A little disappointed to see you give up so easily. What about using a vacuum to suck that stuff up...literaly, or maybe that vibrating sonic machine that you use to clean boards. I don't know, just suggestions. lol
Then I would have paid for a vacuum pump, for the once-every-three-years that I get sent a board with liquid metal all over it that is unfixable anyway because 12v got sent to CPU/GPU vcore by the gigantic blob of crap shorting everything on the board. I would damn near sooner spend my money on a macbook! But seriously, this was a total waste of time. I went over it for fun and lols, but once there's that much shit that was short circuited all at the same time as it was attempted to be powered on, even if I remove every damn piece of goop, this shit is done for. Buying a vacuum pump to waste another half hour on this when I am going to have to replace the CPU, the GPU, and a bunch of other stuff...... on a nine year old board..... no.
@@bindkeys a household vacuum is useless. compressed air will blow it around further underneath the GPU, however that GPU is dead to begin with so it doesn't make a difference
A lot of people don't realize that liquid metal reacts with other metals. That's why those resistors got removed too. Most "users" only focused on the "cooling aspect" of the liquid metal and forgot to research its downsides.
so... this is as good class of decisions as put water cooling but DIY half-assed way... good way to make it time bomb. There are people who like these risks, super OC people, but regular people... funny that macbooks got this now, I thought it would've been too much risk and hassle in large scale production.
@@effexon the fuck? MacBooks don‘t have liquid metal inside. This stuff was applied by the owner! And there is no downside to liquid metal - if you use it correctly. It‘s not mend to be used as an alternative for thermal paste at all. Usually it‘s applied right under the CPU or GPU head/cap so the chips have better contact to the head of the chip and on that had another layer of thermal paste is applied. Using it instead of normal thermal paste is was to risky.
@@mrreisskeks3441 Oh really? I missed that from PS5 launch. Yea it can be put by professionals but I wouldnt touch it with my clumsy fingers, not worth it to brick machine.
@@Elepole Most servers are unix based which is why many companies give there workers MacBooks I don’t know what else to tell you, they could give out Linux based machines but most companies who do don’t have the supply apple does
This is mostly the result of an improper application. With liquid metal you have to work it into a very thin film on both surfaces. Unless the liquid metal is properly spread, it stays "balled-up". It also looks like this person used about three to four times too much. A thin film is all you should have. Also, in case you do apply a little more than you should, it's common practice to protect surrounding caps and resistors with a coat of finger-nail polish. None of these things should matter in this instance, as you can't overclock a mac (from my understanding) and liquid metal really only outshines standard thermal paste at higher temperatures, but the cooling solution needs to be there. The thermal bottleneck in this instance isn't the TIM, it's the anemic cooler. At full load or near full load that cooler likely stays heat-soaked, meaning it can't dissipate heat any faster without adding more heatsink surface area or air movement to the equation. Once a cooler is heat-soaked, your choice of TIM is really not going to affect your temperatures much. Liquid Metal is really only beneficial if the cooling system is considerably over-sized for the chip it is cooling. If the cooler barely dissipates the heat under normal workloads (like most laptop cpu/gpu coolers) liquid metal will have practically no benefit once the cooler is heat-soaked, which will take about 20 seconds. TL;DR, Don't use liquid metal unless you absolutely know what you are doing. And if you know what you are doing, you aren't likely using liquid metal in a laptop.
" And if you know what you are doing, you aren't likely using liquid metal in a laptop." If you know what are you doing, you will apply LM without problems in laptops.
I'd say, for the most part, liquid metal is for laptops (I'm talking about gaming laptops here, not MacBooks). You don't need LM in a desktop, there is no need to overclock your CPU to such an extent that warrants a delidding and LM application, and using LM without delidding is just plain stupid. If your desktop temps are too high, get a better cooler. if they are high because of your OC, reduce it slightly, you won't notice the difference and if you do, turn off your FPS counter because that will be the only perceivable difference between the added 5 fps you're gonna get from the OC, if you're benchmarking competitively, you're already failing because LN2 will always win. Laptops, on the other hand, don't have interchangeable coolers and the coolers you get have to deal with CPU, GPU and VRM all in a single small package, getting rid of all that energy as quickly as possible is vital to the stability and longevity of the machine. LM in laptops isn't for overclocking them, its simply to keep them as cool as a desktop given the cooling system is vastly inferior in comparison. I'd go as far as saying don't buy a top-spec laptop unless you're prepared to apply liquid metal or have a professional apply it for you.
Thats true man, my gaming laptop is running hot af. Like 96 degrees with 55 watt power on the cpu. Im going to use conformal coating. When dried i’m going to use small barrier with good electrical tape and then i will apply the LM slowly.
If you put the board in the freezer (I recommend in a plastic bag or container) it will harden up and you can flake it off. That will let you get the big chunks but he small ones just have to be wiped away.
wasn't it the solder that never melt? it sure as hell scared me and pisses me off when i have to desolder something that soldered with such low quality tin.
Naw, let's take this to plumbing levels of problems. Having to solder copper pipes that have a trickle of water in them because the mainline won't fucking shut entirely.
I didn't see, but I hope they're using nickel plated copper on the cold plate. Aluminum turns to goo when exposed to galium, and bare copper kind of "absorbs" liquid metal, often requiring a reapplication after a year or so.
I'd say he got exactly what he deserved for not researching how to apply liquid metal in the first place... also for putting it on THAT gpu??? HAHAHAHAHAHA Idiots will get what idiots deserve.
well, the part of instructions that says "turn the on/off switch to the on position" is there for a reason. "There may be many reasons not to kill you Mr. Henessey, but one of them is NOT that you will be missed by NASA." Brian Cox in The Long Kiss Goodnight.
@@RNG-999 or at least don’t pour your whole fucking Tube on the poor thing your supposed to apply the least amount you possibly can because otherwise this might happen
@@RNG-999 most thermal compounds are more than enough to improve temps on a laptop. Kryonaut would be safer and still offer great temps. Ironically, only one Apple TIM is adequate.
