Warning: the black plastic end piece is meant for REMOVAL only (that's why it splattered everywhere in the video). The thin curved metal end piece 0:27 is meant for APPLYING. Also, the drop applied in this video is WAY bigger than recommended and will surely lead to seepage into surrounding components over time. I fried my old laptop applying this stuff the wrong way so hope this message saves at least one laptop from dying. (Update) Use minimal Acrylic Conformal Coating and apply to exposed metal only as it will act as an insulator.
@@ethaningoa7461 , I use Noctua NT-H1 for the CPU and GPU and I also removed all the thermal pads and replaced them with Thermal Grizzly Minus Pad 8. 100c to 65 to 70 while gaming. Definitely worth it. Alienware 17 R5, I7-8750H and GTX 1070.
Saw the video yesterday and watched again today to review and my heart still skipped a beat when I saw it like I saw it for the first time... guess I was more alert today
some* dont understand that without electricity, electronics cannot be harmed by water or other conductive fluids. i wash my motherboards in the sink every other year and air dust every 3 months. just need to make sure it is 100% dry before putting electricity back into it
@5:07 I actually had a physical reaction watching that. That might have literally been the worst possible case scenario when working with that stuff. And sarcasm aside, "we did it on purpose to show you what to do" is a totally legit response. I can only imagine how much more carefully every single person who watched this and attempted the same procedure was when pushing down on that plunger. Kudos for keeping it in the video and owning up to it. None of us are perfect.
I don't get why they dont make the applicator a twisting plunger instead of a push plunger... If it was twistable, it would be far less prone to slipping and even just the smallest amount of liquid metal could be applied.
literally the reason i didn't even apply it directly... put it on a q tip and spent hours, painting it on and taking it back off when i think i applied too much, making absolutely sure it wasn't going to seep out and still had 100% coverage. probably outright wasted half a gram, which is trivial compared to the 1400 price tag of the laptop. Acer Nitro 5, playing EVE after an hour or 2 it would hit 85-90 with only Zkillboard running behind it but the thermal grizzly keeps it below 75 at all times. CPU wont exceed 73 and GPU wont exceed 63 when i have RU-vid, discord, EVE, and Zkillboard running simultaneously.
update: i use 2 monitors on a regular basis now and even after extended periods of time with youtube discord Zkill and EVE running simultaneously it will not exceed 78 degress C with an ambient of between 75 and 68 F. this is a laptop.
no, i have not had to do anything but clean the fans and radiators. i have not had seepage. i have not had a leak. i have not had shorts. the laptop was frequently put into a backpack and jostled around. (this isnt a recommendation to do so, its anxiety inducing knowing what can happen. please for your own sanity dont use this stuff unless you plan on keeping it where it sits or youre using something you dont care to lose)
This is just like porn. You start with normal stuff, like building your own PC, then go to harder stuff, like liquid cooling and suddenly you're deliding and using liquid metal and your friends don't know what you are talking about anymore.
MX4 is a good cheap TIM, I was disappointed with it's performance compared to my NT-H1 that came with my cooler but at $10 it's hard to find anything better.
I'm not subbed to NCIX so I never saw that video, with that being said, he used to not believe in the benefits in LM and called their gains minimal for the amount of risk, though he never used the product for delidding where everyone was having success. This was back a long time ago during some WAN I can't remember. Remember when he would delid a CPU just to use a standard thermal paste? Kind of defeated the purpose of delidding in the first place. Also note, in that video you linked, he never delidded the CPU in the first place because he was using a 5820k which has a soldered IHS and is not the CPU's that were having issues with heat management. I ran a 4790k naked die on a h100i with CLU and dropped 30C with the same fan speed, with others having results like mine is why people became obsessed with CLU/CLP etc. So while you are right, he did try this two years ago, he did not try it on the processors which had issues nor did he apply the LM in areas where the poor thermal conductivity was thus he didn't realize it's true benefit.
