God I wish I would have known this ahead of time.
There's a problem where the right bar of the socket sits higher than any of the chips after delid. It's about 3-4mm higher. This means no matter what block or heatsink you use or how you orient it, there will never have complete contact on the dies. And there is no replacement socket (or bracket for that matter) that resolves this. So unless anyone has done this modification before no one has successfully ran a correctly cooled AM4 3000/5000 delid before.
I found this out by observing a major core-to-core delta that I couldn't figure out. People were saying it was a bad mount of course, but one commenter on a post in r/watercooling noted that an offset bracket by Der8auer was required. I thought, hm ok so it's not getting even cooling because the chiplets (and therefore heat center) aren't centered without the IHS on anymore.
Was about to buy it when I watched the instruction video. Then he said something crucial. "We were attempting to find a solution to this problem of a difference of height but we could not solve it." (Sic) So Der8auer flat out says delid is not possible without a major mod! You can see in the second photo of my block how poorly it was making contact, and that it is, in fact, sitting tilted.
So I had three options. Reinstall the IHS and give up, do a mod to the motherboard socket, or mod the water block. The sunk cost fallacy made me gamble on the second and third options.
Modding the block would mean cutting a divot in the surface where the bar sits. That was a major undertaking and ultimately proved impossible. Risky because I cut too far and it goes into the fins or water channel. And getting it sized up just right on where to grind would be far too tedious. But ultimately after sizing it up anyhow, I would have to grind into the screws holding it together which meant that idea was toast.
So modding the socket it is. Der8auer said you can't do it without ruining the mechanism for the socket latch. I decided to go against his advice. Mill down the bar somehow. And you get to the point in the main photo.
I could have used a Dremel but that's very risky as one slip could cut a trace on the mobo. So I decided to melt the plastic down. Much better as it was stable and it was actually easy with the tip I had on my 260W Weller to shave off a mm at a time. (Mind you the results look way more disgusting in the photo than it does in person)
So I did it! And surprisingly the mechanism still works? I guess if you are super careful and don't take off too much then it's mostly fine. But it makes the remaining plastic on the mechanism thin so you have to be very gentle when latching the CPU.
And you can see it was a success by core-to-core deltas now being practically non-existent!!! Running prime95 on all stock bios settings gets everything sitting at 60C. So it's definitely working
Now to get to work on overclocking!!! 😀