@@r1oot not quite - you **can** use Liquid Metal without Plastidipping the entire thing - you just have to be extremely adamant about using as little as possible so that what material is there is happy wetting the surface that is it in contact with. which is an extraordinarily small amount. not for average joe to get involved with.
Usually I just spread LM over the entire PCB, for maximum thermal transfer. It works too, my laptop never warms up past room temperature anymore. Ever.
There's a reason the only companies using the stuff commercially in laptops (asus and I believe msi?) have literal rubber dams around the edge of the packages so it doesn't leak all over everything.
Eluktronics has a Liquid Metal thermal choice from the factory. I haven’t had ANY issues with my 10875 or the 2080 Super in my Max-17 Laptop. Worth every penny.
From a professional standpoint, fixing this thing is a non-starter. Even if by some miracle you could get this board to work again, you could NEVER warranty the repair. Those circuits have turned to dust, they just don’t know it yet.
@@DrunkAncestor yeah, I was thinking more about the endless “why did you give up without doing x thing?” comments. It was kinda cool to see just how much of a mess it really makes, even if there was no chance of success.
What would happen if you cooled the board down, put it in a freezer, then you could take the gallium off in chunks? Maybe as it gradually warmed, so it didn't rip chips off with it. As for the liquid metal under the BGA, could you use a heat gun to heat it up so it's runnier, and flows out from under the chip? I don't know the properties of gallium, so not sure if this is possible.
I've had this come through my shop before. I made a custom hose coming out of a shop-vac using gaffers tape to eventually come down to a bendy straw at the end. It worked pretty well.
Hey Louis, I haven't tried it personally, but I think a solder sucker could work pretty good for this. I imagine you would just have to invert it right after sucking up the metal, should work if you're quick enough. Solder wick might work too. Don't know for sure, just a thought.
A vacuum pump such as used in a desoldering tool,( or any vane pump) used with a trap to catch the metal, would work good for picking up this liquid metal. We used to use that setup to collect spilled mercury back in the days when mercury was used in blood pressure apparatus and lab equipment in hospitals. A plastic micropipette or eye dropper makes a good nozzle.
Liquid metal, also known as Gallium loves to "invade" solid metals, especially aluminum. Just search "gallium vs can". Also no hate, but it was done by an macbook owner after all, just saying.
It's not gallium, it's an alloy, which has significantly different properties compared to pure gallium. It's already lost most of it amalgamation potential and isn't likely to "invade" other metals to such a degree, especially if we're talking about nickel-plated heatsinks and such. The aluminium oxide layer will also slow it down significantly, you're only going to see dramatic "Ermahgerd, it broke it down in an hour!" reactions when you expose the pure aluminium underneath to pure gallium, but that's highly unlikely on multiple levels. Also, gallium is almost exclusively used in the manufacture of semiconductors and various other components in the electronics industry, so every computer out there already has a small amount of gallium (alloy) in most of the chips. It's not some doomsday gray goo that instantly destroys everything it touches. The short-circuit possibility is certainly a much greater issue with liquid metal thermal compounds.
@@Myemnhk It did, but if it were pure gallium, half the SMDs would fall off while cleaning them with a Q-tip. Considering the absolutely insane amount of liquid metal, I'd be surprised if the aluminium case itself didn't start falling apart in places. Fun fact though: if it were lead-based solder, you'd barely see a difference, gallium dissolves most metals used in lead-free solder quite well but doesn't affect lead really (and only lightly affects tin). It's not that liquid metal thermal compounds don't dissolve stuff, they just do it rather slowly compared to pure gallium. Regarding heatsinks, if it's nickel-plated, it'll be fine. If it isn't, it'll get damaged somewhat (aluminium quite badly, copper very lightly). Personally, I'm sticking to my MX-4 as Rossmann suggests, but I wouldn't call liquid metal thermal compounds something inherently dangerous if applied correctly, the main issue is that they're not idiot-proof (as seen in the video) and don't offer tremendous benefits compared to typical thermal paste.
the problem is they didnt take into account where it could flow. liquid metal is awesome in the right application with the right precautions. i feel like if he had properly coated the board ahead of time it would have been fine even if it came off. but you can tell the person used WAY TOO MUCH liquid metal. and also it seems you have to rub it in on the mating surfaces to get it to stick well. so many wrongs i understand louis's hatred of this situation, if the end user was a bit smarter or did a little research he wouldnt have even been here saying this. so IMO this is an end user error. find better end users. or in louis's case this is money. so i guess chalk it up to the food chain lol
@@Blox117 cause you won't be able to get it off the components. Then it's like hard solder, so you've to heat it up again an whoops, you're fucked up again^^
I'm running a laptop with liquid metal for over a year and it's working like charm. Here's a heavy layer 8 problem. Way to much liquid metal and absolutely no "defense" for near components, so they can't get shorted, if some tiny (really tiny) sprinkles of liquid get of the DIEs. That's a brilliant example of "more isn't the best way to do everything". Sry for my bad grammar, I'm from Germany and got stuck on local sayings, which can't be great transfered to English.
Hi Louis! I saw the pinned comment, reading it was just for the "lol". But if you happen to deal with Liquid metal and do really aim to recover the mess i would suggest you to put the board in the fridge/freezer. The melting point of this liquid metal is generally around 20-35°c so putting it in the fridge/freezer should make it more solid and easier to scratch it away or pick it up with your tweezer!
I've been applying liquid metal to GPU's and my laptop multiple times, and never got a spillage, but you need to take your time and probably even reapply it a few times because its hard to work with. I usually capton-tape off all the surrounding SMDs just for safety and also thought about possibility to make a barrier out of lithium grease around the chip (as it is non-conductive, heat-resistant and so on), but usually been too lazy to add it. I wouldn't recommend any casual user to apply LM if you're not an overclocker or hardware enthusiast
"an overclocker or hardware enthusiast" doesnt make you smarter or an engineer just because you repasted a heatsink. liquid metal has zero value in term of cooling and even regular thermal paste last years.
When I replaced the toothpaste in my blade 15, I made a protective dam with nail polish around the gpu die, as well as using WAY less liquid metal. You really only need a tiny little bit.
