 Intel improved the thermal performance of the Core i9-10900K by actually reducing the thickness of the CPU die itself, improving thermal transfer. But as crazy as it sounds, enthusiasts had already tried this technique on the previous generation 9900K with a degree of success. Pun intended. But, this kind of tomfoolery doesn't come without risk. I mean, I'm talking delidding the CPU, lapping down the integrated heat spreader, lapping the silicon die itself to improve its flatness and thermal conductivity, and putting it all back together. Sans warranty, of course. For our attempt, we're gonna use, ha ha, this. Two tools from NudeCNC that will hopefully give us the precision that we need to get the performance we crave without ruining our chip in the process. You know what I never ruin, though? My segues. To sponsors like Ridge Wallet. Ridge Wallet wants to redefine the wallet with its compact frame and RFID blocking plates. Check out how they can help keep your wallet bulge down and use Opricode- to save 10% and get free worldwide shipping. We get into it in more detail here, but in a nutshell, keeping heat under control makes a processor last longer and or run faster by allowing you to increase the voltage and overclock it. Now, as for why a very small reduction in thickness can help thermal transfer a lot, the reason is that silicon is much, much, much less thermally conductive than copper. So the more of our distance that we need to cover to get to our large heat dissipating heat sink can be done through copper, the better off we are. Now, let's have a look at the tools that we're going to be using today. Yeah, we got a lot of them. It's going to take this whole gamut of tools. We have calipers. We need to precisely measure our IHS. Allen keys. That's actually the right one. You did good. We got thermo grizzly conductive nut paper. This is just for figuring out how close the IHS is to the die. Silicon for resealing the IHS to the CPU scraper. We've got to scrape off the old stuff. Lots of scrapers. Lots of scrapers. All the scrapers. Cotton swabs, cleaning tools, all this all this knock to stuff. Debroward new lid and cool. Debroward is a cool guy. Go check out his channel. But first, before we can get to any of that, we need to get a baseline measurement to tell us if what we've done at the end of all of it was actually effective. What we're looking at here is our temperatures as recorded by the on CPU sensors. What we're going to do to get a baseline reading is we're going to allow it to heat up until it reaches a steady state, which it already did about 10 minutes ago. Then we're going to take five minutes of data and average it. So the ones that we are most interested in are both our hottest core as well as our CPU package temp. So both of those are sitting in the neighborhood of around 81, 82 degrees. So have you deleted a CPU before? Yeah. Because I haven't. Well, the thing is, I haven't done one of these soldered ones. So Intel has been resorting to more and more elaborate schemes to bring the temperatures of their CPUs down over the last couple of generations. And with the 10 series, of course, it was finning the die. But with the 9 series, they finally went to a soldered IHS, which means that instead of just using a delidding tool to kind of slide the IHS off with a little bit of force, we actually need to soften the solder between the die and the integrated heat spreader in order to perform that removal. That I haven't done because the solder performed so much better than the previous thermal compound that I didn't honestly really see the point. It's better to clean that off once you've got it out of the socket, because that way you won't accidentally lift it up and mingle any pins. OK, fair enough. There's a free tech tip for you. Everybody gets one. Look at that. I get free ones. I even pay you to give them to you if you think about it. I see there's a heat gun. That should be a heat gun. We're going to give her some beans and then hopefully it'll help. Are we just basically following Roman's guide on this? Pretty much. Good. Yeah. Now we've got to heat this puppy up, I guess. Hey, I said that one 50. Yeah, try one 50 to start. If I apply too much force without it being melted enough, we will break it and this video will be over. I saw a guy do it cold, but he had to really reef on it. What temp are we at now? 190. That's a full half turn that we've done there now. So it's an M6 screw, so M6 by one. So one one turn is one millimeter. I think we can just give her. OK. There we go. Look at that. That actually looks like we got it off clean. Wow, that's coming off real easy. Yeah, it's still warm. It's definitely like not perfect, but it's something. And actually, most of the stuff on the underside of the IHS came off pretty well, too. Isn't it normal that