Ladies and gentlemen, we officially have our first casualty from AMD’s Ryzen 9000 Series and with it, the first death of a Zen 5 CPU. The cause of death? A botched delidding process by the extreme overclocker Tony Yu.
Yu is one of the rare few overclockers that was given the rare privilege to delid one of the latest Zen 5-based Ryzen 9000 Series processors. Unfortunately, things didn’t go as planned and instead of a delidded and intact chip, Yu was left with a CPU with a broken and ripped out die.
The images posted on Yu’s official Bilibili account shows the extent of the damage; you can actually see that outline of where the top layer of the Ryzen 9000 Series die broke off, exposing the bottom layer of the lithography. For folks like this writer, it genuinely hurts yours truly to look at the damage. Worst, it doesn’t get any easier to keep staring at it.
Nevertheless, Yu’s failure highlights the dangers of delidding CPUs, in a high-risk, high-yield sort of way. Delidding is extremely dangerous process that, as seen in the picture, can lead to a cracked die underneath the Integrated Heat Spreader (IHS). Sometimes, contact between the IHS and die is facilitated via soldering, instead of using thermal paste. If the latter is used, then removing the IHS is relatively easier than the former.
Reviews are of the Ryzen 9000 Series are already coming out – our review of the Ryzen 7 9700X is on the way, so look forward to it – with both the 9700X and 9600X already available starting today. The Ryzen 9 9950X and 9900X will be available from 15 August next week.
(Source: Bilibili, Tom’s Hardware)
