Ryzen 9 9950X3D Delidded With Clothes Iron And Fishing Line Flirts With 6GHz
Specifically, UserBhoss says that by removing the protective plate on his brand-new Ryzen 9 9950X3D, he was able to take the chip right to the line: 5,942 MHz, or just 8 MHz shy of the fused frequency limit on the Ryzen 9 9950X3D. Despite that, he says the chip remains relatively cool at 72°C under a Furmark CPU burner workload, which is very impressive. Of course, he's using a custom liquid-cooling setup, so don't try this at home, kids.
Before and after the delidding process.
For those unfamiliar, "delidding" is the process of removing the nickel-plated copper shield that sits between the silicon CPU die and the cooling apparatus. This plate is called an "integrated heat spreader" (IHS), and despite the name, it is primarily present to prevent physical stress from cracking the silicon die, as the crystalline structure of the chip is quite vulnerable to fracturing.
UserBhoss' story of how he removed the IHS from his chip is an inspiration for those who want to get stuff done without specialized tools; he delidded his Ryzen CPU with a common clothes iron and some fishing line. By snaking fishing line through the holes in the AM5 CPU's IHS, you can simply slice through the silicone glue holding the posts down, and then it's a simple matter of heating the CPU to melt the indium solder, at which point you can simply flip the CPU upside down and the IHS will fall right off.
Enthusiasts like UserBhoss remove the IHS from their chips because, contrary to what you might expect given the name, the IHS is actually a huge detriment to CPU cooling—especially in the case of AMD's Socket AM5 CPUs. You see, while the indium solder that AMD uses to attach the CPUs to the IHS has solid thermal transfer properties, it's still adding another step between the die and the cooling apparatus, which then has to use its own likely-inferior thermal interface material between the cooler and the IHS.
The only benchmark UserBhoss presented in the thread was this Fire Strike result, where his Physics score of 51631 is definitely impressive, although still some 2200 points behind the fastest Ryzen 9 9950X3D results on the 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme public benchmark database. It's definitely in the upper half of physics scores for a 9950X3D, though.
We obviously don't recommend a project like this for anyone who isn't either chasing benchmark crowns or doing it for fun. AMD CPUs are unlocked for overclocking, but there's not a lot of headroom, even with elite direct-die cooling like UserBhoss' setup. Taking one of these chips past 5950 MHz requires tedious base clock tweaking, which can cause the rest of the machine to become unstable unless you have an expensive motherboard like the ones we looked at just before Christmas. Most users are going to be better served with memory tuning, anyway.
