- 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 kinda 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.
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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 a 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 'em.
It's going to take this whole gamut of tools.
We have calipers. We needed to precisely measure our IHS.
Allen keys. That's actually the right one, you did good.
We got Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut.
Paper, this is just for figuring out
how close the IHS is to the die.
Silicone for resealing the IHS to the CPU.
Scraper. We gotta scrape off the old stuff.
- Lots of scrapers. - Lots of scrapers.
All the scrapers. Cotton swabs, cleaning tools.
All this Noctua stuff- - Der8auer delidding tool!
Der8auer's a cool guy, go check out his channel.
- Very cool dude. - 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 delidded a CPU before?
- Yeah.
- 'Cause I haven't.
- Well, 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 thinning 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 kinda (slurps) 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
performs 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,
'cause that way you won't accidentally lift it up
and mangle any pins.
- Oh, okay. Fair enough.
- There's a free tech tip for ya.
Everybody gets one. - Aw, 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 good. - There is a heat gun.
We're gonna give 'er some beans,
and then hopefully it'll help-
- [Linus] Are we just basically following
Roman's guide on this?
- Pretty much. - Good.
- [Colin] Yeah.
- [Linus] Now we gotta heat this puppy up I guess, eh?
- Yeah, it's set at 150-ish.
- Yeah, try 150 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.
- [Linus] What temp are we at now?
- [Colin] 190.
- That's a full half-turn that we've done there now.
- So it's an M6 screw, it's an M6x1,
so one turn is one millimeter.
I think we can just give 'er...
- Okay.
There we go.
- [Colin] Hey, look at that.
- [Linus] That actually looks like we got it off clean.
Wow, that's comin' off real easy.
- [Colin] Well, it's still warm.
It's definitely not perfect, but it's something.
- [Linus] And actually, most of the stuff on the underside
of the IHS came off pretty well too.
- [David] Is it normal that my anxiety's really high
watching you guys do this?
- Yes. - Yeah.
Okay.
That's probably off enough.
Now I just gotta remove the silicone.
Not to be confused with silicon. We need the silicon.
This CPU is super convenient to remove the silicone from
'cause 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 NLap. This is the IHS one.
- [Linus] Okay.
- [Colin] So we need the die.
And we're gonna take this little piece of Blu Tack.
So we want the Blu Tack to sit completely in this pocket.
We don't want any Blu Tack around
the actual contacting surface of the tool.
- And then what? You just like...
- Yeah, pretty much.
I brought this 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 gonna use this as our base reference surface.
And our first step is we're gonna 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...
- Yep.
- And then that tells us through these steps
how far we've gone. - Exactly.
- [Linus] Genius.
- Now we're getting into the first bar here,
which means we're approaching our 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.
- Ain't that interesting?
We're approaching 0.2 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?
Should we go to 0.3?
- More power.
Is that a cracked die?
- Wait, what?
Let's not go any farther.
- Okay.
- 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...
- (moans) This is 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?
- [Colin] Oh, yeah, got no pressure.
- Well, there's some. - There's some.
- But it's not even. Okay.
This is among the crazier things I've ever done,
but I'm gonna hold it in the socket.
I'll let you know if it's gettin' hot.
Ow!
Quick! Off, off, off, off, please!
Off!
Okay.
It's hot.
- (laughing) Did you just do that?
- What? Did I just do what?
- [Colin] Are you burned?
- What? That really hurt.
- Okay.
- So let's sand the IHS.
- But, like, okay. Mm-hmm.
- Right, because there was no heat when we tried it before.
- Yeah- - That means no contact.
- Okay.
We're gonna reduce it by the same amount.
So went two bars on that guy,
we're gonna go two bars on this guy.
- Okay.
- It's a much more even wear pattern on this guy,
but we haven't even touched the IHS.
- [Linus] Wait, yes we have.
- Have we? - Yeah, that's totally it.
- Oh!
I thought there was 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.
- [Linus] Okay.
- We're not getting any clogging of the abrasive.
- 'Cause we have water.