I'm considering undervolting and underclocking my cpu for now. Until a year or so passes atleaset. I won't risk my laptop warranty as of yet. Not worth it with my mid- range-demanding games and programmes.
I'd also like to know how it went - I have this laptop as well and I've already done a keyboard replacement (so many tiny screws), SSD install, and I'm about to replace the battery. I'm going to repaste it when I open it up to do the battery and have some Arctic Silver, but 20 C is enough to make me consider the liquid metal...
@@Dreznin I have done liquid metal on my Acer Predator 21X and it holds up really good. It has been 3 years since then and I have redone the liquid metal 4 times. You have to absolutely open up the laptop after 2-3 months of first apply as the liquid metal seeps into the copper heat sink which is normal. From 92C on CPU and 88C on GPU to 78C and 71C respectively. Worth it even though I tried it on a 9000 USD laptop :D
They should use their new laser cutter to make a custom laptop bottom plate (well replace the bottom plate with a bottom "box") for notebooks with removable bottom (like the clevo p65x) with liquid cooling for the cpu, dedicated desktop gpu (you can actually use the pcie lanes from internal nvme m.2 slots for this) and a kickass raid for storage.
@@albundi2k101about 6 months to a year. however, if you can afford the downtime, you can prep the copper surface by leaving a relatively large amount on the copper for a few days. You can also lengthen life by sealing it with a foam dam.
Worked great on my Zephyrus. Also makes everything quieter since the fans don't spin up like crazy when everything is cooler. Also, you can get a lot better thermal pads and grease on the memory. ThermalGrizzly stuff is insanely good.
When you manufacture thousand laptops/hour (or whatever) on a sem-automatic assembly line. You don't want to risk playing with liquid metal. Of course you could engineer a solution to the problem, but that costs money, time, effort and there probably isn't that much market demand for this. Believe it or not. But 90% of the people do not care about this stuff, nor the performance increase. They probably won't even notice or care about these issues. I know it sounds dull and boring. But having worked with automatic manufacturing (tho with sheet metal parts) one extra step can increase cost and time spent quite significantly, sometimes you might even need to plan the product in totally different way for a small minor thing.
They are not using this as the liquid metal actually corrodes the copper cooler over time. This is good thermal compound if you do not mind buying new components when they are corroded...
For someone who is considering this, just to let you know that every device will have a lot of different outcomes. Mine just got 3c cooler than Noctua NTH2 repaste (15c cooler than original) and some will get 20c like in this video depend on the thermal design of the laptop.
tommihommi1 a full gpu usually doesn't thermal throttle as much as a laptop. A boost in fan speed usually helps get rid of thermal issues on most gpu's
Alex V.D.H. similar improvement in temperature or noise normalized performance, and really big improvement on radial fan style cards, which are limited by cooling performance most of the time.
You don´t need to do it very often. I do it every 4-5 months because I feel better, but there is no change in doing so. It holds up better than normal paste.
I was thinking the same, two months ago i change to liquid metal on my notebook and did some undervolting of the cpu (7700hq) and overclock/undervolting of the gpu (nvidia 1060) and i went from 30 fps on shadow of war with a lot of stuttering to almost 60 fps smooth AF. Temps also lower between 15 and 20° less than before. Ah the 1060 is overclocked to 1935 mhz @ 0.9v with a +200mhz of vram. I used MSI afterburner for that, if you press CTRL + F you can set a curve profile and limit the voltage for each clock.
