Check our video on how long liquid metal lasts: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-fnbovjT4JLQ.html Grab something on the GN store! store.gamersnexus.net/ Article: www.gamersnexus.net/guides/3362-how-liquid-metal-affects-copper-nickel-and-aluminum-corrosion-test
Steve, would you please do some tests with lapping cold plates? It would be interesting to see how much a mirror-finish affects temperatures. You'd probably want a control test, a lapped cold plate only test, and finally a lapped cold plate and lapped CPU IHS test.
Hey Steve iv seen some concerns and photos of the effects of liquid metal to the die itself. Can u please look into this if there's any truth or anything to worry about?
great dive into the potentially controversial topic. I do suspect that the depth of tainting is only atoms thick beyond the imperfections of the copper surface. And even then, unless a heat pipe is already on the edge of failure due to excessively thin outer walls, the atoms thick tainted copper outer layer will not cause any problems at all. Also, given the nature of LM attoms filling gaps between copper atoms on the surface, it may actually make the surface a tad better for contact area to whatever TIM is later used (albata possibly immeasurably outside of an ultra-precision lab test), due to LM atoms being better at conducting heat than a void between copper atoms, lol. Great vid GN crew.
Thanks so much for this video! I've been pondering these questions for a while. Good to know all the laptops i repaired and did cpu upgrades for will be fine. I started to question the longevity of the performance seeing first hand how the copper and LM react with each other.
In my understanding the corrosion/alloy effects of liquid gallium with solid solid aluminum, copper and nickel (actually nickel plated on copper) have been fully described in the video as 1) Aluminum: destructive corrosion (solid aluminum alloys with liquid gallium and the resulting brittle alloy gets attacked by moisture in the air with final effect the aluminum gets "eaten away", similar like solid iron corrosive rust oxidation with gaseous oxygen, but at a much faster rate) 2) Copper: also strong reaction, but non-destructive and also thermal degradation is negligible (copper alloys with gallium to CuGa2 and this alloy stays as a mechanically stable layer on the copper, thermal conductivity is reduced to 95 W/m-K compared to 400W/m-K for copper, but due to the thinness of the CuGa2 layer no measurable/see-able effect on the chip temperature) 3) Nickel (actually a thin plated layer of nickel on solid copper): A very slow reaction between nickel and gallium causes some not harmful staining of the nickel and the plated nickel layer seems to suppress that the copper alloys with the gallium In my understanding this video has not at all addressed what above 3 corrosion/alloy reactions mean for the thin TIM layer of liquid metal. Liquid metal stands in my understanding for all metal compositions that are liquid at room temperature. No fixed/concrete composition exists/is defined. Liquid metals based on mercury need special care because of mercury's high toxicity. Generally considered as nontoxic are liquid metals based on gallium. The name Galinstan stands for a 3 metal composition mainly of rather expensive gallium (Ga 69~95%), but also indium (In ?%) and tin (Sn 0~11%) with the specific composition Ga 68/69%, In 21/22% and Sn 9.5/10.5% showing under vacuum the quite deep melting point of -19°C. However there are also 4 metal or even 5 metal liquid metals mentioned in this German patent (application: thermometers for several purposes/temperature ranges in the total temperature range of -20 to +1.200°C, patents.google.com/patent/DE10321843A1/de). As additional metals zink ( Zn 0~29%) and plumb (Pb 0~10%) are addressed for specific purposes and in another patent bismuth (Bi) and antimony (Sb). The patent also mentions that a 4th or 5th metal may allow to reduce the percentage of expensive gallium to 50% with only minor degradation and that the way of processing/mixing results in differences, for example by addressing the strong oxidization of gallium with oxygen. In my reading liquid metal is not liquid metal, but there exists a multitude of possible metal compositions around gallium as the main material which I see also in application as TIM, where CoolLaboratory offers today 3 compositions, Pro obviously for lowest thermal resistance, Ultra probably for lower cost and on the newest composition Extreme CoolLaboratory claims they have addressed also the longevity. The harmful consequence of gallium's strong reactivity seems to be that several people have proven by video that the applied liquid metal got hard/"dried out" while others even commented when they opened the gap/TIM and checked visually the liquid metal was gone completely. In my understanding such hardening of the liquid metal happens only when applied on copper (does not occur when applied to nickel plated copper, this means especially the IHS) and I understand the underlying process for the hardening is gallium leaves the liquid metal and migrates into the copper to form there the solid CuGa2. For the quite thin TIM layer this means the percentage contents of gallium is permanently/quite fast reducing and when the gallium percentage falls below a certain percentage (different for each composition of liquid metal) it becomes hard and the hard remains of the liquid metal are quite difficult to remove from copper (the people even claiming liquid metal disappeared completely may have difficulties to see the remains of liquid metal by their eyes, especially when the gap was extremely thin and the color of the remains may be similar to CuGa2). In total I see following 2 problems when applying liquid metal as a TIM: 1) Only on aluminum: destruction corrosion and 2) Only on copper: hardening of the remains of very thin liquid metal once a certain amount of gallium has moved into the copper it is in contact with to form there the solid CuGa2 alloy. This hardening when applied on copper requires to re-apply the liquid metal generally every 6 months (in extreme cases even faster) to avoid the not easy removal of hardened liquid metal from copper.