my anxiety is really high watching you guys do this? Yes. Yeah. OK. Well, that's probably off enough. Now I just got to remove the silicone. Not to be confused with silicon, we need the silicon. The CPU is super convenient to remove the silicone from because there's no surface mount components up here, so you can just go ham with a plastic razor blade here. This looks sketchy as heck, but this is actually a very safe way to do this. We are pretty darn close to this being stripped. I think we're good to go. So we need the end lamp. This is the IHS one. OK. So we need the die. And we're going to take this little piece of blu-tac. So we want the blu-tac to sit completely in this pocket. We don't want any blu-tac around the actual contacting surface of the tool. And then what you just like. Yeah, pretty much. So I brought this from from my home stash. This is a granite surface plate. It's not super high quality, but it's flat and consistent. So we're going to use this as our base reference surface. And our first step is we're going to take some 220. Did you just say 220 grit? Yeah. So our first step is we need to create our zero reference. So as we start, it won't actually be touching the die. Oh, I see. So we actually start by rubbing away the outside plastic here. Yeah. And then that tells us through these steps how far we've gone. Exactly. Genius. We're getting into the first bar here, which means we're approaching our kind of zero plane because this bar is larger than this lower bar. That means that as I'm lapping, I'm applying more force to the lower portion. It's wearing away here first. The beauty of these bars is that I can now adjust and watch from the top these bars and make sure that the lapping is going on very flat across the entire plane. I'm not tilting it onto one corner or the other. In that interesting, we're approaching point two millimeters now. We can tell from the red marks. But from our initial go with the 220 grit, we've actually still got a little bit that we haven't touched again. Should we go farther? Go to point three? More power. Is that a cracked die? Wait, what? Let's not go any further. OK. Now we have a problem to solve. Because we wore away part of the die, we need to wear away part of the outer boundary of the IHS to make sure that they're sitting right against each other. This is real. Too real, man. Train wreck. Can't look away. That ain't a good sign. Sure ain't. Is it possible that because the IHS isn't contacting the core, it's not holding it down? Oh, it's got no pressure. Well, there's some. There's some. But it's not even. OK. This is among the crazier things I've ever done, but I'm going to hold it in the socket. I'll let you know if it's getting hot. Ow! Quick! Off, off, off, off, please off. OK. It's hot. Did you just do that? What? Did I just do what? Did you burn? What? That really hurt. OK. So let's sand the IHS. But like, OK. Right. Because, well, there was no heat when we tried it before. That means no contact. OK. We're going to reduce it by the same amount. So we went two bars on that guy. We're going to two bars on this guy. OK. It's a much more even wear pattern on this guy, but we haven't even touched the IHS. Wait. Yes, we have. That's totally. Oh, I thought there's a gap right here. I can feel it. Oh, it looks like it. And there's no silicone left on it. Do you want some water on that? Not really. We're not at the point. OK. We're not getting any clogging of the abrasive. OK. Because we have water. We keep it in LTTstore.com water bottles. Really? Yeah. You got to go check it out. LTTstore.com. I'd say that's a pretty even four bars. That actually looks pretty good. Thank you. All right. Wow. I think we're good. Yeah. I think we're ready to go. OK. That's not a good bonus. What a day! This one confirmed dead. Toast. The second one. It's over here. We had a little bit of a. I had a little bit of a day. We had a moment. We had a moment. Let's call it a moment. Collin removed the IHS without testing the before temperatures. It's not a good bonus. It's not a good bonus. It's not a good bonus. It's not a good bonus. It's not a good bonus. It's fine. It's not dead. We can just put it back together. We haven't sanded anything. We just don't have a baseline. We just don't have a baseline reading. And as we discussed, you unfortunately can't take your baseline reading from one CPU and apply it to another one, because part of the whole point of this exercise is that due to the manufacturing tolerance issues around things as, as you would think precise as the die height, you get a lot of variance from one chip to another. So we went to Memex and bought yet another 9900K. We're doing this for you. This one has now been lapped two millimeters on the die. Point two millimeters. Excuse me, point two. Yeah. Big difference. The IHS has