IHS was removed from the 7980XE with Der8auer’s Delid Die Mate X. Silicon was then scraped off using a credit card and polished to a shine with paper towel. This was particularly time consuming as it was difficult to clean around the exposed contacts on the PCB. The contacts were then covered with liquid electrical tape. This is not usually necessary however, direct die cooling requires a generous amount of liquid metal to achieve good contact with the heatsink. After about three months use, some corrosion occurred to the die of the 7980XE. You can see very slight imperfections which I assumed was from impurities in the die.