Louis Rossmann in the Upside Down: "Hey everybody, how's it going? Today we're going to go over how to properly apply liquid metal to your MacBook. Step One: Don't. This is why you don't do self-repairs. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk." Apple: *confused Tim Cook noises*
I mean, I've never even used liquid metal, but I researched it enough to know how to apply it! That same research told me to not bother using it, but shit, this fucktard BOUGHT the stuff and didn't even LOOK at a fucking youtube video on how to apply it??? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
@@jellybr3ak And it also eats metal over time I hear... such a good idea to put it on a $500 cpu or gpu! XD (I certainly hope there was no aluminium in there!)
@@donniehdea9281 It's gallium. Mercury isn't electrically conductive to my knowledge (could be wrong) so it wouldn't have shorted it, but also it's a consumer product so it probably just wouldn't be a highly toxic chemical. Edit: I was wrong. Still a horrible idea to put free mercury in your computer unless you like getting violently ill.
A video on youtube by Backyard Scientist shows the host putting a couple drops of gallium on a scoooter deck, and a bicycle frame. they were going to allow it to react for a couple hours, then try riding. An hour or so in, they heard a crash, they find the bike frame dissolved, which allowed the bike to collapse. The scooter did a little better, he rode it about 10 yards before it collapsed too. Someone online said it is illegal to trasport any amount of it on a commercial flight due to its volitle reaction when it contacts aluminum, it sounds believable, but I didn't fact check that info.
More like the nobler Ga forces the less noble Al to give up its electrons and the electron-short Al atoms become ions that flow into the liquid connecting the galvanic pair. The leaving ions cause the decay of the less noble metal. A liquid metal can double as the required electrolytic fluid between the two metals. This is known as 'galvanic corrosion.' With two solids, the electrolyte is usually water.
Btw, Louis. You can get some very cheap vaccum pumps that would solve this way better than tweezers and cotton swabs. One of those with an in line liquid trap(which can be cobbled together with basically any bottle that can hold up to a slight vaccum) and a syringe tip on the end would make quick work of cleaning that crap up... At least the bits of it that aren't underneath things.
Then I would have paid for a vacuum pump, for the once-every-three-years that I get sent a board with liquid metal all over it that is unfixable anyway because 12v got sent to CPU/GPU vcore by the gigantic blob of crap shorting everything on the board. I would damn near sooner spend my money on a macbook.
I delided my i7 8700K and put on liquid metal directly on the die. Used some nail polish to cover any blank contacts and glued everything together with heat resistant silicone glue. Got my Temps down by ~20° and has been working fine for the last 2 years. Was my first and so far last time doing that. What I'm trying to say is, if done right it can make a huge performance difference. If done wrong it can wreck your expensive stuff.
You can remove liquid metal with a very fine nozzle + suction. The syringe that e.g. Conductonaut is packed in will work very well for sucking up any excess liquid metal back in. The syringe has a very fine metal "straw" at the end.
As soon as I saw liquid metal all over the board my first reaction, "yep she's dead jim". Liquid metal is nasty once it gets on your electronic components.
This video reminded me of an old sh*tshow that I took back in University Repair Class in which we took broken parts and machines from students and tried to fix them or diagnose the problem. So, one day arrived a MASSIVE Toshiba laptop with all the gadgets one would expect from a desktop PC like a subwoofer, massive heatsinks, DVD-R/W, a full array of USB/Firewire, and a MXM graphics card back in 2011-2012. So he said that the laptop turned on but he had no screen or external image after he tried to clean it himself. Young back then, I just thought he simply either shorted something or didn't plug some important cable. Long story short, after it took 2 millennia to open it I arrived at the CPU-GPU heatsink combo and I see something that made my heart drop. In the MXM area, there was this white fluid all-over the card. At first, I thought he just put too much paste on the GPU effectively short-circuit the thing around it, and after a quick bath in the sonic cleaner, we could get it working. Nope, after I lifted the heatsink I was met with absolute horror. The ENTIRE MXM card and the CPU were flooded with cheapa*s thermal paste top to bottom, the reason? when he cleaned it he threw away the thermal pads for the VRAM and the GPU controller and he either didn't buy new because he forgot or didn't care to spend a few cents more or didn't know, so he used a CRAP ton of thermal paste on them. The thermal paste was the cheapest sh*t you could buy, not even eBay or AliExpress sold that stuff, it was like a face cream or sun cream protector that got put on a syringe and slapped "THERMAL PASTE" on it. When the VRAM/GPU heated up it melted and got EVERYWHERE especially under the VRAM. I didn't even bother, I simply told my teacher that the laptop was LONG gone, not just the MXM card which we thought and I simply put it back together and gave it back to the guy. He was furious we didn't even try to fix it and I simply told him "That's what you get for buying stuff without knowledge and try to do it on the cheap." He wasn't happy at all, the only thing I could offer was to make a backup of his data since the drive was ok, but he wanted to give him a "temporary laptop" to finish his assignments, which we didn't of course.
A can of Dust Off "liquid air" goes a long way toward cleaning up GalInStan cleanly. It has a freezing point of about -20C, so if you freeze the board hard enough to solidify it, you can then pick pieces off. Doesn't really help with the stuff under components, but worth knowing.
@Louis Rossmann Here's a tip as far as removing LM goes: While it's mostly gallium it has some additives to bring the tripple-point (ie. the temperature at which it will solidify) down to below what they consider reasonable ambient temperature. For Thermal Grizzly conductonaut this will be around 5-8'ish degrees. Other compounds will be somewhat similar. So if you want to harden it to easily chip it away (it won't griip as hard like solder) then you can just use a common electronics-troubleshooting freeze spray to cool it temporarily. A common compressed-air can held upside down works the same role in a pinch. You can pre-cool the whole board in the freezer for an hour or so to give you more time to work and not use so much spray. But when LM comes into contact with solder-points like here, or important aluminum parts - it's a kind of moot point. It will chemically react and drastically weaken the materials. Any soldered component compromised by LM can no longer be trusted. If it didn't fall off right away - it probably will in time. This is why you don't mess with LM without thoroughly insulating beforehand.
