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Is Liquid Metal Killing Our PCs? Scientific Analysis and a 2-Year Test [video]

78 points zdw 1 day ago 51 comments

sanex 21 hours ago | parent

I have a Thinkpad x1 extreme gen 5 with an i9 and 3080. Liquid metal. Overheats like crazy. I want to get in there but I hear it's such a pain to deal with I've been putting it off. Definitely will be swapping to one of the thermal pads when I do it.

Tempest1981 20 hours ago | parent

After how long? I.e. did you get a few good years with it?

Silagi 20 hours ago | parent

Not OP, but it launched in June 2022, so less life than I'd like to see from a Thinkpad regardless of how you slice it.

sanex 19 hours ago | parent

It's at most 4 years old. For that high end of a laptop I have pretty high expectations, I think it was over $4k retail.

jmb99 19 hours ago | parent

Not the end of the world to deal with, you just have to be very careful. No harder than mobile phone repair if that’s something you’ve ever done

whizzter 17 hours ago | parent

Go at it, I have a 1st gen Zephyrus 14inch and had bad heating problems, liquid metal there also initially that just didn't work due to bad application or whatever, repasted it and it's behaved way better.

I was quite nervious, but check Youtube, there's guaranteed some people that has documented the steps, do check multiple ones as some people are more detail oriented or just know what parts can be dangerous/tricky. Good tools can be a lifesaver also (isoprop alcohol for cleaning, lotsa q-tips, good screwdrivers and plastic picks like the fixit toolkits to pry gently).

plqbfbv 17 hours ago | parent

This, I repasted my wife's Zephyrus laptop which had liquid metal for the Ryzen APU (6900HS), regular thermal paste for the GPU (3080) and thermal putty for VRMs.

Redid APU and GPU with PTM and VRMs with paste. -10C on average on the APU with way lower idle temps, and GPU went from being thermally throttled at 60W to being able to push until 110W. Fan is basically silent for 3 months now, whereas previously I could hear it from the next room.

vanschelven 21 hours ago | parent

I was wondering where the liquid metal would come from but apparently it's an alternative to thermal paste.

SloopJon 21 hours ago | parent

This video is by the owner of Thermal Grizzly. They make thermal pastes and putties, but I think they're best known for their KryoSheet graphene pads.

Although I've never been conscious of pump out as a problem, and have never reapplied thermal paste, I did use a KryoSheet on a 9800X3D in my most recent build. So far, so good.

Kirby64 21 hours ago | parent

They also make Liquid Metal themselves. Pretty sure that’s a substantial part of their business actually…

tomega2134 20 hours ago | parent

And they talk in the video about how expensive it is now, because of gallium export restrictions in China, and that people shouldn't be using it because it's not cost effective. Only the most hardcore of overclockers should even do it.

But it was a very informative video regardless.

Tade0 20 hours ago | parent

I've been meaning to get one of these, as I was looking to make a liquid cooling dock, so I can't have an interface that adheres to any of the sides.

Does it really simply not stick and is held in place by pressure alone?

SloopJon 19 hours ago | parent

It definitely slides around. The package I got included silicone oil to anchor it with a drop in the center.

Aurornis 19 hours ago | parent

> Although I've never been conscious of pump out as a problem, and have never reapplied thermal paste,

I’ve had problems with both pump out and other thermal paste aging problems.

The problem is very different across thermal pastes. Some of the high performance enthusiast market pastes I’ve used have started out great and then degraded until I was having problems a few years later.

My feeling is that the engineers and OEMs understand these tradeoffs better than the hobby market. All of those boring pastes that came in OEM configurations but underperformed the latest $20 tube you could buy in the aftermarket were just making different tradeoffs.

