No, but they’re pretty handy. I’m running a Thermalright on my Asus Maximus Z790 Extreme with an i9 and under full synthetic load, my package temos are never above 84° using an Asus Ryujin II 360 AIO. And it idles between 30 and 42° so I’m happy with that. Standard use and it never gets above 78°.

Its highly recommended for all LGA1700. It is a solid 10-15c temp drop.

It’s not board specific, it’s an issue with the socket while it’s not “necessary”, for the price of the ThermalRight one there really is no reason to not use one.

I didn’t with my most recent i7-13700k w/ Noctua D14. I get a bit of throttling under prime95 but not enough to matter in real use so I haven’t bothered to go back and add one since I’m lazy.

If you are just gaming its useless. Temps don’t go that high. My i7 13700kf vary rarely goes above 70C. When it does its mostly due to shader compilation that doesn’t take that long. I have an nzxt kraken x63 on it (with the lga 1700 kit). It works without any issues. My cpu is at stock settings. MCE is enabled by default so it boost to 5.4ghz on all p-cores (i don’t remember what’s the frequency on the e-cores).

For any other workloads (more intensive) i suppose it can be use full, but by how much? That’s the question.

I don’t have one on my 13700k + gigabyte z790 aorus elite.

Would I recommend one? I mean, why not. It’s cheap, I don’t know what would be the actual benefit though

You can expect something like 2.2-4.5c improvement (Hardware Canucks with a Noctua NH-D15), so it’s kind of worth a $10 frame, but at the same time you can live fine without it. Some of the frames are also way overpriced, just get a cheap one.

For those wondering, it does absolutely nothing for AM5. It’s the rectangular Intels getting bent into a slightly concave shape.

it’s $10. it will lower your temps by 8-10c. it takes five minutes to install. i don’t get why it’s such a contentious issue, people spend $200 on AIOs that do the same job as a $40 dual tower heatsink, but can’t be bothered to buy a little metal frame for $10 that will make more difference than either.

For how cheap they are, for 5-10c it’s totally worth it to me. I went with Thermalright paired with Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut extreme and an Arctic Liquid Freezer 420mm AIO. Temps 83-85c under load and 30-45c in game.

It can lower temps by about 5c. Is that necessary? If you are overclocking, water cooling or using heavy multi core workloads then sure. A contact frame can be had for $5 these days.

For gaming tho, no. Games don’t run hot enough for 5c to matter much

Necessary? No. Helpful? Yes.

Never required but I would always recommend, especially for new builds.

It’s never “necessary” but it is ALWAYS beneficial for the LGA 1700 socket. Especially for higher end CPUs like the 13700k. So just spend $10 and get it