After waiting almost a month, my i9-9900K finally arrived!!
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Based on all the reviews, I already made up my mind that I would be delidding this thing. I knew that if I didn't, it would always be in the back of mind and I would eventually end up doing it anyway. I contemplated sending it off to professionals to do it, but after waiting so long for this CPU to be shipped, I really didn't want to ship it off and wait for delivery again. Plus, I trust my own workmanship more than handing it off to someone else. So, I did it myself...
Kids, don't try this at home!! It took me about 3.5 hours and lots of liquid metal. Liquid metal is used to break down the solder and soften it up. After applying the liquid metal, we have to let it sit for approx 15 minutes before we wipe it off and try to work off as much of the solder as we can. We repeat this process until all the solder is gone. I lost count of how many times I had to reapply liquid metal, but I'm guessing about 8 times.
I think I did a pretty darn good job. You can see the reflection of my iPhone camera in the last picture.
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I ordered a copper IHS which is due to arrive on Wednesday. I want to do everything possible to keep this thing as cool as possible.
As tempted as I am to install this thing, I don't want to have to redo it all again in 2 days, so no testing yet. I'll be updating this post with more details when the copper IHS arrives.
*Disclaimer: I don't recommend anyone do this!! In fact, I highly advise against doing this yourself. I take no responsibility if you try and ruin your CPU!!
Update Nov 21:
My Rockit Cool Copper IHS arrived. Here's the copper IHS and some very preliminary benchmark results:
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Temperatures are very even across all cores at idle and full load:
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