The newer pastes have been better for me so far. The person who made this video also does some testing that’s supposed to simulate pump-out and maintains a database of pastes which has been helpful to finally have after all these years of relying on forum anecdotes for everything.

xethos 7 hours ago | parent

> My feeling is that the engineers and OEMs understand these tradeoffs better than the hobby market. All of those boring pastes that came in OEM configurations but underperformed the latest $20 tube you could buy in the aftermarket were just making different tradeoffs

For example, if a consumer is going to periodically (or ever) replace / upgrade their thermal paste, they can get a bump in performance. The consumer that's never going to do that is better server by paste that has slightly lower performance, but lasts much longer.

lapetitejort 18 hours ago | parent

I built a PC in 2019 with a graphene pad. I have been too lazy to check its integrity. I rely on the lack of airplane sounds coming from my tower as indication it's working

PowerElectronix 18 hours ago | parent

They also sell liquid metal under the conductonaut line.

I thought ptm was all the rage anyway as it can't pump out and is very very long lasting, but I'm probably outdated in that respect.

terribleperson 17 hours ago | parent

PTM is still all the rage, but liquid metal is more marketable.

Of the latest gen of AMD GPUs, a bunch used PTM.

lp92 15 hours ago | parent

If you can get real Honeywell or Laird phase change TIM, they are well proven in long service interval industrial applications. I personally run a Laird 7000 series PCM on my 5800X3D as well as my laptop which originally had Liquid Metal.

chickenbig 21 hours ago | parent

Another liquid metal you have to watch out for is mercury. A former employer of mine traced elevated RAM degradation in a particular datacentre to mercury contamination in the canal the used for cooling water. Mercury has an interesting way of migrating through other metals.

jordand 21 hours ago | parent

There's been concerns for a while with the PS5 and the use of liquid metal in that. Especially given it stands vertically, and that liquid metal can "shift" downwards

simoncion 20 hours ago | parent

> Especially given it stands vertically...

FWIW, you can set it horizontally. You need to use the -heh- stand they include for the purpose, but it's how I have mine configured and it works fine.

I get that size and shape of the case may make this the least popular way of orienting the hardware, but -unless they've decided to save ten cents by not including the stand- it's just as doable as the vertical orientation.

wafflemaker 19 hours ago | parent

OP meant the risk of liquid metal acting amorphic and slowly leaking/shifting, moreso because with the console being vertical, the gravity force is pulling on the metal very strongly.

thomasjudge 21 hours ago | parent

There is a youtube laptop repair show I follow that specializes in Dells and he *HATES* liquid metal, causes soooo many problems when it leaks

smallmancontrov 20 hours ago | parent

Are we not allowed to speak northwestrepair's name or something?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNjoREOH80Y

He's a beast at BGA replacement, if you want to learn how to handle big chips he's the one to watch. But yeah, liquid metal sure seems to kill a lot of them, though typically just for the prosaic reason of getting somewhere it shouldn't and shorting something out.

winkelmann 20 hours ago | parent

I believe the previous commenter meant Parts-People: https://www.youtube.com/@dellpartspeople

Both seem to regularly face laptops and GPUs respectively that have BGAs shorted out by leaking liquid metal.

jacquesm 11 hours ago | parent

I have a couple of modded 4090's here and it is amazing what you can get out of slightly older chips with lots of VRAM.

bitwize 20 hours ago | parent

Man, I hate it when my gaming rig turns out to be a T-1000...

drdexebtjl 20 hours ago | parent

I have a dead mini PC due to liquid metal leaking. Never opened it before it died, never kept it upright.

I don’t think I’ll put anything liquid on my electronics ever again.

CamperBob2 6 hours ago | parent

If you're not too hung up on that whole forever-chemical thing, you can still buy Fluorinert on eBay!

Scene_Cast2 20 hours ago | parent

This video seems to be about LM on untreated copper (which I thought wasn't really advised).

Now, I personally have had two builds with LM. One with LM as the material for a CPU re-lid, and another for a direct-die application. Neither touched aluminum or untreated copper.

The re-lidded CPU is still going strong, no issues. But with the direct die application, I found the performance to significantly degrade after two years. Apparently there's a pump-out effect.

