This Thursday’s trip down memory lane takes us back to a day when Roman der8auer Hartung took time out to share with us all a hardware mod for Haswell-E processors. For many of us it bordered slightly on OC madness, involving soldering directly on the CPU itself, something many if us would never dream of doing, especially on an pretty expensive HEDT processor. Here’s a sample of the guide, which was originally published back on September 29th 2014.

I was trying to find the difference between the OC-Socket and the normal LGA2011 socket. So I just took the X99-SOC Force (no OC-Socket) and the X99-SOC Force LN2 (with OC-Socket) and measured the differences between the pins. After that I soldered thin wires to the empty pins of the CPU and measured the voltages while it was running. I came across two additional voltages which are not supplied on the normal socket, but are present on the OC-Socket. However the CPU internally supplies itself with different voltages there.

The key is to get both of these to the same level and increase if you need even higher clocks. Since I have no pin-out of the OC-Socket or pin-in of the CPU itself I will name this “uncore supply voltage”.

I soldered directly on the CPU. Please only do this if you are already experienced in soldering. Otherwise it could happen that you connect more pins and kill your chip. I suggest that you cover the rest of the pins while soldering. Here at the GIGABYTE OC Lab we had some special soldering tape that is temperature resistant and doesn’t melt. No clue how this is called exactly or where you can find it but this makes the mod very easy to apply.

As always, it’s interesting to read the original post from back in the day just for the comments. Reactions vary, from ‘Wow… you’ve really gone too far’, to ‘hey thanks, I’ll go home and try that right now’. Well, not exactly, but you get the idea.