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 deleting
the CPU lapping down the integrated heat spreader lapping the silicon dye itself
to improve its flatness and thermal conductivity and putting it all back
together sam's warranty of course for our attempt we're going to use haha this
two tools from nude cnc that will
hopefully give us the precision that we need to get the performance we crave
without ruining our chip in the process
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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 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
heatsink 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 uh allen keys that's actually
the right one you did good we got thermal grizzly conductor knot paper
this is just for figuring out how close the ihs is to the die
silicon for resealing the the ihs to the CPU uh scraper we've got to scrape off
the old uh stuff lots of scrapers lots of scrapers all the scrapers cotton
swabs cleaning tools all this all this knock to a stuff there's
cool debra is a cool guy go check out his channel 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 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
deluded a CPU before yeah because 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
delitting tool to kind of slide the ihs off with a little bit of
force we actually need to soften the
solder between the dye 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 uh 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 mangle any pins oh okay fair enough
there's a free tech tip for you everybody gets oh look at that i got free ones
i even pay you to give them to you just if you think about it i see there's
a heat gun that should be there is a heat gun we're gonna give her give her some beans
and then uh hopefully it'll help are we just basically following roman's guide
on this pretty much good yeah now we gotta heat this puppy up i guess hey i'm
gonna set that to 1 50ish 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
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 okay
there we go hey look at that that actually looks like we got it off
clean wow that's coming off real easy
yeah well 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 is it normal that my anxiety is really
high watching you guys do this yes yeah okay
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 okay so we
need the die and we're going to take this little piece of blue tack so we want the
blue tac to sit completely in this pocket we don't want any blue tack
around the actual contacting surface of the tool remember what you just like
yeah pretty much so i brought this from uh
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 0.2 millimeters now we can tell from the red marks but uh
from our initial go with the 220 grit we've actually still got a little bit uh
that we haven't touched again should we go
farther go to point three more power is that a crack die
wait what let's not go any further
okay now we have a problem to solve because
we wore away part of the dye 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 giant is it
possible that because the ihs isn't contacting
the core it's not holding it down oh it's got
yeah no no pressure well there will 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 getting
hot ow quick off off off off please off
okay it's hot
did you just do that what did i just do what are you burned
what did that really hurt okay so let's sand the ihs but like okay
right because well there was no heat when we tried it before
that means no contact okay we're gonna reduce it by the same amount so we went
to 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 wait yes we have have we yeah it'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 um not really we're not at the point okay um
we're not getting any clogging of the abrasives okay because we have water we
keep it in ltteststore.com water bottles really yeah you gotta 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 okay
that's not a good noise
what a day this one confirmed dead toast
the second one oh it's over here we had a little bit of uh i had a little bit of
it get 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 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 mx
and bought yet another 99 3k we're doing
this for you this one has now been lapped two
millimeters on the die 0.2 millimeter excuse me 0.2 yup 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 going to try and do like a a a
rando test without it properly glued on so colin'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 this stuff reeks
so now we should have 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 silicon job was uh her
silicone job was a little bit uh messy we might have to clean up a little
bit so we had a little bit of silicone ooze out but uh 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 dye didn't
kill the CPU i have a pretty high degree of
confidence right now big if think of it this way colin
you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs
the goal wasn't to make an omelet
but contact okay
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 gonna be better i did it exactly how you did it okay so
as like as little as possible just like you know wet it down okay
so i ran the last bench for 12 minutes so that gives it two minutes to kind of
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 read it
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 okay so our per core
temps all look 34 very normal yeah but they're actually
really even they're within three degrees
well that looks very promising very promising
i'm not gonna 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
um what is it heat reach heat soak or
whatever like what would you call it yeah equilibrium oh we should check our
clocks oh 4.8 okay
so we're 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 an overclocking very little don't be a downer
i'm not a downer i'm a realist well data wow
so red is good bread is good this is great
so this is 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 you know closer to three degrees but
it worked it did work and theoretically
the uh sorry i'm just
and theoretically the flatter you lap it and the better your contact the more it
will work and if you win another 0.1 millimeter you might even get another
degree fraction of a degree or a degree again
not recommending it but uh
darn it roman you were right and i guess you've already got your
validation because Intel went in did exactly this on their next generation
CPU but this was fun anyway
fun
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guys enjoyed this video maybe you would enjoy uh oh how about checking out our
liquid metal adventure where we put liquid metal in a phone that phone
eventually died
i'm fine
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 gonna fill it up