I ended up switching to PTM. Same temps as LM, but zero degradation so far.

badlucklottery 20 hours ago | parent

> LM on untreated copper (which I thought wasn't really advised).

I think the supposed issue is nickel (the most common waterblock coating) has a much lower thermal conductivity so you might lose a degree or two under load vs a bare copper block.

Which kind of makes sense: people who know what they're doing use liquid metal to squeeze out that last couple degrees vs PTM/graphene so going bare copper and dealing the the buildup problems maybe makes sense for them too.

He mentions in this video that liquid metal really should just be for the extreme overclockers who don't mind changing it out and resurfacing their waterblocks regularly which is good advice. The fact liquid metal is even semi-mainstream and comes standard on any consumer hardware is kind of stupid.

paimapi 20 hours ago | parent

I never really understood why you would risk using liquid metal versus something like Honeywell's PTM with the effect size in temperature difference indistinguishable from statistical noise. The only drawback I've seen for the PTMs is that the paste is extremely sticky to the point that I've ripped pins off an old 3600 when I tried to remount the cooler without warming it up first.

mindslight 20 hours ago | parent

From what I've seen the whole PC review industry operates on emotional narratives rather than scientific measurements. When is the last time you saw a cooler spec'd by its thermal conductance (Watts per degree C) as opposed to a whole rigamarole of we used so and so RGB motherboard with so and so PC case and this version of Windows with so and so benchmarking software. And every cooler in the limited set we compared it to was worse, but of course we left a whole bunch out. Like sure integration testing can be useful, but it doesn't beat characterizing units in isolation with hard numbers. And they never reduce the number of variables enough to do that.

jmb99 19 hours ago | parent

Part of the problem is that any given cooler doesn’t have a single W/K value. It depends on the temperature gradient across the heatsink which depends on airflow over the heatsink (and both the heat and heat density of the CPU being cooled), and the airflow depends on the case (and fans). And airflow temperature matters too (are you cooling the CPU’s heatsink with air that’s already been warmed by a GPU?)

Note as well that I said heat density - different benchmarks (or applications) will load the CPU differently, and the same amount of power consumption will result in very different heat outputs (heavy single core use will result in part of the die and heat spreader getting really hot, whereas heavy multi core use will result in the whole die and heatspreader getting kinda hot). If the heatsink has a very high surface area and high airflow it might have the ability to dissipate quite a lot of heat, but if the contact surface sucks (or is aluminum) it might not actually be able to transfer heat away very effectively without a massive temperature delta - resulting in high CPU temps for single core use even with a high cooling capacity for multi core use, for example.

Your average person can’t understand all of these variables, and the average reviewer can’t control for all of them. So, “this CPU with these benchmarks in this case with this fan configuration” is the best you can really expect. Because otherwise, what reporting are you actually going to do? “This cooler with 3.2CFM of 26C airflow on a CPU dissipating 80W on one core and 10W on the other 7 cores results in a peak core temperature of 87°C and a package temperature of 81°C” is not useful reporting. Especially because, when the average person doesn’t understand it, they’re gonna buy a case fan that says 3.2CFM on the box and then wonder why their CPU’s throttling.

mindslight 19 hours ago | parent

Sure, but the goal of science is to distill these variables down into a model of what matters. Define a reference contact patch that's supplying the heat, and you've suspended all of the concerns about single core vs multi core. Then for more in depth articles, there could be a few to represent single core (smaller area), multi core (consumer processor), and multi core (larger server packages). Same with the airflow over the secondary parts of a cooler.

Another in depth article could then even analyze CPUs and how they themselves differ from that reference contact patch, and their own thermal resistance from each core to their surface.

