Delidding Q's

[Gerard]

Waiting on my delid tool arriving for my 6700k, watched quite a few videos on it and its straightforward enough. Just wondering about the liquid metal application, seen quite a few vids where people are putting a die shaped patch of liquid metal on the inside of the IHS as well as on the die itself. Any particular reason as to why or is this the recommended method? I remember years ago some heat-sink manufacturers advised putting a small amount of paste on the heat-sink as well as the IHS but that practice seems to have gone by the wayside.

Just would have thought doing 2 applications of it would end up with too much, and as its a pain in the arse to remove i'd rather just do it once.

 

[Panos]

Waiting on my delid tool arriving for my 6700k, watched quite a few videos on it and its straightforward enough. Just wondering about the liquid metal application, seen quite a few vids where people are putting a die shaped patch of liquid metal on the inside of the IHS as well as on the die itself. Any particular reason as to why or is this the recommended method? I remember years ago some heat-sink manufacturers advised putting a small amount of paste on the heat-sink as well as the IHS but that practice seems to have gone by the wayside.

Just would have thought doing 2 applications of it would end up with too much, and as its a pain in the arse to remove i'd rather just do it once.

There are two different type liquid metals. Use the ThermalGrizzly one, is more forgiving.
Alternative use Cryonaut paste. You will see big improvements over the standard stuff.

 

[Gerard]

Already got the Coollaboratory Liquid Pro Liquid Metal here, still doesn't really explain why people are putting it on the ihs as well as the die.

 

[Aa83]

Maybe to make sure the liquid metal makes contact with both surfaces?

I did it when I carried out a delid on my 3570K, and the liquid metal doesn't spread easily (you have to push it around with a small stick to ensure full CPU coverage).

 

[beany_bot]

Can't believe Intel have made it "mandatory" to have to do this now. What a riot. AMD all the way for my next build. Expensive CPUs should not have junk thermal paste in them. they should be soldered.

 

[Gerard]

Can't believe Intel have made it "mandatory" to have to do this now. What a riot. AMD all the way for my next build. Expensive CPUs should not have junk thermal paste in them. they should be soldered.

Intel made the excuse that it was something to do with the solder deteriorating over time and developing cracks, apparently something to do with the smaller die sizes of some of their chips. Though it seems even with bigger chips like skylake x they're still using bargain basement TIM.

 

[Zeed]

Well amd is on small nm also and yet somehow all their cpus got somder.

Intel is just ******* with us..

 

[ZXSpectrum]

LOL, I love how people think that Intel, a multi billion pound company, doesn't know exactly what they are doing.

 

[Gerard]

LOL, I love how people think that Intel, a multi billion pound company, doesn't know exactly what they are doing.

We know exactly what they're doing, penny pinching.

 

[ZXSpectrum]

But are they? These CPUs are fine with a decent heatsink or aio they even overclock alright and temps stay within the thermal envelope of the CPU. If you want to have better temps or if you want to overclock past about 10-15% then you have to delid and invalidate your warranty at your own risk.

Crikey people who overclock that are the younger generation just want a cpu that they can thrash the pants off with no recourse if it dies, something for nothing generation. I am old school overclocker and remember having to drill a hole into a Athlon 1400XP to cut a wire then draw round the hole with a pencil.

People need to get a grip, I do understand that these CPUs are expensive and the current/future gen of AMD are better powerwise, cost wise and in some cases performance wise but the realism of it is that Intel are a business that sell CPUs at specific speeds, anything more than stock and you are getting more than your moneys worth. If you don't like it, then don't buy them.

 

[Burr]

The 7900x is a CPU that costs nearly £1000. There is no way that a CPU that expensive has such a tight margin of profit they can't afford to use solder as opposed to a crap thermal paste. Hell even if that was the case most folks spending that cash on a CPU likely wouldn't gripe about spending an extra 20 bucks or so on a proper solder. It's just bad decision making anyway you cut it. I understand that Intel has higher overheads considering they manufacture their own chips and have additional R&D + labour costs but this kind of 'economising' just stinks.

 

[ZXSpectrum]

But they have said its not purely based on cost, If intel soldered thousands of CPUs it would cost them bugger all, as a matter of fact it wouldn't surprise me if the tooling for manufacturing had to be changed considerably so they didn't solder. Again, at stock or 10-15% overclock as they are intended to be used they work fine with standard cooling without delid. If you want better temps and better overclocking you have to use better cooling and have to invalidate your warranty to do so.

Surely this is sensible business practice? A Nissan GTR works and drives perfectly well from the factory, you can get away with a bit of a bump in power with a remap or induction/exhaust and would probably be ok with warranty. Replace the turbos and it will perform significantly better but you have invalidated your warranty.

