 Now this is a video that I have received many requests to do over the years that this practice has been, I don't want to say commonplace, but definitely something that enthusiasts have been doing, and I am finally, finally going to set aside my concerns about not really wanting people to do this, because it can definitely break your CPU and will definitely void your warranty, and I will be showing you guys how to remove the integrated heat spreader or IHS on an Intel Core i7-6700K. TunnelBear is the easy to use VPN service that lets you use the web as though you are in one of 20 different countries. Learn more and try TunnelBear for free at the link in the video description. So I think a natural question to ask is why on earth would you want to remove that metal top that protects the die of the processor? Well, the reasons have varied from year to year, so in the olden days it was so that we could actually mount the heatsink directly to the die, eliminating that small thermal resistance that is caused by the IHS itself, but in recent years, starting, I think it was particularly with Haswell, it's become more because Intel has used not the greatest thermal compound to attach the IHS to the die itself, rather than soldering them together. So what that worst thermal compound means is that your cooling performance can be affected by that goop. So what people have been doing is instead of leaving the IHS off, they've actually been going as far as to put the IHS back on and just replace the thermal compound. So that's what we're going to be doing today, and we're going to find out if it makes a difference. So to start with, we'll need a baseline. So we're going to take our 6700K, we've just got some Z170 board from MSI going on here, and other than that, this is kind of a janky test bench, and wow, I applied a lot of thermal compound, but that's okay. As long as I do it the same way the second time, then we are freaking golden. So we're just using a stock heat sink. I don't want to sit around and wait for water to warm up and reach equilibrium or whatever else, and frankly, that doesn't matter to get the results that we need, because we are looking for an improvement in temperatures, not an absolute value. Let's go ahead and get that puppy mounted. There we go, snapped in place. We're going to fire this up and then get Ida64 going to find out exactly what our baseline reading is. Benchmarking break. That was a long pizza break. It is actually the next day I got busy, I had to do WAN show, whatever. You guys don't care about my excuses, but you care about his results. And right here, we've had our test running for about 20 minutes and it's running at 70 degrees Celsius here. So that gives us a really good before scenario. Well, before we rip that baby apart. All right, so step one, we're going to pull the CPU off of our test bench here. Put that aside next. And this is for the sake of keeping my hands clean, not because it's a hazard to the CPU. We're going to go ahead and clean off that thermal compound. Don't worry, we'll be reapplying it later. One handy thing about doing this test on this CPU, one that's had thermal compound applied and cleaned off of it many times, is that we're effectively working with a pre-polished IHS. So that's another thing that people do sometimes to get slightly better performance. Now, with some previous generation CPUs, and I've encountered this before, there were surface mount components, much like you see here on the top of the package, which meant you had to be extremely careful as you were cutting in between the substrate and the IHS. But that's not the case with Skylake, making it actually surprisingly easy. So you start with the corners. I'm a good gap in that one. We will try a slightly different approach. Holy crap, all of that is tight. All right, I think I got it. I just need to get the CPU flat, make sure that I get under the metal here. Once it starts to cut, it'll cut pretty fast. There we go. See that? OK, so the adhesive is starting to come loose. We're going to do all four corners just like that. I really don't want to slice my hand open for these. That would suck. So once we've done the corners, we're going to go ahead and do the edges. Don't cut too deep. It's really not that much adhesive. All right. Whoo, rock on. So it looks like we are right side up with the notches at the top. We're going to clean the adhesive residue, the seal here, off of both sides. Then we are going to clean off that thermal compound and replace it with something else. Now, I'm just going to use some Maker gel that I have lying around. But what a lot of people are doing is they're using like that liquid metal stuff or whatever else to get the utmost in performance. And then they're actually using an adhesive, like a thermal adhesive, to glue these pieces back together. I'm just going to be going with the floating method where you don't actually glue them back together. I'm just going to be doing a Tim swap, that is thermal interface material, to find out just how bad the stock stuff is. Let's put some aftermarket grade thermal. Wow, so much fail. All right, I got to clean this again. We'll be back in a moment. Let's try that again. This time, holding down the CPU and putting less thermal compound. Let's check our orientation. There we go. And... So, let's find out if she works. Now, because I didn't glue down the IHS, I do have to be pretty careful in my installation here. I'm just going to throw that baby in there like that. So one tricky bit, as we lower the retention arm, as you can see, these wings right here sit on the integrated heat spreader, the IHS. So we're going to need to compensate by moving it a little bit further back before we tighten this baby down so that it sits in the correct position once the arms are locked, just like that. So now, we're going to reapply our thermal compound, again, going a little bit heavy, putting a little bit more than I normally would like I did last time. Put our stock heat sink back on. And let's fire up a stress test, shall we, my jabronies? That's right. I am full of dated words. See if it works. Yeah! All right. That's the first step in success when it comes to trying to improve something, not making it worse or breaking it. Boom. Let's let her run until she reaches max temperature and we will come back. So here we are, my friends, the stunning conclusion. It's hovering anywhere from about 66 to about 68 degrees. We'll call that 67. So there you have it, friends. That is ultimately why I have never really condoned the removal of integrated heat spreaders, because while you do get a couple of degrees, and if you were using a better paste, you would get a couple more degrees, what you do not get is enough for it to make any kind of significant difference to your overclock or the lifespan of your chip if you're using air or water cooling. So I don't recommend doing it because I don't feel like it is worth the risk of damaging the CPU or the voiding of the warranty of your CPU. So we've got Tesoro here with a pretty freaking awesome giveaway. We've got three of their Excalibur V2 keyboards to give away. So these are based on Kiwa's brown mechanical switches. 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