Did somebody tell Sony that we love screws? Because this steel plate is secured with a ton of screws. Um, thanks!

Underneath: a heat pipe for cooling a row of VRMs, connected to a baby fin stack. Looks like we're seeing the back of the main board here—all the really serious cooling hardware is mounted down below.

We may be approaching a point of no return, but let's un-mount the hardware and flip the board out.

Yep, that shiny stuff covering the processor is none other than mimetic polyalloy liquid metal, the king of high-performance thermal interface material.

Liquid metal is popular amongst PC modders and overclockers because it's an extremely efficient conductor of heat—significantly more efficient than conventional thermal pastes and putties. Translation? Cool chip run faster, make prettier graphic.

But with that thermal conductivity comes some unwanted electrical conductivity—so you don't want it sloshing around in the wrong place.

Sony filed a patent for an insulated, foam-cushioned pouch that keeps their liquid metal confined to the surface of the chip ... as long as you don't do what we're doing here.