This is an excerpt of a comment on another video, and the reason why I think you just gave that laptop the equivalent of terminal cancer. bobsagget823 5 months ago Leaving this as a top level comment so more people can see it: I did more reading about this stuff since I'm interested in using LM for my own laptop, and it seems corrosion is not out of the norm. Typically when LM is used under the IHS of a desktop CPU (often necessary for intel chips since they bond the IHS to silicon with toothpaste instead of solder) the results are pretty good even after a year. The IHS (which is made out of copper, then nickel plated) does get stained by the LM but nowhere near what happened to you. This is because your contact (in a laptop) is silicon die LM copper heatsink. In the desktop scenario, LM is often applied underneath the IHS so the contact is silicon die LM nickel plating copper. To be even more clear, the key differences in your application of LM is that 1. Your application was silicon-copper instead of being silicon-nickel as you would find in the 'delidding' of a desktop CPU 2. Your application was not insulated against air (read: oxygen) 1 is important because the electrode potential of gallium is -0.53V, nickel -0.24V, and copper +0.34V. Obviously, all liquid metals are made out of gallium (because Ga is liquid at room temp, and is also nontoxic unlike mercury) plus small percentages of other metals to reduce the melting point. When gallium is in contact with pure copper, the differences in electrode potential favors the gallium and copper to alloy, which will eventually consume the gallium completely[1] (Ga + Cu → CuGa2 [67%] + Cu3Ga [11%], and both products are stable until 175C)[1][2]. The liquid metal will literally into the copper until the gallium is gone, which causes the copper to turn silver-ish. The non-gallium components (indium, tin) of the liquid metal[3], which are solid at room temperature, get left behind - and that stuff is hardened deposit that you were trying to scrub off the heatsink. Note that at higher temperatures, the reaction between gallium and the copper heatsink only gets faster. 2 is important because the gallium based LM components can and do oxidize. This is the reason why people generally recommend sealing your contact as much as possible. With a desktop chip under an IHS that's already halfway taken care of by the IHS itself, so if you've never seen a liquid metal tutorial for a laptop you might have not even known that sealing the LM was important. I'm not making this stuff up, gallium begins to oxidize at 25C and fully oxidizes at 75C[2] (Ga2O3, mass fraction 0.12) which is a totally achievable temperature range. This is not even considering the fact that the other components on the LM can oxidize, and they likely will. Other interesting things to note: 1. The thermal conductivity of CuGa2 (the principal alloy of gallium and copper) at 20C is 98 W/(m⋅K). Copper's thermal conductivity at 20C is 400 W/(m⋅K). 2. We have no idea what exactly is in LM, the formulations are proprietary - but it's been said that the consistencies of Coolaboratory CLU & grizzly conductonaut are not the same so clearly whatever is in this stuff varies and lead to different results. 3. Simply buffing the residue off the copper heatsink and reapplying the LM might be OK. The GaCu alloy is obviously not as good of a heat conductor as pure copper but it's not clear how deep the gallium will attack. If eventually you keep reapplying LM and the gallium can't penetrate its own pitting then it's effectively self-limiting and you end up with a 'stable' LM application. These papers are interesting if you want to learn more about the process: 1. www.ipme.ru/e-journals/RAMS/no_81808/grigoryeva.pdf 2. sci-hub.ac/www.scientific.net/DDF.326-328.227 3. forum.notebookreview.com/threads/something-to-think-about-liquid-metal-compatibility-with-copper-heat-sinks.800890/ TL;DR Liquid metal pastes react with copper heatsinks (aggravated by oxidation and higher temperatures) until the gallium in the paste is totally absorbed by the copper heatsink and you end up in thermal runaway. The damage to the copper is permanent, but if you keep reapplying the LM whenever this happens you may end up with a stable LM application. LM is much more stable when used under the heatspreader of a desktop CPU, since the heatspreader is nickle-plated and way less reactive to the LM.
Ok, from the top, but this time explained like I was a 10 year old. 😂 Thanks for this. Totally forgot that the nickel IHS was the only reason why it was safe for the long term on desktop and not laptops.
liquid metal cool laboratories or this stuff is primarily gallium. Gallium is that dirty gigolo metal that likes to get with every other metal. It spends one night with aluminum and the next thing aluminum knows it is pregnant the tv is gone and her bank accounts drained and gallium nowhere to be found and her car is gone...
We have flowed many liters of Gallium-Indium-Tin in our research liquid metal magnetic loop and it once leaked onto the aluminum support structure and it steadily began to consume it like some kind slow but powerful super acid. It never stopped, requiring a complete disassembly so what remained of the aluminum support frame could be disposed of. Application in any kind of electronic device should absolutely include 100% containment/sealing with minimal quantity (a drop or less) to protect components. It also begins to react with air, oxidation etc...
