Intel May Unveil New Cooling With Alder Lake CPUs

A Twitter post suggests that a new range of stock fans to cool Intel's 12th-gen CPUs may be in the pipeline.

User Ayxerious shared an image showing alleged prototypes of fans for the Alder Lake-S CPUs, models aimed at the desktop segment.

If the leak proves to be true, we will be dealing with a fundamental change in Intel's policy on stock cooling bundled with the processors. Recall that boxed versions of 11th gen Rocket Lake-S came with cooling that hasn't fundamentally changed in over a decade.

Alleged Laminar fan prototypes. Source: @ayxerious/Twitter

By comparison, AMD has offered five different stock fans (with or without RGB) since the launch of Zen 2-based Ryzen series.

Reference cooling solutions for Ryzen processors. Source: AMD

The situation may change if the range of fans visible in the picture will indeed be manufactured: provisionally named Laminar RH1 (i9), RM1 (i7, i5, i3) and RS1 (Pentium, Celeron). Two of them are supposed to have led backlighting (RH1, RM1), but it is not known if any of them will offer RGB.

There is also a question regarding the fans' supported TDP. The published screenshot says that the cooler is designed for processors in the 65W TDP segment. It seems that this may be the case for the weakest versions of the Alder Lake-S CPUs; most i9s, i7s, and i5s are supposed to be in the 125W and 165W TDP segments.