We keep it in LTTStore.com water bottles.
- Really?
- Yeah, you gotta go check it out. LTTStore.com.
- I'd say that's a pretty even four bars.
- [Linus] That actually looks pretty good.
- Thank you. - All right.
- Sweet. - Wow, I think we're good.
I think we're ready to go.
- [Colin] Okay.
(fan whining)
- [David] That's not a good noise.
(Colin sighs)
- What a day.
This one confirmed dead.
- Toast. (clucks)
- The second one-
- [Colin] Ah, 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.
Colin removed the IHS
without testing the before temperatures.
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-
- Yep. - 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, 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. - Number three.
- We're doing this for you.
This one has now been lapped 2 millimeters on the die-
- 0.2 millimeters.
- Excuse me, 0.2, yeah. (snorts)
- Big difference.
- The IHS has been lapped 0.4 millimeters.
We've got a bit of a bigger gap, but I told Colin
I think it's probably okay.
- By gap we mean between the IHS and the PCB.
- Yeah.
So what we're gonna do now
is we're gonna liquid metal this puppy.
We're not gonna try and do like a rando test
without it properly glued on,
so Colin's gonna glue it on with silicone.
And we are finally ready to find out if this works.
Fortunately no cracks.
- Don't wanna use too much. Less is more.
According to Linus.
Oof, this stuff reeks.
(Colin groans)
So now we should have,
if I did my job right,
perfect contact between the liquid metal.
Now we wait.
We'll do that magic wipe thing to three hours from now.
- Moment of truth.
What are you thinking?
- Well, I think my silicon job,
or 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,
Colin 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, Colin. - Hmm?
- [Linus] You can't make an omelet
without breakin' some eggs.
The goal wasn't to make an omelet, but...(chuckles)
- Contact. - Okay.
There's POST codes! That's a good sign!
It's a lot better than 00 POST code,
which means zero CPU detected.
Whoa, hey! I saw...
Yes!
(Colin chuckles)
You have to say now-
- If it's gonna be better? - if it's gonna be better.
- I think it's gonna be within margin of error.
- I didn't see how you applied the liquid metal,
but I'm gonna say you were sure to consult with Alex,
you did a great job and it's gonna be better.
- I did it exactly how you did it.
- Okay. - So as little as possible.
Just wet it down.
- Okay.
- So I ran the last bench for 12 minutes,
so that gives it two minutes to kinda acclimatize.
- And what was the average last time?
- I think it was 92, 91?
- Okay, 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 the point in the video,
even if this works it's not something
that we would recommend.
- [Colin] Not even a little.
- Okay, so our per-core temps all look-
- 34. - very normal.
- [Colin] Yeah. But they're actually really even.
They're within three degrees.
- [Linus] Well, that looks very promising.
- [Colin] Very promising.
- I'm not gonna celebrate yet.
- Yet.
We'll, I'm celebrating because it's working.
- It's not going up any more.
I think it might've 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.
Okay. So we're turboin', boys, we're turboin'!
- [Colin] Yep.
I mean, 88, 87, that's a four-degree drop
with liquid metal and a lap.
So I wonder what that would equate to in overclocking.
- Very little. Don't be a downer. (laughs)
- 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, two, four degrees better
over the time of our run.
- [Colin] Yep.
- [Linus] Huh!
- [Colin] And 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. It did work.
- And theoretically, the, ah...(laughs)
Sorry, I'm just...(laughing)
And theoretically, the flatter you lap it
and the better your contacts, 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.
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If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe you would enjoy...
Oh, how 'bout checking out our liquid metal adventure
where we put liquid metal in a phone.
That phone eventually died.
- [David] Spoiler.
- I'm fine.
Look.
- Do you need first aid?
- I'm not burned.
Yet.
Actually, this one's a little red.
- We do need to fill out a report later.
- Why?
- Because- - I'm not burned.
Look, look, see? Look.
- But even if you weren't injured it would be a near-miss.
- I mean, I could've taken my hand off it at any time.
- We're gonna fill out a report later.
(Linus sighs)