Halloween Horror Story. I'm a tech enthusiast and I have never once had a problem with liquid metal... Maybe because I don't squirt the entire syringe onto my CPU. A pin-head size amount, on the die, with the included black q-tip.
Super wrong, LM will definitely give a huge performance boost: it's a laptop, and as all macbooks it is not TDP but only thermal limited.. Why do you write about something you clearly know nothing about? DId you ever actually used a macbook pro?
@@DW_25 you clearly never ran intel power gadget on a macbook, and on a liquid metal / open chassis with vents one tried on a 2015 4980hq and was pulling almost 70w no stop, 750 cinebench r15 it is always a thermal limit
Liquid metal is not thermal paste! It can and will fuck up you day/pc. You use just enough to cover the die and the surface of the cooler with a very thin layer. If there are exposed components near the die, you can put a little amount of clear nail acrylic to encapsulate it to prevent shorts. Even still, a high grade thermal paste and proper mounting can do just a good. Some times a washer is needed to increase mounting pressure or removing a little material, like chamfering the screw holes can allow better contact with the heatsink/heatpipe. Linus had a video where they just made better contact with the heat sink with a good thermal paste and it really helped the thermals.
I'd slather everything except the contact point with conformal coating before attempting such a thing. And even then, it's just fucking stupid for what...a single degree?
I've always been of the idea that liquid metal is stupid. Not only is it conductive and super easy to fuck up, but it also contains gallium which will eat away solder and traces, even if applied correctly! Fuck that shit, just use a good thermal paste...
How about do not use liquid metal at all and if you really want a faster computer then go buy a faster computer. You people looking for something for nothing or just cutting in the line of life disgust me.
Being someone that like repairing my own stuff, I realized that with normal thermal paste it gets squeezed to the sides always I don’t understand why people think that liquid stuff is not going to be squeezed out...
You are basically supposed to paint it on with the supplied qtips in a super thin layer, I've used it loads and never had it run. You DO NOT just put a blob of it in the middle and let the cooler spread it out with mounting pressure.
Liquid metal isn't bad, The problem is this dude used way too much just like the people who get a tube of thermal paste and think they need to use the whole tube.
not only that but he obiviously didnt apply it he just put a junk on it and pressed it down lol. soeven if he had not spilled there was large junks of the DIE without anything and would have burned
I have found the purely mechanical desoldering pumps to be very good for sucking up liquid metal, assuming you realized you shorted stuff before you ran power through it. Pro tip: The nozzel adapters that come with Conductonaut kits can also fit (or be made to fit) on the tips of the desoldering pumps. Make sure to clean out the desoldering pump frequently, like after every pump, or you risk spraying it everywhere.
If this is like solder, maybe use solder suction tools? like, vacuum ones? Without heating them up. Another idea is probably shaking it off, possibly by swinging violently OUTSIDE the lab? Yet another idea is to wipe some kind of napkin across the board - it will leave residue but that can be cleaned off normally.
I won't recommend some experiments in this direction. LM is very aggressive against most other metals and can destruct them fast. LM can aluminium "melting" in seconds, so don't do it^^
You had it at hit it. You just hit the board with a good rap and loose junk should fly off of it. I do it stripping boards. I heat the board up over a solder pot then real quick before the solder solidifies I slap it in an empty cardboard box. Solder and parts go flying into the box. With liquid metal you could take your time even. It is not like the stuff is going to solidify.
It's real fun stuff, eats aluminum for breakfast like a real glutton - and even solder joints get yummy yummy'd! Little Macbook is gonna need more than a nice wipeup if it ever wants to see the light of day again..
A lot of times it will stick to a q-tip. You can also use a needle syringe to suck a lot of it up if it's pooled. I use liquid metal on almost everything and yes, I've made some big messes with it.
You have to basically pressure wash with alcohol if you want to remove *_ALL_* of the gallium. Takes about 2 gallons of high-pressure spray to flush the board. And even then, you'd need to replace any aluminum component that contacted the gallium alloy.
HAve you ever tried thermal pads between the mobo and backplate? Depending on the model it can give significant performance boost by keeping the machine from throttling under load
@@taylorsharp5928 I'm don't think badly of you, but i would imagine Louis would rather just work on another mac book and make some more money than trying to reinvent the wheel. Also, even if he did find that a thermal pad helps, it might be a tuff sell for his clients. Your pulling the head off the board and dumping it into the chassis. Some people will not like that and might even feel cheated that they paid for it. Not worth the hassle imo.
Once that stuff touches the solder it makes the solder melt at near room temp. Similar to a product called chip quick to make solder melt at a lower temp for removing delicate parts. So even if you clean everything once the machine is turned on and warmed up all the contaminated SMD's fall off.
No one here seems to get it. Even if he had a magic wand that removed every single bit of liquid metal, it's already blown up the CPU and GPU (probably more stuff too) by shorting a higher voltage rail to their pins. So unless you have a spare CPU and GPU and the time/equipment to replace them, this board is toast.
Maybe a microfiber cloth? I don’t know, I’ve never worked with liquid metal. But I was thinking maybe try something besides a Q-tip since that obviously wasn’t working too well. Maybe Google “liquid metal clean-up off of PCB”? Don’t know. Looks like quite a mess that I wouldn’t want to have to deal with either. I’ll say that much.
I worked in instrumentation in a Refinery in another life and when we cleaned up small mercury spills we used hazmat kits with what looked like little Brillo pads of really fine spun metal. They soaked up the mercury like a sponge. I bet these pads would soak up that liquid metal crap too.
Liquid metal tends to want to stick and pool to itself, but as you saw with the tweezers, it can also stick to other metals. However if something is made of aluminum, it will dissolve it in short order unless it has oxidized coating. To clean off the liquid metal from the caps, don't use a Q-tip. Just use your fingers, with toilet paper and the toilet paper coated with alcohol. You can then push the liquid metal around and then actually scoop it up with the toilet paper. This works very well as long as you can actually get to it (e.g. if it isn't under the green chip housing!). You can use LM's tendency to attach to itself to aid in removing it.