It sounds like “liquid metal” is just some form of gallium considering they’re warning against use with aluminum. Gallium soaks into aluminum and makes it extremely brittle and weak. Edit: 3:02 he does say it’s made from a gallium alloy.
Manufacturers will never ship items with liquid metal underneath their IHS' due to the risk of jostling it and making it spill out onto other components during shipping and handling
AMD already does this, Intel used to. Go look at an older i7 2600k and you'll see that the processors were soldered to the IHS which is nearly as good as liquid metal TMI
One way to avoid excessive application and accidental spills is to deposit a small amount of liquid metal in a separate container then use a cotton swab to gradually transfer the substance onto the cpu and gpu until a correct amount is reached.
I saw this video and decided to apply the Arctic MX-2 to my buddy's laptop. He would get the worst perfomance at the lowest resolution and some serious thermal throttling. Temps were fluctuating around 78 - 81 degrees, with some other less demanding games it'd get around 75 degrees. Now after reapplying the thermal paste temperatures dropped and it runs about 15-17 degrees cooler. That was really worth, thanks Linus! PS: laptop had an i5 4200u and a 920m
I was reading with a huge laugh, because I thought you are pranking your buddy with the cheapest thermal paste available, and the guy just start to thermal throttle right at the start of booting screen 💀💀🔥
I just wanted to post as a note anyone watching. If you want to remove or accidentally spilled some liquid metal on the board while unpowered. You can use wet wipes to help remove it. I found this out by experimenting. Rip a piece of the wet wipe cloth to grab a bit of the lm paste off the spot and Discard piece, rinse and repeat. Do not reuse or it will smear the lm paste around. The lm paste tends to ball up on the wipe so it works like a charm.
Well, one wouldn't have thought the bottleneck here (super thin laptop) would be standard thermal paste. (Rather moving the heat out of that thin case)
This irrelevant, laptop BGA and LGA CPU, GPU & chipsets do not have an IHS. Only desktop Clevo and all alike laptop the desktop CPUs would one. And it is recommend to delid the those laptops as the reseller will commonly offer a delid service before shipping is you choose.
After having watched Hardware Canuck’s video about speeding up a MacBook by reapplying the thermal paste, I wonder what this would do to a MacBook Pro...
I think this is not a coincidence that they both have similar videos. Especially since Dimitri's results were not as impressive. I would even assume that Dimitri's video was a parody, after he saw this one on floatplane
in my old pc i had a corsair h80 watercooling shit came wiht thermal paste on it, ran at temp x needed to replace something, thought by myself lets change the paste for fun 8 degrees lower. and i went from supershit to a little shit paste
Hi, I have applied thermal grizzly liquid metal to my P56XT like this video says and CPU temp dropped from 96 deg C to 76 deg c. Thanks for the great tutorial.
One thing you may need to consider when doing this is that over time under the influence of oxygen the gallium may react with the copper especially if you use the laptop a lot if this happen you will get a dry crust of the other metals mixed in. This is not as bad as with aluminium but it can still happen over time and heat. If this happens you can remove the crust from the heatsink and reapply the liquid metal.
"We decided that the BEST LAPTOP for this job was the three-thousand dollar Acer Predator Triton 700." Linus, you kill me dude. Keep up the killer work.
I did some research and there is one more thing to be considered. Gallium (main metal inside LM) in contact with copper gets into it over time, that's why sometimes people can't get rid of it when it "dried out" - it doesn't really dry out. It created sort of an alloy, bacame "one", like sunk into it. Of one thing I'm not sure - if this is a bad thing or not... What I'm sure of is that it won't be a pure copper anymore (heatsink, at least a part of it), more of a "CuGa". That's the only thing keeping me away from applying it to my A17R4...
