One of the largest complaints enthusiast system builders have had with Intel CPUs of the extreme variety in recent years has been their use of poor-quality thermal compound under the integrated heatspreader (IHS). That lead to higher than necessary temperatures when overclocked and many people resorted to the process of delidding the CPU and adding higher quality liquid metal compounds.
That won't be necessary with the Core i9-9900K though, as Intel has listened and it's been confirmed as using a soldered CPU die with a gold plated IHS for maximum conductivity with the indium solder heat transfer medium.
Pictured by XFastest on Facebook, the chip has been delidded to reveal the gold plating and the solder at its heart, thereby potentially making the Core i9-9900K the best extreme edition CPU Intel has ever released. Even if it runs hot, it should be possible to whip that heat away from it using adequate cooling, rather than having to resort to brutalizing the CPU (and voiding its warranty) just to make its temperatures adequate.
Better yet, they claim the same is true of the 9700K and 9600K, meaning that enthusiasts will really be able to go to town on the new-generation CPUs when they arrive in the coming weeks. Considering the 9900K is already able to hit 5GHz on two cores at stock speeds, we wouldn't be surprised if we see some 5GHz all-core overclocks in the very near future and potentially far higher on just one or two cores, as the chip seems to hold lots of potential for extreme clock speeds.
