The delidding service wouldn't have made sense back then - the whole phenomenon arose only a few years ago when Intel changed the TIM material to something substantially worse than what you could get on the market.
It's still not clear to me why they did that.
But in any case, suddenly the thermal performance of Intel CPUs dropped significantly, which gave rise to the de-lidding phenomenon.
Now that Intel has switched back to a better TIM the era necessarily is over.
10-15 years ago folks did more overclocking but there wasn't really a need to de-lid, it was more about heat dissipation via elaborate cooling setups than messing with the chip package itself.
There is still some performance gains to be had by removing the IHS and placing the cold plate of your cooler straight on the die (and even crazy shit like lapping the die), but yeah, the major reason was intel's bad paste under the ihs.
It's still not clear to me why they did that.
But in any case, suddenly the thermal performance of Intel CPUs dropped significantly, which gave rise to the de-lidding phenomenon.
Now that Intel has switched back to a better TIM the era necessarily is over.
10-15 years ago folks did more overclocking but there wasn't really a need to de-lid, it was more about heat dissipation via elaborate cooling setups than messing with the chip package itself.