"I want to touch on a couple of mods that I have seen online that don’t fix the problem entirely but can help increase performance. One mod uses washers under the hold-down mechanism to mitigate some of the downward pressure, thus reducing the bowing effect. In my opinion, this will work, but I would avoid doing it for a few reasons. First, the ILM is created to provide a certain amount of pressure to assure the chip has proper contact with the pins, and while this mod does remove some of the bowing, it affects the pin contact pressure as well. This could negatively affect stability, and in the worst case, you could lose a memory channel.
A similar method is just to loosen the hold-down mechanism’s screws. But by how much? Who knows — it's all a gray area. For most people, doing this on a $500+ motherboard and chip is risky for the minimal gain. Another mod I have seen is using a replacement top for the ILM, but it mimics the original Intel design and only contacts the same two points on the sides of the chip, which introduced the flex in the first place. I can only guess that maybe the modded ILM is looser, introducing the same potential problems with lower-than-spec pin pressure.
The last mod I’ve seen is to remove the hold-down mechanism completely. I admit I tried this one, and I killed a motherboard by bending all the pins in one corner when I removed the cooler. I later found out it wounded the chips’ memory controller, too, and now dual-channel memory no longer works on the chip. That was a frustrating day.
I will never fault anyone for coming up with ideas to improve performance, though; I’m just giving my opinions on them. To everyone else, I would suggest being patient. There are some commercial solutions on the way. If you can’t wait and can afford to destroy an expensive motherboard, you could grab your own hacksaw, but the performance gain isn’t worth the money for most people."