AMD Ryzen 7 8700G delid turns mid-tier CPU into peppy powerhouse with liquid metal

Thanks to the integrated AMD Radeon 780M iGPU — which recently saw 61% performance gains in an overclock — and eight Zen 4 cores, the AMD Ryzen 7 8700G is a strong contender for anyone looking to get into gaming on a budget while having room to grow. Never one to back down from a challenge, though, Roman Hartung, aka Der8auer on YouTube, has torn into AMD's budget powerhouse in an attempt to eke out every last drop of performance it can provide — to tremendous effect, no less.

Before the delidding process, the CPU in question was hitting in the neighbourhood of 4,625–4,750 MHz across its eight CPU cores during an all-core Cinebench R23 test run. During the base-line test before going under the knife, so to speak, the Ryzen 7 8700G (curr. $329.99 on Amazon) achieved a score of 16,535 points.

By overclocking the CPU with AMD's Precision Boost Overdrive, the overclocker was able to boost clocks to 4,850 MHz at the cost of almost 20 W of additional CPU package power. The results of the overclocking effort netted just 385 points in Cinebench — a virtually-negligible improvement. Manually overclocking the CPU further boosted performance to achieve a Cinebench score of 17,947 points, albeit with CPU temperatures in the region of 92 °C.

After preliminary testing, the overclocker got into delidding the Ryzen 7 8700G, which is an involved process that's been made easier on the 8700G by the lack of a soldered thermal interface material. The results, however, are impressive. By simply replacing the CPU's thermal interface material with a higher-performance Thermal Grizzly KryoSheet thermal pad (curr. $29.08 on Amazon), the average CPU temperature during a stress test dropped by around 10 °C.

Taking things to the next level with a manual overclock to 5 GHz, the delidding process and new TIM shave about 15 °C off the average CPU temperature in Cinebench R23. However, it's when Der8auer whips out Thermal Grizzly's Conductonaut Extreme liquid metal thermal interface material (curr. $12.39 on Amazon) when things get interesting.

The liquid metal manages to bring temperatures on the AMD Ryzen 7 8700G down by yet another almost 10 degrees to around 57 °C in complete stock form. Enabling AMD's Precision Boost Overdrive brings temperatures up to around 68 °C when running Cinebench, while the manual 5 GHz overclock now nets temperatures of around 62–64 °C — compared to the 85 °C before the delid.

Making use of the extra overclocking headroom granted by the Conductonaut Extreme liquid metal, Hartung was able to achieve a stable overclock of 5.3 GHz on all eight CPU cores, which resulted in CPU core temperatures close to 80 °C and a Cinebench R23 score of 20,022. Compared to the stock numbers, that's a 21% performance increase in the Cinebench R23 score, although Hartung quotes the actual performance increase as "15–17%. "