Check out these awesome homemade chip delidding images

Shawn Knight

Posts: 15,240   +192
Staff member

We’ve all seen die shots of various hardware components over the years but as of late, it’s a practice that many companies have been shying away from. Instead, we get PowerPoint slides that, while informative in their own right, don’t offer up nearly as many details to the trained eye.

That’s why, when The Tech Report spotted a photographer on Flickr that is systematically dismantling hardware and snapping macro shots of what’s hidden under the caps and heatspreaders of various chips, it drew our attention.

The photographer, who goes by the handle Fritzchens Fritz, has uploaded more than 450 photos to the “Die Shots” album. It’s not all old, junky hardware as you might suspect – the most recent uploads are of AMD’s Polaris 10 chip from a Radeon RX 470 graphics card.

Other chips delidded include a GTX 580, an old AMD Duron, a GTX Titan and a Riva 128ZX, just to name a few. That’s quite a wide range of hardware for sure and as The Tech Report notes, you could easily spend hours combing through everything.

What’s really neat is that the author posts the images in chronological order from removing the chip off the board to getting down inside it. It’s also cool that the user is willing to sacrifice new silicon for our enjoyment. Hopefully for the sake of his wallet, he is sourcing dead hardware from eBay or something. I only wish I had thought to do this before getting rid of some old hardware recently.

Fritzchens Fritz also has a couple of other albums dedicated to various hardware. As a photography enthusiast, I can also appreciate his stunning infrared gallery as well as the macro shots of insects. Very impressive.

All images courtesy Fritzchens Fritz, Flickr

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This is cool! I do like a bit of macro photography. I've seen many a mini beast, plant life and mineral project and I own one or two macro photography books on those subjects but its nice to see someone point a macro lens at something very few people think about but nearly all use. I bet it must be a real task getting all those chips delidded though and I too hope most if not all of those chips were already dead as it would be a huge shame otherwise.
 
Always loved the look and color that the light bouncing/refracting off the chips gives!
 
Nothing really cool about such macro photography. not like biological flora or fauna macro photography. I think as a photographer its a waste of time. factory has diagrams that show all of this so taking photos of it is wasting time
 
Nothing really cool about such macro photography. not like biological flora or fauna macro photography. I think as a photographer its a waste of time. factory has diagrams that show all of this so taking photos of it is wasting time
I think the point of the project is in getting a real world view of how intricate and complex all this technology is, and to use his skills to capture that. Its not really about gaining technical information, as you say there are diagrams for that. This is showing tech as art in a way few people outside of the tech industry and computer hobby get to see.
 
I think the point of the project is in getting a real world view of how intricate and complex all this technology is, and to use his skills to capture that. Its not really about gaining technical information, as you say there are diagrams for that. This is showing tech as art in a way few people outside of the tech industry and computer hobby get to see.

like I said there are charts that are more detailed than what he took. tech art is so cold thats why it doesnt catch on
 
Nothing really cool about such macro photography. not like biological flora or fauna macro photography. I think as a photographer its a waste of time. factory has diagrams that show all of this so taking photos of it is wasting time

Looks impressive to me. IMO the photos are incredible and if you can't appreciate them I have to wonder why you are visiting at tech site at all ;)

Sorry mcborge I have fixed the original post.
 
I think 'tech art' as you put it doesn't catch on because most artsy types probably don't appreciate or understand what it is they are looking at.
You know when you watch a movie with someone standing in an art gallery and admiring the beauty in brush strokes. I sometimes find myself doing the same while staring at all the colors in a Chip Die. Just gazing and wondering how many transistors this time. Asking myself how many cities are wired together in this architectural beauty. Just wishing I could shrink and walk the roadways. To me there is more art in the creation of one CPU than all the art galleries.
 
Looks impressive to me. I think 'tech art' as you put it doesn't catch on because most artsy types probably don't appreciate or understand what it is they are looking at. Regardless of how popular this is the photos are incredible and if you can't appreciate them I have to wonder why you are visiting at tech site at all ;)
I visit tech site like this to see innovative products or projects and reviews of products not to actually see close up photos of hardware that I have already seen somewhere else
 
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