Been using LM for years and never had a issue. Would of done over 100 applications for myself and others, Its all in the prep. Mask everything off you dont want it getting onto and use the minimum ammount so it doesnt spill. Easiest way to remove it is with another syringe to suck it back up. Or if its old and dried out then a little bit of heat to get it soft again and desoldering braid sucks it up. But iv also seen people remove it the oppsite way by chilling it until its solid then just picking it off in bits.
How can liquid metal dry out? There's no water in it. It's probably the other way around, that it collects more and more crap which makes it go more viscous. If it does indeed "dry out" then that means that 1) its a compound, which I believe does not apply to every liquid metal paste, and 2) that the liquid metal component has evaporated, which probably doesn't mean good things for your health if you breathed that air. That is, if it didn't immediately condense somewhere else on the board where it's cooler, potentially shorting stuff. And even in that case, drying as a verb is usually reserved for water drying.
You need to “wet” the Q-tip first (with gallium based TIM) then it’ll attract the other stuff. Honestly, just stick it in the sonic, it’ll come off and sink to the bottom BTW, I use the stuff on my CPU and GPU’s. I’ve been fine for 4 years.
When used in the right way it does lower temps by more than a few C. I de-lided my 8700k and used thermal grizzly conductonaut with a rockit IHS and my temps went from TJ max 100 C to a max of 56C under torture test. I have the 8700k OC to 5Ghz all core.
How does this differ than Thermal Compound? I know this is risky, but still depending on the entire cooling system (pipe, heatsink, fan) right, if just to get -10-20* lower then i might go with thermal paste instead? correct me.
If sony can do it with the PS5, so can you. Lol. Just need to make a foam seal that goes around the outside of the die, and use nail polish or conformal coating on the substrate to cover any caps or pads. And of course, don’t apply the entire syringe like this clown did.
@@imchris5000 I've got a LM'ed Razer Blade Stealth 13 that's been running fine for probably near a year now. Still running fine - if you aren't a fool, you'll be fine. Just use it very cautiously and make sure to not splooge it all over the place, and you'll be fine. Lots of people make the mistake of treating it like regular paste and just covering everything with a blob. For me - it's been totally worth it. After LM and using throttlestop i'm getting pretty significant thermal gains.
The person that sent you this has to be trolling you man. The only way I can see this happening is that they thought it was like normal paste and they just blobbed the hell out of both chips. Great video and gave me a good giggle in what's a boring morning. Thank you
Beat me to it, was about to ask him why he does not use a solder sucker. I would think that would suck this right up without an issue. @Louiss Rossman, is there some technical reason to not use a solder sucker and instead use a qtip that seemed to be a nightmare to work with?
I won't recommend some experiments in this direction. LM is very aggressive against most other metals and can destruct them fast. LM can aluminium "melting" in seconds, so don't do it^^
@@Halaster He has said before he hates using solder suckers and that they always jam up on him, so my guess is he doesnt have one to use. Board was fried to begin with though
@@Halaster if the solder suction device has any exposed Aluminium, its a write off. Lq metal has Galium in it and that eats Aluminium. Could have used Goot Wik tho 👌
@@IcecalGamer Was not talking about an aluminum one, there are ABS ones that are cheap and work fine. They are cheap enough that even if you only got 20 or 30 uses out of them before you had to toss them it would be worth it, but they last way longer than that. If Lq metal though reacts with ABS I suppose that would be a good reason. Was just confused since the method he was using seemed like it was super annoying for him, and he was even trying to pick the stuff up with a tweezer, when I expect an ABS solder sucker would have sucked it right up, including out from the cracks that he was saying it seeped into. I could be completely wrong as I have never worked with the stuff before, but from just watching his video and seeing how it behaved it LOOKED like it would have worked far better than qtips. :) Which is why I was asking him if he had any input on why he didnt use it. Others did reply though that he does not like Solder Suckers.
Also also, for those who are saying he gave up too quick - Liquid metal corrodes every metal it touches that's not protected by nickel. Gold, solder, aluminum, all that's corroded and toasted. Whoever applied that liquid metal absolutely ruined their computer beyond help.
@@backslash_iii this begs the question how much does nickel plating the heat plate (cooler surface) cost?. LM if applied correctly is definitely worth the upgrade.
In my day even crap TIM was still conductive. That never happens unless the folks that apply it do crack. Much less with the super high wetting properties of galium based alloys. I mean they are conductive and the wet the crap out of stuff, blessing, and a curse, you have to apply it right. It was not the issue with liquid metal TIM, that was a user error.
@Louis: thank you for this video!!! I just built myself a computer ground up, first time in 20 years, and the thermal paste was my biggest, yet cheapest, hurdle. I didn't want water cooling because I'm too amateur to risk putting water near all the brand new parts, the fan cooler was an easy decision but lots of people were trying to sell me on liquid metal - I didn't even know it existed. I went with normal thermal paste in the end to stick with what I know - I didn't even consider, and nobody even mentioned, the risks like what you've just shown. I'm glad I didn't choose the liquid metal, I definitely would have spilled some or applied too much, and I would have cleaned it thinking nothing more, and power on only to fry my board and my soul. I was even shocked to see the little pins were no longer on the CPU - they're in the board now!! Still didn't make installing the CPU less stressful, I bent and broke pins on a chip decades ago and literally cried because it took so long to save up for and gone within minutes of opening the packaging. Anyway, I enjoy your videos and am appreciative that you take the time to create videos showcasing your skills, passion and educative knowledge. Thank you! Kind Regards, Nathan Adams.
Ive used LM once and after that I stopped doing it because it left a stain on my heatsink, you also have to be careful not to use too much because if you screw it down and it spills out it will cause problems for you. How do you clean this up?. too risky for something like 1-2 degrees lower temps compared to a traditional thermal paste.
Three important things to know about liquid metal conductant: 1) when used properly it rates in the to 2% most effective heat conductors you can possibly use. 2) when used properly it doesn't degrade like mixed thermal conductors making it perfect for high flow server's. 3) if used improperly it will obliterate everything about your computer you enjoy and laugh about it. BE CAREFUL WITH IT! ITS LITERALLY A LIQUID HEAT/ELECTRICAL CONDUIT!
because this litteraly make amalgam with other metal like mercure this board is toasted the liquid metal is probably eating the processor and the gpu internally at this point
Well, over time the black gloves gets absorbed by his body and changes shape, so that is why he needs to add a new layer every now and then. You just caught him between his changes.
