Following up on his AMD Ryzen delidding adventure that we brought to your attention last week, today Roman ‘der8auer’ Hartung has just posted a video where he investigates the relative performance benefits of delidding a Ryzen X1800 chip, and using liquid metal to directly mount a CPU cooler. Would we see improved thermals?

Just as a quick recap, last week Roman showed us how it was possible to successfully delid a new AMD R7 1800X processor using razors, knives and a heat block. Once delidded the next job for Roman is to cleaned it up and remove the remaining indium solder from the CPU core. This can be done by simply scratching the surface of the core with a sharp blade. As he explains, the silicon is actually harder than the blade so unwanted scratches should be easy to avoid. Roman also removed the residual glue from the rest of the die, because… why not?

Once the surface of the CPU core is clean enough to offer a solid contact, we can then mount the cooler, which in this case a Raijintek Erebos cooler that just happens to have an ideal sized contact surface. First he applies liquid metal directly to both the base of cooler and the CPU core. The liquid metal of choice is Thermal Grizzly’s Conductonaut thermal compound. After cleaning both CPU core and cooler contact surfaces using the provided cleaning pads, the liquid metal is applied, the cooler is mounted and it’s time do some thermal comparison testing.

If you want to find out just how well AMD’s new Ryzen processors react under full load when using a delidded chip with liquid metal, I suggest you watch the video here on the der8auer YouTube channel.