We spoke with Der8auer separately, and he spent an entire week getting his delid dialed.

That’s the point of this content, though: It’s to illustrate how much extra effort is required to really get good performance. The reason we didn’t see better performance is because we have not yet sanded down the die to be smoother, and so there are some marks from removing the solder previously. It is possible to get even bigger temperature reductions, of course, but that might be something we explore separately with die sanding. That’s an additional 4-degree drop in our Blender AVX workload. The Īfter our liquid metal application, we saw a temperature reduction from about 64.4 degrees Celsius delta T over ambient to about 60 degrees over ambient. We found that the differences didn’t amount to much: Intel’s solder was only 4-5 degrees better than good paste on average, leaving plenty of room to improve. This was to determine how much different Intel’s new Indium solder is versus a high-end Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut paste. Our typical delids use liquid metal, whereas our first delid used thermal paste. We already talked about delidding results in our review that was posted on launch day, but that was a different approach than normally. For the workload, we are using Blender to render a real image, so it is a realistic AVX workload. Note that the 8086K is not perfectly comparable, as its die size is different. We’re not going to re-read and explain everything from the review, so if you haven’t checked that and have questions, consider watching or reading our 9900K review as well.įor testing, we’re still using the Maximus XI Hero with the CPU set to the frequencies and voltages specified in the charts. We’ll talk more about this process toward the end, but let’s go over the new results. We used grit 600 sandpaper, then 1200, then 2000, then wet 2000, and ended with grit 3000 sandpaper for a polished finish. Slipping or getting to aggressive can very likely kill the CPU.Īs for the internal lapping, that can help deal with gouges that may be leftover from the Indium removal process. We just took the more barbaric approach of a knife, but this requires patience.

Although we haven’t tried it, one could theoretically use liquid metal to help dissolve some of the Indium. This isn’t like a paste where it’ll squish-out and make-up for mistakes. Liquid metal’s surface tension requires it to have an opposing surface that is also coated in liquid metal, and depth differentials could throw-off the contact and increase likelihood of air gaps between the liquid metal.

If it’s not smooth and there are chunks of Indium remaining, the CPU will almost instantly throttle when used, especially with liquid metal (like the Conductonaut we used). It is principally important that both surfaces are smooth when the delid is done. It’s not exceedingly difficult, but it’s more work than popping the CPU into a delidder and then applying liquid metal.įor this job, you’ll need to carefully remove all of the excess Indium solder from the die and the IHS. The truth of the matter is that, no matter what all of the tech reviewers – including us – will show you, it is actually a higher level of difficulty to get a delid working well on the 9900K. The task of lapping the inside of the IHS arose out of necessity. What We Did & Why: Lapping the Inside of the IHS

I9 9900k cinebench