Just a thought could you not simply put the board in your oven upside down at 100C to remove the liquid metal? This should raise the flow rate of the LM higher than surface tension making the LM drop free of the board.
holy smokes, that's a lot of liquid metal! you only need a very small amount, about the size of a surface mount resister (or even smaller). It will spread to the size of the chip easily with the spreader/q-tip. I wonder if you could suck the liquid metal using some de soldering braided wick. would the capillary action work since it's a liquid.
Yea if applied properly, it is by far the best TIM for air/liquid cooled CPUs. Not the safest, and won't always make a performance difference, but for laptops in particular it does an amazing job at helping cool the cpu/gpu... If you can properly apply it.
Liquid metal is good when you know how to apply it. It's just that this guy didn't. He assumed that you apply it the same as regular paste and this happened.
I know exactly what he did. He probably never spreads his regular thermal paste either. He put a big drop in the center and just pressed his heatsink on top of it. All he had to do was watch one video beforehand.
@@cemsengul16 You don't need to spread regular thermal paste. That only really helps if you're trying to conserve it. Liquid metal has to be spread though.
This is one reason I never bought into liquid metal. I personally really like IC Diamond, but it is impossible to completely remove after application, and it practically glues the heat sink onto the heat spreader. It's not electrically conductive, though, so that's a plus.
I've found that you tend to need to break the surface tension of the liquid metal enough that it attaches to the Q-tip and then once you have some on there, the rest will follow, you may need a syringe to extract some of the excess from the Q-tip after a while but it's helped me in the past when I had more compound applied than needed. I used liquid metal because my cpu was maxing out at around 100*C whilst building lighting for a project and the change in paste was enough to drop the temperature down far enough to stablize my workstation.
Even IF somehow that macbook was ok after having all that stuff shorted, the liquid metal would have likely infiltrated most of the solder joints and made them really brittle. That macbook would never be the same. Other than lighting it on fire that might be one of the most thorough ways to fuck it beyond repair even with the most patient repair shop on planet earth.
Easy. Just soak it in liquid nitrogen and give the board a twist like an ice cube tray. That way we can forget this one and not try to XOC the macbook next time. Edit: but seriously what about a plain desoldering pump? right after the mistake I mean. Before it rots away the solder.
@@mychem20 well like of you just fucked it up and you see the problem, you don't need to power it on and seal it's fate. I'm just talking about removing the tim in general not saving this particular board. That's why I said turn it to dust in the first place lol
Got some on mine for 4 years now. One of the two parts holding the screen broke, but I never had problems with the liquid metal. And yes, it also surrived a few drops. Key is to use as little as possible (while covering the whole DIE) and putting some electrical tape around the chip to catch anything in case of a leak.
It's awesome when it's applied correctly(tinly, use the the right q-tips to smear it on, used a 2-3mm ball of Grizzly conductonaut on the gpu and a 3-4mm ball on the cpu as some of it stays on the q-tip), i use clear nail polish or high temp electrical tape on the components around the cpu/gpu to avoid shorting something if it for some reason goes wrong. have done it to all my gaming laptops without issues just so i can overclock to a maximum. Did this last spring on my Asus g703VI, and running the i7-7820HK at 4.7ghz(no boost, and a small undervolt) and GTX1080 at +170mhz core and +1200mhz memory at under 60/65 on cpu/gpu degrees celsius att full load, was about 10-15 degrees higher with arctic silver. So no need to run the fans on boost and max anymore. Going to do the same whit the next one, if they release a model with Ryzen 7 5800H cpu and RTX 3080/6800XT gpu(if it's not already done from the factory).
1. Mostly sucker has aluminum inside, it will break because it's liquid gallium not liquid tin 2. Even if the sucker has no aluminum inside, high probably the liquid will stay inside forever
Been using liquid metal for years on my gpu and cpu and never had a problem with it ever getting on any components other than where I applied it. You are supposed to quite literally use only a paper thin layer on the heat sink where it contacts the die and another paper thin layer on the die itself. The person applying the TIM on this board had absolutely no clue what he was doing or his head was planted firmly inside his rectum during application. On another note, while Louis was correct that the temperature drop vs traditional TIM is negligible, the thermal conductivity of the liquid metal is vastly superior when you are overclocking the cpu/gpu. Ive seen plenty of examples with a 15c drop in temps on my personal machines. With that being said, unless you are overclocking heavily or just want the extra cooling and dont mind the risks involved then just get the Arctic MX. Most importantly, dont be stupid and research application methods by watching a few of the dozens of videos showing the process.
That's the first question I had, but I think this liquid metal could get underneath the chips and just spread everywhere on all the connections... Also, I don't know if the ultrasonic cleaner tank is made of aluminium or stainless steel but if it's made of aluminium, gallium can ruin it.
Gallium's melting point is 85.58°F solder melting point is 370 °F you could have use a hair-drier and melted it off. and taken a Solder wick to it. any aluminum that was exposed was corroded by the gallium.
A little disappointed to see you give up so easily. What about using a vacuum to suck that stuff up...literaly, or maybe that vibrating sonic machine that you use to clean boards. I don't know, just suggestions. lol
Then I would have paid for a vacuum pump, for the once-every-three-years that I get sent a board with liquid metal all over it that is unfixable anyway because 12v got sent to CPU/GPU vcore by the gigantic blob of crap shorting everything on the board. I would damn near sooner spend my money on a macbook!
But seriously, this was a total waste of time. I went over it for fun and lols, but once there's that much shit that was short circuited all at the same time as it was attempted to be powered on, even if I remove every damn piece of goop, this shit is done for. Buying a vacuum pump to waste another half hour on this when I am going to have to replace the CPU, the GPU, and a bunch of other stuff...... on a nine year old board..... no.
@@rossmanngroup What about a household vacuum?
Or compressed air.