Silicone RTV should work great. I use it all the time for coating electrical connectors. If you ever need to remove it apply some dielectric grease first it will pull off effortlessly. 100% protected. Also works for making connector covers.
I have done this on my Legion 5, has been around a week and have checked countless times for seepage, and a tip if you do this, buy some liquid silicone, and spread it around, I don't feel safe with the spray on stuff shown in the video, and spread it around in the parts shown in the video, add around 2 or 3 coats, works pretty well, liquid metal is a nightmare for the first time, it's hard to spread around, and suck back into the needle, and also, make sure you check it, and temps a week apart, if it dryes up, it will do pretty much nothing for cooling, adding a teeeeeny bit extra, to make sure it is still a liquid. Tbh, I recommend you first try Kryonaut, unless your laptop, as much as you clean it, and apply good thermal paste, still overheats, then sure, my laptop went from 95, to a whopping 72° C from cleaning, undervolting, and adding liquid metal, insane change, full load on all cores.
@@RekzysTheTitan its not "just gallium" - its an eutectic alloy of gallium indium and tin. considering the given density of 6.24g/ccm of conductonaut and the denisty of 6.44g/ccm of galinstan, its probably a really high gallium variant in the 75% Gallium, 17.5% Indium and 7.5% Tin ballpark.
@@ericvauwee4923 Dude, you clearly just read the information on the back. You wouldn't have any idea what "eutectic" even means without googling it first. Shut the hell up.
Is that heat sink copper? A galvanic reaction may happen between the gallium and the copper, eating away at the liquid metal. May damage the heat sink and require reapplication every few months.
3 years?? I ended up repasting my 7 year old i7 MBP with Kryonaut and saw good results. No thermal throttling and about a 5 degree drop. Was that a delid or a laptop? The lid on a desktop CPU is nickel plated so there are no issues with liquid metal.
By heat spreader do you mean you delidded your laptop or did you add an extra part? Sorry I'm not a computer expert but if you can get it to work and have the liquid metal stay liquid for 3 years I may have to try it too. Are you getting those massive 20 degree temp drops? Have you opened it up just to see what it looks like?
Welcome to 2010 Linus...Coollaboratory Liquid Pro...Just a note guys before you try out..even though your heatsink might be cooper, it may not be 100% cooper and will still form an alloy with the compound which gets hard and it is kinda absorbed into with time, therefore needing you to perform heatsink lapping and repaste every now and then (about 6months from experience - just did mine again yesterday). It gets up to the point when if you are overclocked the temps might still look good but you get random weird crashes, becoming more frequent with use, that is the point that you know you need to repaste. However if your heatsink is nickel coated you should be good :)
Also conformal coating is not needed..unless you are linus or suck..Also Coolaboratory comes with a really really small needle thus you can't fuck up like in the video
5:05 aaaand this is EXACTLY why doctors spray a squirt into the air from a needle before actually putting it into someones arm. There's always some gunk or residue at the very tip of the instrument, that may cause shit to spurt out as the pressure blob releases.
Using some Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut I got my i7 4700HQ running 15°C cooler under load, and my GTX 850m about 10-12°C cooler too bringing some performance back thanks to no CPU throttling
Nick Faber It's a question. Broad, granted, but pretty straightforward. Why go through the whole process to squeeze a tiny bit more performance out of a mid-range laptop-grade 4th gen i7 and low-end mobile GPU? I'm all for keeping things running, but at this point min-maxing your performance on a laptop like that makes no sense to me. Just curious what the reasoning is.
That's interesting, thanks for sharing! My laptop is with the same processor, i7 4700HQ and with the GTX 880m. With my last paste AC5, my gpu can get 82ish°C and my cpu 80-85°C max. I wonder if I can lower those numbers down to 75°C, but not sure if I would risk it yet :)
Yes if we could only have read Linus brain when it shot its load all over the guts. I am sure it caused his blood pressure to soar, and his emotions to just spaz out all over the place....