So using it on the die of a microprocessor under the nickel plated IHS is mostly safe and doesn't degrade the materials. Have I understood it correctly?
@@eniff2925 Yes. I did this with a de-lidded 7700K with Thermal Grizzly which i bought new 4 years ago. If you do as I did and as the rocketcool or similar recommend to reseal the heatspreader after application then its a once off process. Im one of those OCD people so I would reapply thermal grease once a year after the delid and at the same time inspect the 7700k for any damage. None and literally no drop in performance. Infact before I upgraded earlier this week 18/6/2020 I did an experiment with liquid mental on the heat spreader to AIO (for about a month) and yes, the results were as expected even better. Do I recommend having liquid metal between a cooler and processor? Probably not. But if you are just doing a delid then yeah man just do it.
Steve is hands-down the most thoroughly informative reviewer online. This video is excellent! Why don't any other channels offer as much info; why don't they even offer half the info on topics like this?
After using liquid metal on a bare copper heatsink for a year, I noticed that the liquid metal had fused to the copper and became a solid similar to the chalky residue from the aluminum heatsink test. I also noticed that the thermal performance became worse over time because the liquid metal was no longer liquid and even with the heatsink removed and heating the surface up, the stuff didn’t turn back into a liquid. So I’m guessing some of the copper and galinstin actually changed chemically so now the only way to get the flat surface back is to scrape off the alloy of galinstin plus copper and not scratch the actual copper
That usually happens if the copper had imperfections. Sometimes this is intentional to cut costs. I've been running the same liquid metal for 6 years on a pure copper plate with 0 problems. Still liquid.
Did you ever reapplied !! After 2-3 month you actually have to reapply liquid metal !!! This step is very very important and everybody missing it and then claiming that it does not work!!!
@@IvanRossSFinally someone said it. First year, reapply it at least twice, after that the galium migration will slow down significantly as the galium that already migrated will act as a barrier and you will not have to reapply thst often anymore.
@@khawajashaharyar9294 What's left of the liquid metal that's bridging the cpu/gpu die and the heatsink should be gallium deficient so it's not of optimal composition. Therefore, I would suggest cleaning it off with alcohol first and then reapplying. Is it absolutely critical to first clean of the remains? I have no idea. I would imagine gallium is used in the composition due to its low melting point so galium deficiency could case lm to not be so liquid anymore and that's obviously bad. In summary, cleaning it off first and then reapplying seems like a safer option
Jokes aside, i used toothpaste in my first pc, LGA 775, 1.8ghz celeron, heatsink plastic socket died and i had to secure it with a ziptie to the MOBO and replaced original thermal paste with toothpaste as a temporal fix for at least a week or two, got some solid 70º under load, much better than expected tbh
For those that dpn't wanna watch vid. Coolers are made in general of three metals Aluminum,Copper,Nickel You dont wanna apply it on aluminum You can apply on copper but it also degrade permamently over time You want aply on nickel plated copper In all three cases it interacts with these metals but only with nickel plated copper you can clear off stain
Hi, how identify with my cold plate is nickel or aluminium? i have a laptop msi gf63 thin , but the cold plate of the gpu is not copper looks like aluminium or nickel, i want to put liquid metal but im not sure she is nickel.thanks
@@Anonymous09096 you could check with the manufacturer. Its a very small chance that they use aluminum, probably nickle plated copper. But you can never be certain so i wouldnt risk it untill you know for sure