@@bindkeys a household vacuum is useless. compressed air will blow it around further underneath the GPU, however that GPU is dead to begin with so it doesn't make a difference
@@rossmanngroup sorry but a vacuum pump would have been worth it. Then you could have made a three part video :D
He paid for all of his liquid metal, and he'll be damned if he's not going to use all of it.
He could have used the extra for another pc
@@OhSoTiredMan "He could have used the extra for another pc"
Or two or three or four...
@@budthecyborg4575 Thats enough for 6 i think, if you do it well
Yeah ruin 10 More.
@@johnyang799 it only ruins it if you put a metric crapton on at once and it shorts out everything.
On the plus side, this computer will never be running hot anymore. This stuff really did lower the operating temperature for life.
"Everything is edible...once."
You mean... dead...😂
Yeah a dead laptop runs super cool.
A lot of people don't realize that liquid metal reacts with other metals. That's why those resistors got removed too. Most "users" only focused on the "cooling aspect" of the liquid metal and forgot to research its downsides.
Most, if not all, liquid metal have gallium in them and gallium "eats" aluminium and maybe some other metals but unlike thermal paste it is conductive
so... this is as good class of decisions as put water cooling but DIY half-assed way... good way to make it time bomb. There are people who like these risks, super OC people, but regular people... funny that macbooks got this now, I thought it would've been too much risk and hassle in large scale production.
@@effexon the fuck? MacBooks don‘t have liquid metal inside. This stuff was applied by the owner!
And there is no downside to liquid metal - if you use it correctly. It‘s not mend to be used as an alternative for thermal paste at all. Usually it‘s applied right under the CPU or GPU head/cap so the chips have better contact to the head of the chip and on that had another layer of thermal paste is applied. Using it instead of normal thermal paste is was to risky.
@@effexon I mean, considering the ps5 has liquid metal it wouldn't be too unreasonable to put it in macs
@@mrreisskeks3441 Oh really? I missed that from PS5 launch.
Yea it can be put by professionals but I wouldnt touch it with my clumsy fingers, not worth it to brick machine.
If you're that worried about thermals, maybe don't buy a MacBook...
expensive products are not always the best
im a developer and mac natively supports unix which is why most developers use a mac
@@ahmedel-mahdi7311 I'm a developper and i have yet to see one with a mac.
@@Elepole Most servers are unix based which is why many companies give there workers MacBooks I don’t know what else to tell you, they could give out Linux based machines but most companies who do don’t have the supply apple does
@@ahmedel-mahdi7311 You're no developer xD Do you even Nix, bro?! Your statement is pure garbage.
This is mostly the result of an improper application. With liquid metal you have to work it into a very thin film on both surfaces. Unless the liquid metal is properly spread, it stays "balled-up". It also looks like this person used about three to four times too much. A thin film is all you should have.
Also, in case you do apply a little more than you should, it's common practice to protect surrounding caps and resistors with a coat of finger-nail polish.
None of these things should matter in this instance, as you can't overclock a mac (from my understanding) and liquid metal really only outshines standard thermal paste at higher temperatures, but the cooling solution needs to be there. The thermal bottleneck in this instance isn't the TIM, it's the anemic cooler. At full load or near full load that cooler likely stays heat-soaked, meaning it can't dissipate heat any faster without adding more heatsink surface area or air movement to the equation. Once a cooler is heat-soaked, your choice of TIM is really not going to affect your temperatures much. Liquid Metal is really only beneficial if the cooling system is considerably over-sized for the chip it is cooling. If the cooler barely dissipates the heat under normal workloads (like most laptop cpu/gpu coolers) liquid metal will have practically no benefit once the cooler is heat-soaked, which will take about 20 seconds.
TL;DR, Don't use liquid metal unless you absolutely know what you are doing. And if you know what you are doing, you aren't likely using liquid metal in a laptop.
" And if you know what you are doing, you aren't likely using liquid metal in a laptop."
If you know what are you doing, you will apply LM without problems in laptops.
I'd say, for the most part, liquid metal is for laptops (I'm talking about gaming laptops here, not MacBooks). You don't need LM in a desktop, there is no need to overclock your CPU to such an extent that warrants a delidding and LM application, and using LM without delidding is just plain stupid. If your desktop temps are too high, get a better cooler. if they are high because of your OC, reduce it slightly, you won't notice the difference and if you do, turn off your FPS counter because that will be the only perceivable difference between the added 5 fps you're gonna get from the OC, if you're benchmarking competitively, you're already failing because LN2 will always win.
Laptops, on the other hand, don't have interchangeable coolers and the coolers you get have to deal with CPU, GPU and VRM all in a single small package, getting rid of all that energy as quickly as possible is vital to the stability and longevity of the machine. LM in laptops isn't for overclocking them, its simply to keep them as cool as a desktop given the cooling system is vastly inferior in comparison.
I'd go as far as saying don't buy a top-spec laptop unless you're prepared to apply liquid metal or have a professional apply it for you.
as a pc builder the pc loyalists in these comments are hilarious lol
*100 time as much
Thats true man, my gaming laptop is running hot af. Like 96 degrees with 55 watt power on the cpu. Im going to use conformal coating. When dried i’m going to use small barrier with good electrical tape and then i will apply the LM slowly.
here we see the person tried to use the Verge method of applying thermal paste (AKA the "jackson pollock") but instead with liquid metal.
+1 for the Verge reference
Got a link for the Verge method?
@@mostlymessingabout even better. ruclips.net/video/0vmQOO4WLI4/видео.html
"usually not enough"
"The Verge method" is now an official standard.
If you put the board in the freezer (I recommend in a plastic bag or container) it will harden up and you can flake it off. That will let you get the big chunks but he small ones just have to be wiped away.
I've used dust off upside down to freeze it too if I don't have a freezer.
The CPU is dead anyway.
Probably most of the components are trashed anyway. If the LM got under the CPU/GPU then they would need to be reballed.
I use a different method, i instead put the board on the trash so i can never worry again about the shit that Apple products are, works every time
@@idont3282 I agree with on apple products but there's times that you might get the stuff on something other than a motherboard.
"it's like solder that doesn't dry"
A repair technician kinda nightmare
Perfect for Halloween! 😅
wasn't it the solder that never melt? it sure as hell scared me and pisses me off when i have to desolder something that soldered with such low quality tin.
