Half of the Ryzen 9000 series have officially launched today, with reviewers receiving samples a few weeks before to get the reviews out. Content Creator Tony Yu was probably one of, if not the first to try to delid one of these brand-new chips. And as it turns out it didn’t go very well. This extreme overclocker’s attempt at delidding the new Zen 5 CPU resulted in a cracked and broken CPU.
This Zen 5 chip can be seen with the still very whacky-to-me IHS removed with a mess of solder on the base side where the dies are. On the chip side, you can see an absolute disaster, there’s not supposed to be a huge gaping crack down the side of the I/O Die.
This is what can happen during a ‘delidding’ process, and it should only be done if you have essentially already written off the CPU in your mind. It’s likely that Tony received this CPU as part of the review samples going around, so we can’t imagine AMD is very happy with him right now. Recently, Gamers Nexus reviewed the 9700X, stating that the 9600X was too unstable even to make a review on, so maybe this was also the case here. Might as well open it up if the CPU didn’t work in the first place.
The difficulty of the Deliding process can vary based on the species of CPU you’re scalping, removing the integrated heat spreader off of any semiconductor chip can be risky though, but some (like Intel chips) are easier than others.
The reason for the failure is likely due to AMD using solder to attach the IHS to the CPU dies, because solder makes for a better thermal transfer compound than thermal compound does. Interesting to think about but solder melts very easily, so it does make sense that it is a really good conductor of heat. The failure likely is that the bond between solder and metal is far, far stronger than the bond that a thermal compound makes.
There doesn’t even seem to be a reason to delid the 9000 series, as they have been proven to be such efficient chips. Such is the nature of an extreme overclocker.