Nice job !! a big plus for performance, fan noise and battery life ... also to remember that the first thing to do after opening the case is to disconnect the battery ... especially if we will play with a liquid conductive above the motherboard: D thx for All your experiments it's always a pleasure To watch your videos !
For europeans: XMG (Schenker) in Germany sells gaming laptops with delidded CPUs, the price is not cheap but you have a warranty in that case. Only EU tho. But for somebody who is scared, but wants it done, definetly an option.
some Clevo/Sager/XMG/etc. laptops have actual desktop CPUs in them just like that ASUS one with the Ryzen CPU. And hey, as long as it is a desktop CPU, you can remove the IHS and fuck around all you want. =D
Are you drunk? I'm talking about that stuff: www.mysn.de/xmg-ultimate-gaming-laptops/xmg-zenith-17-l17 Go select the CPU there and scroll down a bit. Those are laptops with a fullsize desktop CPU inside, those can be delidded and you get liquid metal in there if you want. Custom laptops, this is not some mainstream bullshit that is avaliable in every store around the corner.
Laptop CPUs do not, desktop CPUs in laptops do. Same to you as to the other guy who commented - go check it out, select the CPU tab and read carefully what you can put in there: www.mysn.de/xmg-ultimate-gaming-laptops/xmg-zenith-17-l17 Want a fullsize, overclockable 8700k in your laptop, delidded and with a warranty? You can have it.
Have their been tests that there is degradation due to oxidisation within this application? The reason why I question is that I've been sitting on the same liquid metal for 5 years without change. You'd see more degradation in many regular tims in that time.
Legit the day after this video was released Grizzly Thermal Conductonaut was sold out on Amazon, and the remaining supplies went up in price (from $11/1g to $16/1g). Same for NewEgg, except they still have some left. Thanks LTT
Linus Tech Tips 05:07 HOLY! I audibly gasped. Having watched numerous videos from Gamers Nexus, I was already concerned when he was trying to go for direct application instead of using cotton swap painting. *smh*
Just applied it to my ASUS ROG STRIX GL702-VM and now idle temps are sitting at about 30-35°C and under full synthetic load 62-65°C and under full gaming load 70-74°C. This stuff actually works, no joke.
Main reason why this isn't worth it. You're better off hacking the bottom off, or simply paying a dude at a local CNC shop to just cut you a proper heat sink, not the consumer grade BS. If you're genuine about your pursuit for a cool setup in a small package, it shouldn't matter if the thing is a bit 'hacky'. I wouldn't.
Or rather than turning a slick $3k laptop into something 'hacky' or using sketchy ass thermal conductive shit that eats alunimium, you simply apply some good quality non-conductive normal thermal paste correctly and get a 10c drop in temps, achieving essentially the same results. Factory applied thermal paste is, always has been, and always will be complete trash. Even cheap aftermarket paste applied yourself will be a big improvement.
Harry 8642 it is an alloy..... tin alone is a soft metal and a bad conductor , copper is kinda soft and is a great conductor, mix them together and you get an alloy which is a great conductor and is much stronger than both metals (bronze) gallium is a metal too it can change properties when alloyed correctly
"The Laptop works! But that's not much of a surprise if you guys have been paying close attention..." So, I didn't saw anything...but please do not tell me they short circuted one 3000$ Laptop and tryed it again with another one .-. :D
i am wondering if you get any drop on outside temperatures of the case? I'm afraid that won't make any difference and make it even worse due to the slower fan speeds. Anyone should consider damaging laptop internals and even causing dangerous battery explosions most probably on macbooks. I guess laptop manufacturers are well aware of that. Only sinful solution could be undervolting the CPU without damaging anything which reduces the power consumption in Watts and results lower temperatures (if you are not planning to overclock). If you still wanna do that, make sure you decrease fan trigers in bios advanced settings ( there is a hidden combination in most laptops where you can also set your stable voltages after trying on Intel Extreme Tuning Utility. Of course there is some cases you will get temperatures over the safe margin which can cause damage where repasting could be usefull. Just avoid high external temperatures on laptop.
