Naked 9900k

[lsevald]

I know, pics or it didn't happen. But I removed the IHS on my 9900k today on my rusty old vice, scraped off the solder of the die, and sanded it a little bit to make it smoother (still pretty ugly). I have an old EK Spremacy (non Evo) water block with a Precise Mount for Naked Haswell CPU's I decided to try again on this i9. I also cut out a shim from and old access card that measured to be a tiny bit thinner than the die, placed it on the CPU, put on some Conductonaut liquid metal and torqued down the water block carefully. Quite scary as the pressure seemed pretty high. This Precise Mount is meant for a slightly thinner Haswell die, but the springs have been compressed on my old CPU for ~6 years, so I figured it would be fine. So now the 9900k is held down only from the pressure of the water block. Anyway, to the point. Before all this I tuned my system for max temps (as a quick test for myself), and it would thermal throttle within 6 minutes at these settings, so I ran a quick Prime95 small FFT 10k run for 5min and saved a snapshot before and after, of all my HWiNFO readings, in case anyone is interested

 

[Vayra86]

Pretty nice temps for 1.36V! What did you get prior to the striptease?

 

[lsevald]

Thanks! Max stable OC? Not really sure, but 5GHz was a stretch, not with temps I could live with anyway, leading me to this experiment. Now that the chip runs ~18°C cooler, I hope I also can lower Vcore a little to gain even better temps. I aim to run it at 5GHz 24/7, and maybe have some fun playing with it at higher speeds if it will allow it. I will update the thread when I know more. Right now I'm just happy it survived the brutality

 

[Vario]

Nice results and thank you for sharing the info. You have a lot of guts to do this.

One thing I have read is that the IMC on delidded 3rd and 4th gen i7 would fail from bare die pressure, hope that doesn't happen to your 9900K.

 

[TheMadDutchDude]

With a vice? You’re a nutter! That has been proven to be the most risky way with the thinner chips.

 

[lsevald]

Yeah, it was a bit nerve wrecking. BTW the 9900 have a thicker PCB like the Haswell, I wouldn't to this to a Skylake

EDIT: someone else delidding with a vice, at 7min20s:

Nice results and thank you for sharing the info. You have a lot of guts to do this.

One thing I have read is that the IMC on delidded 3rd and 4th gen i7 would fail from bare die pressure, hope that doesn't happen to your 9900K.

lol yeah, I'm sure all kinds of bad stuff still can happen to it. My biggest worry now is the flatness of the die after the scraping and sanding. I rushed a little to see if it still was alive. Though I ran my old 4770k haswell like this for over 6 years, only issue being the PCB bending slightly from the pressure of all the pins, and I had issues with a SATA port dropping out from time to time (within the last year). Solved by adding a shim and some spacer under the springs to add pressure, and it ran fine again.

EDIT2:

This will keep me warm next winter. The dreaded P95 Small FFT test with AVX enabled and max L1/2/3 for max heat. I guess, with an 2x AVX offset I could maybe get away with 5.2 non AVX and 5.0 AVX. I kinda like running it without an offset though. This is still with most stuff on Auto in BIOS, I haven't touched power limits or C states or anything like that. I tried to follow a few guides, but this Gigabyte BIOS (z390 Aorus Pro) is finicky to say the least, and all paths have lead me to weird issues. Anyway, buildzoid said that anything above 150Amps on the 9900k is uncoolable unless you delid. Here's 200Amps delidded:

EDIT3:

Played a bit with it today. This CPU needs a lot of Vcore, and I think going past 1.375 is where I draw the line for 24/7, all though temps are quite good (low 80's small FFT). 5.0 is max for heavy AVX loads, but I played a little bit with it at 5.1 and 5.2, and it didn't seem hopeless, but outside my comfort range. For benchmarks it is fine. I haven't really tweaked the LLC stuff, so there might be more there.

So to summerize, I gained 1-200MHz and a lot better temps. Worth it? For me, yes, computer cooling has been a passion of mine since my first cpu, a 486SX 20MHz overclocked to 33MHz, so when I decided to go for the 9900k over the new ryzen, it was mostly due to the cooling challenge. For everyone else? Not recommended