Just a brief pause to appreciate the hardware inside this machine.

To remove the thermal paste, isopropyl alcohol is a standard way to do this in conjuction with a tissue or Qtip.

Image one is the left side of the motherboard. The big chip is the GPU, the nVidia Quadro P4000 P2000 (EDIT: thanks @Julianmustofa!). As noted by @Kisai, the taped over chips (image two) are likely GDDR memory chips for the GPU, 1GB each for a total of 4GB of GDDR memory (part number 8HA47 D9SXD with a stylized "M" printed on them).

Image three is the CPU, in this case a Intel Core i7-8850H CPU at 2.60GHz. The large chip on the lower edge is possibly a memory controller or a north bridge like chip - there was no easily found part number.

There are obviously numerous other chips on the front and underside of the board, and perhaps in a future teardown, I'll break them all down.