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 cuz 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 of an Intel Core i76700
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description so I think a natural question to ask is why on Earth would
you want to remove that that metal top
that protects the die of the processor well the reasons have varied from uh
year to year or so in the olden days it was so that we could actually Mount the
heat sink directly to the die eliminating that small uh 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
um not the greatest thermal compound to
attach the 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 6700 100K 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 reum 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 Val you so
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 Ida 64 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 anow whatever you guys don't care about my excuses what you care about is
results and right here we've had our test running for about 20 minutes and
it's running at 70 ° C here so that gives us a really good before
scenario well before we uh rip that baby
apart all right so step one we're going to pull the CPU off of our test bench
here and put that aside next and this is
for the sake of keeping my hands clean not because it's uh 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 have a good Gap in that one we
will try a slightly different approach holy crap ho 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
that okay so the adhesive is starting to come 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
with one of 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 there's really not that much
adhesive all right woo rock on so it looks like we
our 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 the 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 GL 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 and 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
that's slots 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 is you can see these Wings right here sit on the inter gred 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°
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
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