When Jacob reviewed the Intel Core i9 14900K last week, he was not particularly impressed with the lack of improvement over the previous generation. Of course, if you're buying Intel's latest and greatest chip, like everyone else, you can accept that the chip is within safe tolerances, or, if you're concerned about case heating, you can invest in a proper AIO to bring that pesky extra temperature back into the wide world.

But if you're Youtuber der8auer, you might take the plunge. While his channel covers all kinds of hardware breakdowns and analysis, he often focuses on cooling solutions. One of the ultimate cooling solutions, and something of a dark art to most, remains the rather invasive process of "deriding."

Derriding involves removing the factory-installed heat spreader from the top of a modern CPU in order to gain direct access to the internal silicon die, either to bring coolant into direct contact with the chip or to modify the heat spreader itself.

In the case of the Core i9 14900K, der8auer was able to lower the core temperature by up to 10°C by removing the heatspreader, cleaning the surface, and replacing the solder with liquid metal. In the second half of the video, he successfully lowered it by another 2°C, adding a contact frame that distributes the pressure more evenly across the surface of the modified IHS.

No doubt these drops are impressive, but it is worth watching the entire video to see exactly how he achieves this result. This method may actually be on the easy side as far as delidations go, but it's hard not to grit your teeth when you put high-end silicone into what looks like a modern CPU torture device and watch it screw until you literally surrender.

While it is certainly interesting to watch him simplify the process, it is hard to think of deridding without flashbacks to the bad old days when terrible things could happen to the foolhardy and under-researched. Like this poor soul who forgot to melt the solder first and managed to peel the old chip clean off the die.

If you are thinking of trying to do the stripping yourself, I kindly suggest you don't. Unless you are a professional like de8auer, you will be laughing in the face of fear, tweaking your nose in horror, and probably mocking this article as you now do. His website sells tools to make this process more reliable, but I'm still not entirely convinced that this is a good idea for anyone other than extreme overclockers with money to spare.