Commenting on a older video, but this is a great reference and wanted to mention something with regards to bare copper. When the liquid metal alloys with the copper, the oxidized result is sort of dry and chalky. This is normal, but it could hurt performance. What you want to do is ALLOW this to happen initially. Give it a few weeks or so to "soak" and bind. Once you've given it some time, you want to open it up again. Remove the existing liquid metal and clean it as well as you can like you would normal thermal paste. Do NOT use sanding or polishing to remove the alloy stains. If lapping the IHS, you should lap it first. The idea is that we WANT that staining to stick around. It is only surface-level, is stable, and has done all the reacting/alloying it is going to do. That is, it isn't going to continue reacting the way it would with aluminum. So in essence, it has become a protective barrier, stopping further corrosion. After thoroughly cleaning the surface, simply reapply the liquid metal. At that point, the liquid metal should more or less retain its original properties from then on. If you had polished or sanded the staining off of the surface, then when you went to reapply the liquid metal, it'll just re-alloy and create the same chalky residue. You may still want to check the temps after re-application in case you need to repeat the process. But basically once the alloying process is "complete", the liquid metal is mostly just an alloy of elemental metals, rather than a complex emulsion or ceramic you would see with other TIMs. This means you shouldn't have to worry about decomposition or "aging". A couple other tips: - On the cooler, apply an amount notably larger than the die for the initial application. There will probably further reactions along the edges, so you want those edges to be outside of your contact zone. - To speed up the alloying process, you could do some thermal cycling. Running hot will speed up the reaction. Thermal cycling may help it expand/contract and thus fill tinier nooks and crannies. I usually do a batch video conversion, or do an overclocking stability test, perhaps running the fans lower. We basically want to hang out around 80-90C. Modern CPUs are OK with this, and LM works better at higher temperatures.
Gallium and Aluminum is an amazing reaction. There’s tons of RU-vid videos showing what it does, but look for gallium vs lock. It makes the aluminum so weak and brittle it just falls apart in the guys hands.
I have a der8auer i7 8700k Ultra with a silver IHS. The last weeks the temps kept rising until I couldn’t overlock anymore and figured my watercooling was busted. That proved not to be the case. I delidded the CPU and what I saw was nothing short of catastrophic. The LM was completely hardened and had visibly corroded the silver to the point of effectively having destroyed the IHS. The CPU is 2 years old. Replaced the IHS with a pure copper one and will delidd at least every 6 months now.
I used 8700K with delid and liquid metal for a year. I lapped both sides of the HS to copper. On the bottom between the core and the HS year later the metal was still liquid. But between the top and Noctua cooler (which I also lapped just to be sure), it dried and basically fused the two surfaces together. I had to use a lot of force to pull them apart, and after that I had to lap both surfaces again to get rid of it. But that being said, before I pulled them apart, the temps were still fine, so even when it reacted and dried off the thermal conductivity was still fine.
Thanks for the comment on my Liquid Metal video, when i replace my liquid metal ill make sure to inspect for these same issues, as of now my system is still stable at 5GHz but who knows maybe today will be the day the Magic blue smoke is liberated only time will tell. keep up the great work i love your videos
When I finally decided to use LM on my 2080 TI on a bare copper EKWB, I remembered this video and needed to re-check the results of Conductonaut on bare copper. Steve, never doubt any of the research and testing that you do. As niche or cliche as it may seem sometimes, it's great information that you're putting out there.
Bare Copper can suck a bit of it up, so the best thing you can do is add a bit more than you would with nickel plated copper. The mistake a lot of these laptop LM users make is in fear of LM doing a different short prone kind of migration; they use the complete and utter bare minimum amount of LM they can manage to get away with, and the LM dries up in a matter of months. Use a little bit more and just insulate the surrounding circuitry and you will be fine.
@@lvl-up3951 conformal coating would be a much better idea, it's meant for damp proofing electronics. Grizzly sell 'SHIELD PROTECTIVE VARNISH' for this exact purpose which also looks a lot like relabelled nail varnish, lol
Hi, how identify with my cold plate is nickel or aluminium? i have a laptop msi gf63 thin , but the cold plate of the gpu is not copper looks like aluminium or nickel, i want to put liquid metal there but im not sure she is nickel.thanks
If the gallium indium mixture is reacting with the copper in a way that ends up plating the copper as you said, wouldn't it then become an almost perfect non reactive surface for liquid metal due to the plating acting like a barrier between the gallium and copper, just like the nickle plated copper?