And yeah, I know this is more work. The point is that doing the work allows the results to be used and compared across articles, even when some things are subtly different (eg contact patch). The problem is we're missing a strong incentive for these things to be objectively comparable, rather than having to read article after article and getting tripped up in the details.

jmb99 17 hours ago | parent

The incentives aren't there (in my opinion) because the average person doesn't actually want to see that level of info. They're reading (or more likely, skimming) these sorts of reviews to have someone tell them what they should buy. The reviewer could go into a crazy amount of detail to figure out all of the thermal characteristics of the thing they're reviewing, but in the end it won't make a lick of difference compared to doing "just enough" and recommending something "good enough." Especially when, in most cases, coolers on the market these days are either "good enough or better" or "junk" and it's not hard to tell them apart.

There are exceptions to the above, like GamersNexus, who do take a slightly more scientific approach to things, but at the end of the day, most people don't care.

paimapi 14 hours ago | parent

It also doesn't matter except for the most extreme overclockers. Even the worst tests are granular enough to tell you which ones are terrible and which are competent. The rapidly diminishing returns when you aim for the top 10% of performance in CPU building seems to hold here. Plus Steam's hardware survey puts the vast majority of users within factory overclock ranges. With so much of tech 'journalism' funded by ad views, you'll rarely get anything like extremely rigid methodologies outside of a few rare uber-nerds with dedicated followings (eg Igor's Lab, Snark's Domain) simply because it doesn't matter if, for eg, your 5700X3D is 70C or 73C under load.

jacquesm 11 hours ago | parent

Indeed, also, the variation between individual applications is enough to invalidate the results of the number of tests isn't large. It is super easy to mess this up. Too much paste, too little paste, a little bit of grease left behind or maybe a small piece of dirt... A nice way to practice application of paste is to use a piece of glass instead of an aluminum cooler. That will show you exactly what happens between the piece of aluminum and the CPU and it can be quite revealing how hard it is to get a perfect layer without any air trapped. Once you can do it perfectly with the piece of glass you'll be in a much better position to lay down a nice layer with the real thing.

Scene_Cast2 19 hours ago | parent

That's what I had lying around when I started the build. PTM is now my go-to recommendation.

bigwheels 18 hours ago | parent

Had never heard of PTM, actually super cool.

> PTM thermal paste—most famously known as Honeywell PTM7950—is a Phase Change Material (PCM) used as a high-performance alternative to traditional CPU and GPU thermal paste

Application Demonstration: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Y60A_589wj8

ahartmetz 14 hours ago | parent

Yeah, first time that I hear about it as well. Pretty sure that it is what I'll use next time I need a thermal interface material.

buildbot 20 hours ago | parent

Tangential but people might think it's neat - there's reusable indium pads for replacing thermal paste - https://www.indium.com/products/thermal-interface-materials/...

They are used on the Supermicro Power9 platform weirdly.

Palomides 19 hours ago | parent

they're slightly less efficient than a good paste and need a higher pressure interface to seat well, but I like the zero mess aspect, ease of application, and knowing they'll never dry out

I wouldn't call them "reusable" since they do get crushed onto the chip or heatsink pretty hard and tend stick

escapecharacter 18 hours ago | parent

This is covered in the plot of Terminator 2. The liquid metal tries really hard.

phyzome 17 hours ago | parent

Oh man, I would never put (bulk) gallium into electronics if I could help it. That stuff gets into everything and will wreck various metals.

platevoltage 16 hours ago | parent

One of my favorite LockPickingLawyer videos is of Gallium utterly destroying the aluminum body of a padlock.

lp92 15 hours ago | parent

Yup. One of the first things I did when I got my laptop a couple of years ago was to clean out the Liquid Metal and replace it with PCM.

westurner 12 hours ago | parent

TechIngredients studied this and found that Silicone oil and Graphene makes the best thermal paste for cooling chips;

"DID WE JUST MAKE THE WORLD'S BEST THERMAL PASTE!?" https://youtube.com/watch?v=Glfak2B9J5U

"Make Our Best Thermal Paste... YOURSELF!" https://youtube.com/watch?v=8RJ-vLLwDPU