I Delidded a $5 Pentium With a Vice and Used Aluminum Foil to Make It Post

August 2022. The chip was worth about five bucks on eBay. It was a Pentium — the one that came out of my very first PC. Sentimental value: low. Experimental value: potentially high.

So I delidded it.

The Delid

No fancy delid tool. Just a vice. Lined it up, applied pressure to the side of the IHS, and popped it off. First delid I’d ever done. It worked clean.

Dropped it in the socket and immediately ran into the obvious problem: without the IHS, the cooler had nothing to make contact with. The die sits lower than the socket frame, so the heatsink was just floating above it, touching nothing.

The Fix

Mad scientist mode.

I started layering aluminum foil on top of the die — building it up sheet by sheet until the height was right. Enough to bridge the gap between the bare die and the cooler contact plate, and enough thickness to get actual mounting pressure without cracking anything.

Delidded Pentium seated in socket — bare die exposed, IHS removed, socket retention bracket open

Got the cooler seated, tightened it down carefully, and hit power.

It posted.

That’s Kind of the Whole Point

This wasn’t a performance project. The chip was $5, the board was old, and nobody needed this to work. It was purely about whether it could work — whether a delidded chip with foil shimming the gap was enough to get a stable contact and boot.

It was. Proof of concept complete.

Pentium, delidded with a vice, aluminum foil shim stack, posted on the first try. Status: it worked.