket cooler is pretty much assumed. Now, Intel is even killing off its cheapest box cooler.
It’s not exactly the kind of thing to capture the headlines, but the media has noticed – Intel’s website announced discontinuing of the the Intel Laminar RS1 cooler. This was the lowest performance and probably the cheapest of the box coolers that came with LGA 1700 CPUs – these were new designs introduced in 2021, specifically for these CPUs. According to Intel’s website, it was discontinued on December 27, 2024. The cooler was not sold separately, so the only affected products will be the processor packages it was part of.
The Laminar RS1 was found in packages in the lowest-end CPUs, such as Celerons and Pentiums. However, this particular class of CPUs is probably on its way out in the first place, because if you’re building a desktop PC on a new desktop platform (with relatively expensive motherboards), there’s no point in putting the cheapest dual-core CPUs in it, you’re probably better off buying a laptop or a mini PC.
It was a cooler with a relatively small all-aluminum (no copper core) radial heatsink and a fan that created top-down airflow. This is important for motherboards that don’t have any heatsinks on the power delivery, as the direct airflow through the heatsink then significantly reduces the temperature of the VRM modules and the entire PCB around the socket. It is therefore the preferred cooler design for the cheapest boards. At the same time, these coolers are also very low profile, so they may find justification in low-profile Mini-ITX cases, especially dual-chamber ones where the graphics card is placed vertically behind the board.
Intel Laminar RS1: What were you like?
We have also tested this cooler in detail on HWCooling, so if you are curious how usable can such a very elementary “free” solution be compared to standard cheap coolers like Endorfy (ex-SilentiumPC) Spartan 5 or Fera 5, we have the answers for you. There probably hasn’t been much other testing (in fact, it seems that quite a few reports about the cancellation of these coolers have used the photos in our review).
Regardless, what does the axing of this cooler mean in practice? Intel is apparently consolidating production to fewer cooler types. The cancellation of the Laminar RS1 type means that wherever it has been included, the next cheapest cooler type will be bundled instead. Which in this cases is Intel Laminar RM1 and that is quite good for users, as the Laminar RM1 is more efficient and advanced. While the fan is similar, the core of the heatsink is copper, in addition to the heatsink being heavier, the resulting higher thermal capacity is better at storing heat and thus doesn’t have to experience such rapid changes in fan speed (which tend to be more annoying than a constant noise levels). Details of this replacement can be found in the article linked below, as we also tested this cooler in detail:
According to Intel, the Laminar RS1 cooler was only included with the Pentium G7400 and Celeron G6900 processors, which were the cheapest processors for the LGA 1700 platform with only two cores. These SKUs probably don’t sell much anymore (for example, the German store MindFactory says it has sold less than five hundred of them in total since 2022).
If you buy one of these processors in a boxed package in the future, it may already come with the better Laminar RM1 cooler. Not necessarily, though, as you may receive old stock packaged before the change – it’s a question of how many new packages of these processors are still being produced and how much old stock is in distribution. A user may find either of these coolers in the package, and it’s probably going to be pretty much random for the next few months at least. However, it seems that the newer dual-core SKU, “Intel 300” (which should replace the Pentium G7400 and probably the Celeron G6900 as well) has never been sold with the RS1 cooler, and so it’s the Laminar RM1 that will always be shipped with it.
Perhaps more significantly, the discontinuation of the Laminar RS1 cooler is something that will be carried over to the next generation Arrow Lake processors for the LGA 1851 platform. So the new 65W models that Intel is now releasing will always have at least the Laminar RM1 with the copper core in the package. True, it’s also possible that there will never even be equivalents of processors like the Celeron G6900 and Pentium G7400 (and Intel 300) on the LGA 1851 platform, and the CPU offerings will always start off with a higher performance level with more cores, but also higher power consumption and price (i.e. Core i3 or Core Ultra 3 now).
Source: Intel, via: Videocardz
English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš
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