When the copper surface on the cold plate is saturated with gallium then no more reaction will occur and you will get a cold plate finish with the same color as gallium. For first time application I have found that you need to apply a little more liquid metal than you would normally use to compensate for the copper/gallium fusing or else loosing a measurable amount of heat transfer from the IHS to the cold plate.
This is all the same for a copper base on the cooler itself? I purchased a cheap Cooler Master water cooler that is very respectable for the price but it has a copper base on the pump itself. I was planning on doing this just for the hell of it with the toasty 4790k.
Great video, very useful too (even though i'll probably never use LM on my CPU's) Please make focusing faster (10:35 - 10:45 for example, 10 seconds to bring cpu into focus even though camera is looking directly at IHS). It hurts my eyes.
Absolutely do not do this.. That stuff is way too expensive - If you want to mess up aluminum locks just get some regular old Gallium. It is much cheaper. You can get 20g of Gallium for under $10.. Where as Conductonuat and the like is over $10 per gram..
Gallium penetrates atomic structure of the copper but thats not galvanic corrosion and has nothing to do with electrochemical potential of involved metals.
I used a product called Indigo Extreme on an old Core 2 Quad (stock nickel-plated IHS) mated with a copper waterblock years ago: that produced a metal film like a foil. It was difficult to separate the CPU from the block when un-mounting, but the material had flowed so well that the mirror-image of the markings on the IHS was printed onto the slice of foil that came out when it was disassembled. Weird installation procedure, but it seemed to work pretty well. Removal was mostly just peeling off the "foil"-- IIRC almost all of it came off in one piece, with a couple of extra bits that needed to be scraped free. Seemed like an easier thing to apply and remove than these liquid metal TIMs. Personally I went back to using non-conductive paste-- it's just easy / relatively risk-free and I'm not trying to set any overclocking records :D
5:45 --> You got it wrong: Aluminium reacts with water (H2O), the O (oxigen) bonds with Aluminium creating AlO (aluminium oxide), and then, the H2 is released (and potencially flammable)
Here's a video of a liquid metal with copper reaction over a year: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-FW8fgTjHdCo.html Short version: gallium forms an alloy with copper over time (months, a year) leaving indium and other materials as a hard metal residue, which is difficult to remove and often not flat. Because of its surface shape, the residue has bad contact with the silicon surface and does a poor job of conducting heat. So the liquid metal appears to "dry out" and fail over time. I wouldn't say that copper and liquid metal is a safe long term combination.
"As he writes, it..." ?! It is en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium called aluminium. Americans popularized false pronunciation. Rest of the world addresses it as it is.
Pro-Tip in 2021: I thought 9900X was totally corroded past recognition after two years. Isopropanol and Acetone did nothing. Then I tried rubbing baking soda in with alcohol prep pads. After 10 minutes I could read the SN again. Cheers.
Focus pull shot around 8:30 is waaaay too slow. Really annoys me and I see it every so often on tech channels. I'm just staring a blurry image for what seems like forever.
@@Ownage4lif31 im thinking its a marketing hype. it will have hardware revision sooner than most people think and replace with regular heatsink and thermal paste
6:00 “Using Liquid Metal wouldn’t cause your computer to explode” Seeing this in 2023 makes me appreciate this statement because there have been far more things that would make your PC explode that isn’t liquid metal
What about copper plated aluminium? Will the copper surface protect the aluminium from reacting or will it migrate through the copper as the surface is very very thin?
@@TheRealFobican That would work. You can electroplate aluminum with a layer of nickel, then add on whatever extra plating you want (silver, gold, etc)
Liquid metal on consoles (ps4 pro/xbox One X)? Or changing the paste for a better one? Does it help? Could you do a test for that? Would it help for temps and noise?
FortuneFed To be honest, structure and design usually counts more than the material (e.g. in radiators, aluminium vs copper fins have negligible impact compared to different fin density and channel formations). But of course material compatibility must be checked.
i put some nh-1 on my ps4 pro with some new arctic thermal pads, it's quiet now, i imagine liquid metal would work even better and yes you can use it on the ps4 pro as it uses a chopper plated heatsink
Two things, there is so much concern about performance, corrosion, and reactivity, but 1) why aren't people concerned about getting this stuff on their skin and 2) why is everyone using cotton swabs to apply this and paper towels to clean when these things will shed tons of fibers all over the place. What's the point of lapping and trying to get a perfectly mating surface when dust in the air, fibers from application tools, and tons of other crap is getting between the surfaces?