I am not saying that Intel are correct with this method, someone who knows a lot more than me and who gets paid more than me at Intel thinks this is acceptable so who are we to say they are wrong? What if intel released a CPU that worked perfectly well at stock, great performance with nice and low temps with whatever cooling you use but could not be overclocked at all? People would seriously moan about that. And although people go on about comparisons between AMD and Intel but I don't believe Ryzen or Threadripper will overclock to the same percentage as the Intel Core-X cpus regardless of thermals/power consumption.

 

[Burr]

"someone who knows a lot more than me and who gets paid more than me at Intel thinks this is acceptable"

Is it a case of it being acceptable or a case of thinking they can get away with it? We can talk about standard cooling but cooling a 7900x with a 260 watt out of the box power consumption is no trivial thing. This situation wouldn't be so bad (thermally) had they used a higher grade compound/solder on the chip and at roughly £1000 a pop i don't think it's unreasonable.

 

[Deleted member 66701]

Surely this is sensible business practice? A Nissan GTR works and drives perfectly well from the factory, you can get away with a bit of a bump in power with a remap or induction/exhaust and would probably be ok with warranty. Replace the turbos and it will perform significantly better but you have invalidated your warranty.

Intel using rubbish TIM on a 1k cpu would be like Nissan putting Wanli ditch finder tyres on a GTR.

What's the problem? It saves a little bit of money and most people wont use the car at a speed where better tyres would be beneficial anyway.

 

[ZXSpectrum]

Intel using rubbish TIM on a 1k cpu would be like Nissan putting Wanli ditch finder tyres on a GTR.

What's the problem? It saves a little bit of money and most people wont use the car at a speed where better tyres would be beneficial anyway.

Well not really, that analogy doesn't really compare. Putting ditch finders on the car would make it dangerous and reduce performance that is stated. The 0-60 time wouldn't be accurate as would handling etc. Its more like if Nissan researched what they require for the stock usage and they use Semi Synthetic oil when everyone else, that has an opinion the matter, prefers fully synth as it gives higher oil pressure, better longevity, and more headroom to modify and bump the power up. It still saves the company a little money and still allows the car to perform as advertised so who is in the wrong? The company that spends millions of pounds to research this or the people that have the opinion and just wants to be able to overclock the balls off the cpu and still want very cool temps and still have the ability to send the CPU back if it dies?

Don't get me wrong, I am no intel fanboy, I am having a horrendous time with them currently regarding some business issues but I can see why they have chosen to do what they have done and understand if I want to overclock significantly higher than the stock, reported, speed I would have to delid and install custom loop etc and in doing so I would invalidate my warranty

 

[Gerard]

But are they? These CPUs are fine with a decent heatsink or aio they even overclock alright and temps stay within the thermal envelope of the CPU.

I might agree if the difference was only a few degrees but people are seeing upto 30c difference. If amd can do it intel have no excuse.

 

[Burr]

"overclock significantly higher than the stock, reported, speed I would have to delid"

Actually with certain CPU's you'll have to de-lid with less than 'significantly higher' clocks. Unless you want to go super high end custom cooling but that adds a pretty penny on an otherwise already expensive chip(s). Maybe it's just me but i can't see any other reason for doing this than penny pinching. I can understand it perhaps with non-K cpu's but what's the point in putting out unlocked chips with crap compound?

 

[Gerard]

I can understand it perhaps with non-K cpu's but what's the point in putting out unlocked chips with crap compound?

Exactly, its not as if they're already making a lot of money on these chips as they've been in the position for the last lot of years where they could charge what they wanted for them, penny pinching at its finest. And as i said its not like we're seeing minimal differences between Intels bargain bucket TIM and liquid metal, its up-to 30c ffs.

 

[beany_bot]

I might agree if the difference was only a few degrees but people are seeing upto 30c difference. If amd can do it intel have no excuse.

This.
It's not like older CPUS where the gain was 5 degrees at best.

My point was only a tiny tiny percentage of extreme overclockers used to delid, to get that tiny advantage. Whereas now it's kind of "mandatory" if you are going to overclock at all, because, as you said. Most folk are seeing >20 degree improvements. Madness.

No big debate here. It's straight up penny pinching.

 

[ZXSpectrum]

But again. I can see from a business perspective why they have done it. It wouldn't surprise me if they noticed that when they introduced the shonky thermal compound they also noticed a significant reduction in returns of the CPU due to whatever faults as people could not return if they had been delidded and interpreted that as in it makes the cpu more reliable. At the end of the day the less returns they get the less replacements they have to send out and the more money they make. I would say that could be significantly higher than the savings in using the thermal compound.