been lapped point four millimeters. We've got a bit of a bigger gap, but I told Collin, I think it's probably okay. By gap, we mean between the IHS and the PCB. Yeah. So what we're going to do now is we're going to liquid metal this puppy. We're not going to try and do like a rando test without it properly glued on. So Collin's going to glue it on with silicone. And we are finally ready to find out if this works. Fortunately, no cracks. Don't want to use too much. Less is more according to Linus. Oh, this stuff reeks. So now we should have, if I did my job right, perfect contact between liquid metal. Now we wait. We'll do that magic wipe thing to three hours from now. Moment of truth. What do you think? Well, I think my silicone job was a little bit messy. We might have to clean up a little bit. So we had a little bit of silicone ooze out. But all in all, I would actually say yes, Collin did a good job of gluing this back together. You can see we've got a little bit of a gap there, which is exactly what we would expect. And we've got what looks like an identically sized gap on the other side. As long as shaving down the die didn't kill the CPU, I have a pretty high degree of confidence right now. Big if. Think of it this way, Collin. You can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs. The goal wasn't to make an omelet, but. Contact. OK. There's postcodes. That's a good sign. It's a lot better than zero zero postcode, which means zero CPU detected. Whoa, hey, well, I saw. Yes. You have to say now. If it's going to be better. If it's going to be better. I think it's going to be within margin of error. I didn't see how you applied the liquid metal, but I'm going to say you were sure to consult with Alex. You did a great job and it's going to be better. I did it exactly how you did it. OK. As little as possible. Just like, you know, wet it down. OK. So I ran the last bench for 12 minutes, so it gives it two minutes to kind of acclimatize. And what was the average last time? I think it was 92, 91. OK. So if we're under 90, that basically tells us we did it. The system worked. Yeah, we did it, Reddit. In case it wasn't obvious by this point in the video, even if this works, it's not something that we would recommend. Not even a little. OK, so our per core temps all look very normal. Yeah, but they're actually really even. They're within three degrees. Well, that looks very promising. Very promising. I'm not going to celebrate yet. Yet. Well, I'm celebrating because it's working. It's not going up anymore. I think it might have worked. It doesn't take that long for an air cooler like this to, what is it, reach heat soak or whatever. What would you call it? Equilibrium. Oh, we should check our clocks. Oh, 4.8. OK. So we're turboing, boys. We're turboing. Yep. I mean, 88, 87, that's a four degree drop with liquid metal on a lap. So I wonder what that would equate to in overclocking. Very little. Don't be a downer. I'm not a downer. I'm a realist. Well, data. Wow. So red is good. Red is good. This is great. So this is a five degree gap here. So as expected, we are three to four degrees better over the time of our run. Yep. Huh. Yeah, and I mean, it did soak up a little bit. I mean, that's like a degree. So up here, we're probably closer to three degrees. But it worked. It did work. And theoretically, the sorry, I'm just. And theoretically, the flatter you lap it and the better your contact, the more it will work. And if you went another 0.1 millimeter, you might even get another degree, fraction of a degree or a degree. Again, not recommending it. But darn it, Roman, you were right. And I guess you've already got your validation because Intel went and did exactly this on their next generation CPU. But this was fun anyway. Fun. Speaking of fun, you're going to have fun if you check out our sponsor, Micro Center. Micro Center is open to supply your work or learn from home technology needs. The Manegear Element 3 laptop is available now for $19.99 on Amazon or $18.99 on Micro Center. It's got an Intel Core i7-10875H processor. It's got an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super, 32 gigs of DDR4 memory, a terabyte solid state drive and a 17.3 inch narrow bezel, 240 hertz display. Check out this and other Micro Center offers over at the link in the video description. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe you would enjoy... Oh, how about checking out our liquid metal adventure where we put liquid metal in a phone. That phone eventually died. Spoiler. I'm fine. Look, I'm not burned yet. Actually, this one's a little red. We do need to fill out a report later. Why? I'm not burned. Look, look. See, look. Even if you weren't injured, it would be a near miss. I mean, I could have taken my hand off it at any time. We're going to fill out a report.