Gadgetory

Intel's x86 architecture was made so popular by the original IBM PC that 40 years later 40 years after the original 8086 CPU we are still using it so it's pretty important but when team blue decided to celebrate that anniversary with what basically amounted to an up clocked and upmarket core i7 8700 K we were a little underwhelmed I mean I have been asking Intel for years to do something truly special with their really high-end stuff and like look at this it's got the same cores the same IHS the same green substrate the same non soldered thermal interface material so we figured if Intel's not gonna do it then we're gonna do it we're gonna build the 8086 K that should have been and we're gonna do it in style speaking of doing it in style madrenas coffee Wow look how great that can looks madrenas blend specialty cold brew coffee Zin two 16-ounce grab-and-go cans for everyone's convenience check them out and use offer code Linus to save 40% at the link below today before we could do anything we needed to make sure that our CPU was performing the way that we would expect because we'll be comparing our end results later on to make sure that we didn't make it worse with that out of the way it's time to shut it all down pull the CPU and deal it it we've deal it had plenty of processors before but this time will be slightly different because now we need to lap it which for the uninitiated means removing the upper layer of nickel plating and leaving behind a smooth flat copper finish for us to play with two hours and two bloodied thumbs later Anthony eased off the manual work to finalize the design that will be edging into the top of the IHS we weren't sure at this stage whether or not the resolution would be too fine to etch into the size of a CPU but once we finished with the design we decided it was time to practice our gold plating with a dead CPU extra hours of lapping not shown so this is our lap teeth spreader I've got that exposed copper going on there I guess the smoother this is to start with the less gold we would have to waste applying it thicker and then polishing it down right right okay what we need to do is we need to wrap this yes around like this so that there's no metal actually showing it is this that's to absorb the liquid okay and none can be exposed and all the exposed but don't do it too tightly because the fluid needs to be able to flow with the electricity okay so this hooked is just gonna hold our our piece then no oh we're gonna brush it on or we brush it on yeah so our gold solution is actually clear dip that in there that gauze will actually clear up and once it's fully soaked you just brush the gold on yep they say to do it as if you're petting a cat after a while we should start to see some yellowing so it paints on a pretty thin layer yeah yeah it's basically microscopic oh I'm just starting to yellow a little bit it's really subtle Wow it's hard to it's hard to tell cuz it happens so slowly brush plating really wasn't what I was expecting when I had said hey guys let's make a gold-plated CPU largely because I had actually never heard of it but it ended up working out great check out the difference from the start now applying conformal coating to the PCB or substrate that's going to be nearby anywhere you're gonna be using liquid metals pretty standard operating procedure so we've already done that all over the green part here but the unusual thing we're doing today is we're gonna Plasti Dip a cpu so we're gonna go ahead and cover up the die and that's just for thermal performance reasons we wouldn't actually be harming it by classy tipping it then we're gonna go hammer oh lordy I put that on a little thick good oh boy oh boy the adhesion to the conformal coating is not ideal and I wish I'd gone on a little lighter but what's done is done now so now that we've got a smooth gold-plated IHS you're probably thinking to yourself well hey almost home-free right throw it in your guys's laser cutting slash engraving machine I mean wow those test runs of the of the pattern look great and boom it's off to the races but unfortunately because we don't have like a solid-state laser or what's what's the other one my bro fiber optic laser and for that matter like almost no one around here does cuz they're really expensive we're gonna need a different plan so we're gonna do it the old-fashioned way it's off to the jewelry store we're gonna engrave it that sounds like company's gonna engrave it I'll find someone hurt he knows a guy while Anthony gets our practice piece over to the engraver it's time to gold plate our real IHS so he took a turn with the electroplating kit when he got back after a bit of Polish and some touch-ups here and there and a second trip to the jeweler I think the end result speaks for itself so something we didn't account for in the original plan was the extra thickness that would be added by the Plasti Dip so a quick extra step we had to add was just sanding down the bottom of the IHS a little bit to account for that clearance because it's the glue that we're gonna apply around the edges when we reel it it that's gonna hold it on so that's sort of important so now all that's left is to peel this off exposing our die liquid metal to die no no no no no and that's more like it it's so chilly in here that it's not staying very liquidy I just want to err on the side of a lighter rather than a heavier application here I think that's pretty close actually let's put our CPU back together oh that was spot-on no one after like that that should be tight enough okay all right we'll be back this is it this is we think the limited edition cpu intel should have made black PCB gold spreader custom engraving and to make sure it still works probably a good idea cool if you're into that sort of thing anyway so we want to enable XMP and disable multi-core enhancement well it looks like yes step 10 cool 27 degrees looks good oh cool so the IHS is lapped we've got liquid metal on it theoretically it should be better than before in terms of its temperatures but we also engraved it and we don't know if that's gonna cause micro ridges around the engraving or anything like that there's a very good chance it could and we applied a new layer of metal on top of it that obviously wasn't lapped so we don't know exactly how flat it is so we're hoping for the best but we won't know for sure until we actually test it we're using an air cooler so we don't have to wait around for the coolant to reach equilibrium max so 64 to 71 degrees does that start 67 to 71 does that sound reasonable yes look at that we had a spike and then it settled in yeah because that was in turbo no it's no longer boy if you look up here oh okay but was that the same way you tested it last time did you take your temps praetor ARP with turbo or without without without so oh so then we're killing it oh yeah we're like 62 degrees yeah we're not finished our before and after testing yet though now the CPUs thermals were not good enough before we liquid metal did to really do any overclocking so all we could do was turn on multi-core enhancement and then where's this guy and then max out these power limits here so 4095 here one place over here and 395 here so now we can have a look at what kind of a performance improvement we can get now that our true limited edition very limited edition one-of-a-kind CPU can be fully unfettered so let's hit it again we're running at 4.30 4.3 68 degrees on the hottest core Wow dang that max turbo though we could just run that all day as it turned out we didn't gain much in gaming but when it came to blender we saw a tangible improvement in performance thanks to our better thermals which were much better than stock when we removed the power limit we hit the same temperature but our gold-plated CPU remained at 5 gigahertz on all cores with a Noctua Nhu 12s with a beefier cooler we could do 5 gigahertz all day long so even after running for 10 minutes our thermal results are still looking great which means the last before and after is a good old-fashioned Cinebench run while we wait for that to go I should probably say like in fairness to Intel there's a lot of stuff that you have to change in the manufacturing pipeline in order to do something like gold plate a heat spreader like the kind of validation a company like this does I mean let alone turning the substrate black they'd have to do all kinds of materials testing and science and stuff in order to do that so I'm not giving them too hard of a time but I also do think they could do better and that's the purpose of this video is hey come on guys if we can do it then I think a multi-billion dollar company can probably do it too so our final result is 1390 Sattar 1086 so wearable we have lost no performance we have better thermal results and presumably we'd be able to overclock this damn thing now probably at this point for kanae speaking of things that are freaking 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