Gold has a negative electrical potential, like copper but much deeper in the negative, so it would probably react like copper but the negatives would arise three times faster, or take three times longer to manifest If you are worried about pitting and staining then you may want to stay away, but unlike aluminum gold should survive (based solely on electrical potential, I don't know enough about liquid metal to say in other regards) but if you want a definitive answer you could test it yourself if you get a new water block some day, interesting thought non the less
@@LaserHuset actually found said waterblock from about 2004 I have not seen gold plated blocks since this one. It is amazing how they have changed over the years. If I had any liquid metal laying around I'd be tempted to test it myself.
If you want to remove all stains of the LM from copper or nickel, just put the IHS (only the IHS) in a heated 1+4 solution by weight of sodium hydroxide (NaOH) + water. When mixing NaOH with water it is an exothermic reaction so add the NaOH gradually into the water, it will heat up quite a bit, so heating it extra to achieve about 60 - 70 °C might not be necessary. It also becomes very Basic when heated, up to about pH 18, so keep the fingers out. Should also be done in a ventilated area, as the fumes coming off when it dissolves gallium, indium and the tin, are basicly Oxygen and Hydrogen...
Probably not at all is my guess, silver isn't very reactive. Der8auer is the man behind them, and I doubt he would make a custom IHS made for delidding if it didn't work with liquid metal, that just doesn't make sense.
Steve, I haven't seen anyone do a review of the CooLLaboratory Liquid Copper - this seems like it could be a much better alternative to the current liquid metals that can be corrosive. Copper is likely more conductive but should not cause concern if proper application guidelines are followed just like other liquid metals. i wonder if this might be a good option for those who have had disastrous results with shunt mods using regular liquid metal?
I'm really glad for this video. I had been kinda worried about the Phanteks liquid cooler I had picked out with nickel and thought I would need to go copper but now I know that it's actually better. I liquid metaled my G752 laptop and it's so good my power brick can't keep up!
Hi, how identify with my cold plate is nickel or aluminium? i have a laptop msi gf63 thin , but the cold plate of the gpu is not copper looks like aluminium or nickel, i want to put liquid metal there but im not sure she is nickel.thanks
How do you seal liquid metal to protect from getting air (oxygen) to it? I mean can we use conformal couting? This is to make sure no air/oxygen get into it and make it hardened.
Just a random thought. Could copper foil be used instead of paste or liquid metal. Is the clamping force of the heatsink enough to cause the copper to conform to surface imperfections. I believe copper is used as a gasket but under much higher pressures.
If you inject an aluminium padlock with gallium, the padlock becomes so brittle that you can crush the padlock into a powder with your hand. If liquid metal contains gallium...yeah
With Noctua heat sinks I have never had to reapply liquid metal (I use Coollaboratory Liquid Metal Pro). I am on my third system with Intel CPU and Noctua heat sink, I have never reapplied, my current system is a delidded Intel I7-7700K, no temperature problems, I could not swear, since my use changes, various overhead from OS and so on, but I have not seen temperatures change to any degree that I have ever noticed. For me the main attraction with liquid metal is pure laziness, I never ever want to touch that CPU again, and my fiendish, nay even devilish plans are proceeding as ...planned, so far. Honestly I thought this was the main attraction for liquid metal, the, what 1-3 degrees? difference, from properly applied liquid metal, does not make up for the hassle of properly applying the liquid metal, instead of fingerpainting on some paste?!? (Woo, the quitest fan in my case might ramp 20-40 RPMs up from what it is, Woo, bugga buggah, soo scary?)
Two days ago I popped open my Asus GL502VSK they I applied Conductonaut to, I noticed staining and freaked out a little Thanks for the video, it was very relevant to me lol
this was a beautiful explination. i tried to point you towards this info in one of your ask GN's but i was honestly not great at any explanations. i loved seeing this, since i use liq metal everywhere in my pc since im a mad man. thank you tech jesus
@Hazard I've read and saw that copper still works better than aluminum though. Not sure, what type of liquid metal PS5 is using. But, they did a 2 year R&D on it. So, it would seem to be throughly thought out from the looks of it. Time will tell though. 😊👍
Something to be careful off is the copper content as some so called copper heat sinks may be something I came across when working in a fitting workshop called cheap mans copper where aluminum is mixed with the copper. Was very common when copper prices went up
Bro... Love your content. In this one and the " how long does liquid metal last" video you answered all my questions! I will be using it in my future build. Thank you. Love the new office by the way. Keep up the good work 👍...oh and more snowflake.
