I am here with my cousin John today. He brought over his computer because
we're going to be upgrading it from the Core i7-10700k to this Core i9-10900K.
Let's go!
I'm sure it's obvious but the first thing we're
going to need to do to upgrade our CPU is remove the side panel of our case.
Just FYI, this video is simply showing the physical process of swapping one
Intel CPU for another. This video does NOT address which CPU's are compatible with
which motherboards however and it's very important you know
which CPU's work with your motherboard before you go out and buy a new CPU.
If you want to learn more about that stuff I've linked another video I made
that addresses those topics in depth in the cards and the video description.
Once you've removed your side panel you'll want to lay your
PC down on a table or something and we can now remove our CPU cooler.
There are dozens and dozens of different types of CPU coolers out there so the process to
remove your CPU cooler is probably going to be quite different than my cousins here. He first
needed to remove the fan by releasing the wire retention clips on each side of it and
luckily he has enough slack on the fan cables to simply move it out of the way.
Depending on how your CPU cooler is designed you may not need to remove the fans from your cooler
to unmount it from your CPU, however you may need to unplug the fan cable from the motherboard.
To unmount the CPU cooler my cousin is using for his CPU he had to loosen
two retention screws here. As I've already said the cooler on your CPU is most likely going to
mount very differently from this cooler so you're going to have to figure out how to remove yours.
This next little bit you see here is specific to the cooler my cousin is using
so you may not have to worry about this at all but he had to remove
these mounting brackets as well in order to swap in his new processor.
At this point we should have cleaned the thermal paste off the CPU but instead we
decided to forge on ahead and released the CPU retention cover by pushing down on this little
arm here and pulling it slightly to the side to unhook it from the little tab like this.
You can then flip the arm back, lifting the retention cover up and out of the way.
Again I would recommend cleaning the thermal paste off before doing this,
but we just just got a little ahead of ourselves.
We cleaned the CPU and CPU cooler off using some isopropyl alcohol on a paper towel
and once they were looking
"Shiny! Like a treasure from a sunken pirate wreck..."
we finally removed the CPU from the socket. When holding a CPU you want to make sure you
hold it by the edges. You never want to touch the contacts on the bottom side if you can help it.
Also if you take a look at the CPU socket on your motherboard you'll notice a bunch
of little gold pins here and you absolutely should NOT touch these pins. They are quite
delicate and if you mess them up then you're going to be buying yourself a new motherboard.
You can now go ahead and remove your new CPU from it's box making sure to hold it by the
edges like we already talked about and place it into your CPU socket. Take note of the little
gold triangle on one of the corners of the CPU. This is to help you properly align it
in the socket. On the socket itself or printed on the motherboard you should see
a corresponding triangle and you want to make sure the triangle on the CPU is aligned with
that corner of your CPU socket and then you gently place the CPU into the socket like so.
You can then flip down the retention cover making sure to hook the little tabs under
the screw here and then press the retention arm down and away from the socket a little bit so
you can hook it under the little metal arm like this, and there we are; our new CPU is installed.
"Yah!!!"
It's now time to do, in reverse, everything else we've done up to
this point. My cousin first had to put his cooler mounting brackets back in place
and then we applied some of this Corsair TM30 thermal paste to the CPU.
Link in the video description.
There are multiple different ways to apply thermal
paste and my cousin chose what is known as the pea method.
You simply place a circle of paste onto the center of the CPU that is roughly the size of a pea
and when the cooler is applied it will smoosh the paste out to
cover the entire surface of the CPU heat spreader. You'll then need to secure your
cooler back in place using whatever method your cooler uses to do that.
In my cousin's case here he just needed to tighten the two screws several turns at a time,
alternating back and forth between each screw until they were tightened down all the way.
Alternating between screws is important to prevent putting too much pressure on one
side of the CPU which can potentially damage it. Once the cooler is securely in place,
if you had to remove your fan like my cousin did you'll need to clip it back onto your heat
sink and if you needed to unplug your fan from your motherboard you'll want to plug it back in.
Before you go putting your side panel back on you'll want to hook your computer
up to power and your monitor to make sure everything is working properly.
Most of the time after swapping out a CPU your system will detect that a new CPU was installed
and it will ask you to enter your BIOS or 'Setup' to basically confirm the change but for whatever
reason my cousins computer did not do this and booted right up to Windows like normal.
This wasn't a problem... just a bit unexpected.
To make sure CPU temperatures were in the normal range we loaded up MSI Afterburner and used it's
hardware monitoring tools and it appears our upgrade is a success. The CPU is currently
sitting at around 32 degrees Celsius at the desktop which is right where it should be.