MogRules

Realistically about an hour I would say, with the cleaning and everything. Now that I have done it I can probably do it a lot quicker. I was taking my time to make sure I wasn't being overly aggressive with anything and separating my parts and screws for easy replacement. I had to take it back apart a second time due to some misplaced screws, pay attention to the gold vs black screw placement. The board marks them, but I misplaced two gold ones so ended up with black ones on the top of the daughter board, which wasn't right, and had to take it apart again to fix that. I honestly don't think this is any more difficult to take apart them the Cassini lineup, or even the 51m, there are just as many parts / pieces IMO. DJUnreal did a teardown and tested it, it causes the LM and the traditional paste to separate and makes a hell of a mess apparently. It breaks whatever is holding them together down and they just make a giant mess to clean up. I didn't want to even try it, so just a microfiber to wipe it off, and it comes off pretty easily for sure. Nice! I honestly have no ambition to be the best, I just want it to run well. I would be happy with the performance I have now, but I still think I can maybe do a little better on the temps. My core differentials are WAY better then they were, I used to have the dreaded 15c+ spread, that is luckily no more. Keep in mind when you turn it back on it will 100% restart a few times and then get mad and say the time is wrong when it finally comes back. Just wait for it to do it's thing, but I am sure you have seen this in the past with previous models, so it shouldn't be a surprise for you.

Starting to have a love hate relationship with this thing I tell you.... No idea what's going on here, but the 18k is the latest. So my CPU is up but my GPU is down ? even though it's running at 62c lol...I got nothing. I am going to reset the BIOS and check a few other things as well. I did move back to CC 6.0 as I was talking with Alienware and had some issues trying to use TCC Offset, and it was determine that version 5 may cause issues. I am going to roll that back, rest and see if that does anything. EDIT: Back to where I was before anyways. I am going to play some damn games on this thing haha...I have been doing nothing but tests since I got it.

I did not, I just cleaned it really well with cloths and Q-tips. The die were both shiny and clean. The only spots I couldn't get it all out of was in the crevices around the GPU die. I kind of want to try a traditional paste of some sort, but I want to see what this thing is capable of now that I am not throttling instantly on the CPU and losing a ton of performance. I know trying to use alcohol of ANY sort is a def nono, so I just went off the video that DJunreal did on his X17, which was just pretty much wiping it off carefully. I have to say, it wiped off pretty easily, much easier then traditional pastes that dry on there and have to be dissolved in many cases.

Whelp, I am on the right track at least. 30306 on R23 now with a -100 mv undervolt. I took the plunge...someone had to go first I guess. The paste job was not looking all too good, IMO you can see where parts of the CPU die just had garbage coverage, like there was just nothing there to work with on a large spot. Repasted with Conductonaut for now, but I need to possibly add more, I don't use this stuff much and haven't for a long time. I used every last scrap I had left. My CPU power draw went WAY up. It was peaking at 170w and eventually dropped back to 140w and settled there. At 170w it was def hitting 100c on multiple P cores but once the wattage dropped back to 140w it was sitting in the 80-90c range comfortably. I would so far call it a success, and I will likely add a bit more when I get more Conductonaut in as well.

Yes, 1.6.0. I agree, likely thermal throttling hard. I will likely try a repaste soonish. I have seen more then a few posts from people who repasted with normal paste and it actually improved their temps, even from Dell's LM.

Very minimal improvement overall, probably within margin of error. The core clocks did seem to stay a little higher though. Worth noting I did roll back to CC version 5, 6 was driving me insane with the auto theme / profile switching and long LONG load times.

This is about where I am stuck currently. Undervolting actually makes things worse 😒 CPU wattage never seems to pass about 117w, and I have three p cores constantly hitting 100c under synthetic loads. But what really gets me is I see others posting stock results much higher. Presumably just heavy thermal throttle.

Really interested to see how people's repaste efforts go with this and what paste they use etc. All my P cores are hitting 100c lol.