Delidding
Delidding
I think I’m the last person to realize the silicon lottery has ended. I wasn’t checking their chips, but I was curious about their delidding service. I’m finally making time to update my rig (the thread is on the workbench section) and don’t need a new CPU—just a bit of overclocking prep. The chip I’m talking about is an I9-7900X that’s been running hot for a while but hasn’t reached its full temperature. Honestly, I haven’t even hit its stock performance because of thermal issues; it came from a builder and was in a 240mm AIO. Now that I’m planning a full rig refresh, I’ll boost cooling, swap out fans, and go for a more airflow-focused case. Sorry for the delay—here’s the point: as part of thermal management, I thought delidding would help. But I can’t find a trusted service in the US to do it. To be honest, my comfort level is assembling hardware and installing drivers, so any overclocking will be a bit nerve-wracking. Would anyone know a reliable delidding shop in the continental US?
Delidding chips has lost its appeal over the past couple of years due to Intel's shift to soldered IHS on all their processors. Those who still try often end up with companies that have closed or simply stopped offering the service. Most enthusiasts who pursue delidding are overclockers using secondhand parts, and they prefer saving money rather than hiring someone else. In short, if you aim to delide, it’s better to learn the process yourself or just avoid it altogether.
You might see around a 20% reduction in performance, likely because you're using an affordable generic Chinese delid tool that works with 2066. It's safe to use without risking damage, but expect limitations due to thermal issues or scaling constraints before voltage-related problems arise.
It seems like you're dealing with a 7900X motherboard from 2017 that wasn't soldered and had known issues with overheating. Investigating the situation yourself makes sense, especially since even improved cooling won't fix the poor thermal interface material. A modest temperature drop could be enough to justify the effort, but you'd rather have someone reliable handle it than risk damaging your CPU or facing a costly repair.
No, I know it's a 7900X. I'm saying how because everything made in more recent years (2-3 years ago, after 2017 when that chip came out) has soldered TIM, the places that did delid stuff have stopped doing it because it just didn't make any sense, you had to find someone with old enough hardware that didn't have soldered TIM, they wanted to overclock, and they weren't looking to save a buck (remember, it wasn't cheap to get someone like Silicon Lottery to do it for you, it was something like $70 to delid an X299 CPU). Any two of those isn't too uncommon to find (collectors, people into XOC, and people who just want to keep using their system for a bit longer), but finding someone who's all three is pretty rare. If you want to delid, I don't blame you on one of those chips, but realistically your only option is to just do it yourself. I've never personally done an X299 CPU (never got my hands on one), though on LGA 115X it was pretty easy to do with a razor blade and an hour (it's how I delidded my 7700K) and that method likely works on X299 as well. You can probably get a delid kit for X299 off AliExpress for cheap as well if you don't want to try the razor blade method. Or you can just use something like MX-4 under the IHS instead, liquid metal is the best performer (and realistically on CPUs it's not that dangerous, but it's still easy for screw up if you don't 100% know what you're doing) but basically every thermal compound is better than the stuff Intel uses out of the box and will get you better temps. A delid is pretty much necessary on one of those chips to be able to overclock it, no amount of better cooling (at ambient at least) will make up for the sub par TIM in one of those CPUs.
I’d do it for you, but I’m uninsured. You’d need to give up your legal rights if there’s any chance of physical harm stopping the CPU from working. It isn’t soldered. I could have the CPU removed in under five minutes. The last time I did that was with an i7 930 that was soldered. With direct die, I achieved 4.6GHz with that chip.
You're thinking about damaging a 7900X and switching to a much more expensive version of this older platform. That sounds confusing.