@@rachmatzulfiqar you mean freeze
Naw, let's take this to plumbing levels of problems. Having to solder copper pipes that have a trickle of water in them because the mainline won't fucking shut entirely.
Actually it "dries" at -100C xD
This is why the PS5 has a foam pad around the die, they know that liquid metal walks.
even then time will tell if it was a smart idea
@@CaffeinatedSentryGnome they probably shook hell out of that thing when testing so hopefully it does..
@@yuriibondar3757 i have no doubt that they did however the final test is still time
@@CaffeinatedSentryGnome oh they would have but like you said, time is the ultimate test.
I didn't see, but I hope they're using nickel plated copper on the cold plate. Aluminum turns to goo when exposed to galium, and bare copper kind of "absorbs" liquid metal, often requiring a reapplication after a year or so.
Why didn't he dipped the board in a bucket full of liquid metal? Clearly not enough on that board!
Less is more with liquid metal, looks like he bought a tube of conductonaut and used the whole tube! Holy cow!!
"I paid for the whole tube, I'm gonna use the whole fuckin tube!"
-This laptop's owner, probably
And forgot to use some conformal coating
@@TeckieWeckie Or any kind of barrier at all.
He used it like it was thermal paste. He didn't even spread the LM over the mating surfaces as per the instructions
I'd say he got exactly what he deserved for not researching how to apply liquid metal in the first place... also for putting it on THAT gpu???
HAHAHAHAHAHA
Idiots will get what idiots deserve.
This Owner: If a little bit of liquid metal is good, a metric f*ck ton has got to be better!
The cpu and gpu are always the same temperature as ambient now, if that's not a sign of good cooling I don't know what is
@@toaster_bloke9999 smort xD
well, the part of instructions that says "turn the on/off switch to the on position" is there for a reason.
"There may be many reasons not to kill you Mr. Henessey, but one of them is NOT that you will be missed by NASA." Brian Cox in The Long Kiss Goodnight.
Someone must have missed the step on conformal coating
Or.. just... Don't use liquid metal on a laptop...
@@RNG-999 or at least don’t pour your whole fucking Tube on the poor thing your supposed to apply the least amount you possibly can because otherwise this might happen
@@RNG-999 most thermal compounds are more than enough to improve temps on a laptop. Kryonaut would be safer and still offer great temps. Ironically, only one Apple TIM is adequate.
less about Conformal Coating, and not using 10-20x too much Liquid Metal.
@@r1oot
not quite - you **can** use Liquid Metal without Plastidipping the entire thing - you just have to be extremely adamant about using as little as possible so that what material is there is happy wetting the surface that is it in contact with.
which is an extraordinarily small amount.
not for average joe to get involved with.
I seen this before. I used a compressor, and it clears all of the stuff about 30 seconds even underneath the chips!
I run my LM in my PCs but this dude is on another level. Cooling underneath the cpu is genius
Needs more liquid metal, think he under applied it.
Usually I just spread LM over the entire PCB, for maximum thermal transfer. It works too, my laptop never warms up past room temperature anymore. Ever.
@@neonlights_12 better make sure to just submerge the computer in liquid metal just in case you miss a part
@Paradoxical Nightmare don't forget to submerge it for a couple days to make sure ever tinny nook and cranny got covered by LM
looks like he followed the famous "verge pc building guide" on the thermal paste LMAO
thats what i was thinking
That computer probably belongs to one of the people who work for the verge
Lyie knows
"he went all bukkake on the thermal paste" lol
Oh fuck I had finally forgotten about that shitshow.
There's a reason the only companies using the stuff commercially in laptops (asus and I believe msi?) have literal rubber dams around the edge of the packages so it doesn't leak all over everything.
Sony will also be using Liquid Metal in every Playstation 5.
Eluktronics has a Liquid Metal thermal choice from the factory. I haven’t had ANY issues with my 10875 or the 2080 Super in my Max-17 Laptop.
Worth every penny.
@@captainzero1 What are your cpu temps under stress test with that?
It just goes to show that people are idiots. This stuff is really dangerous for electronics. Precautions need to be taken.
@@smbu and it is designed such that the liquid metal is contained within a sealed cavity.
From a professional standpoint, fixing this thing is a non-starter. Even if by some miracle you could get this board to work again, you could NEVER warranty the repair. Those circuits have turned to dust, they just don’t know it yet.
He mentioned in a comment that he was just showing this for fun mostly and that it had shorted/long since dead
@@DrunkAncestor yeah, I was thinking more about the endless “why did you give up without doing x thing?” comments. It was kinda cool to see just how much of a mess it really makes, even if there was no chance of success.
What would happen if you cooled the board down, put it in a freezer, then you could take the gallium off in chunks? Maybe as it gradually warmed, so it didn't rip chips off with it. As for the liquid metal under the BGA, could you use a heat gun to heat it up so it's runnier, and flows out from under the chip? I don't know the properties of gallium, so not sure if this is possible.
Getting some Bob Ross vibes at the start of this one.
I wouldn’t call this a happy accident...
Louis is bob ross of repair
It was his birthday yesterday (if he were still alive).
I don't remember mentioning a cum stain on Ross videos.
@@grafknives9544 Someone "beaten the devil out of it"
Not only does that stuff short everything, most formulations eat away solder.
Louis himself pointed that out ages ago
Why use liquid metal then? Im not a really technical person but i hear the new ps5 is also going to use liquid metal
I've had this come through my shop before. I made a custom hose coming out of a shop-vac using gaffers tape to eventually come down to a bendy straw at the end. It worked pretty well.
Did the board survive?
gentlemen, place your bets!
I say no
@@Boutsman u cant imagine what a board can survive.. no joke
Hey Louis, I haven't tried it personally, but I think a solder sucker could work pretty good for this. I imagine you would just have to invert it right after sucking up the metal, should work if you're quick enough. Solder wick might work too. Don't know for sure, just a thought.
me: 'i wonder how bad this will be". rossmann takes the heat sink off: "oh shit!"
0:58 That's a T1000 load if I ever saw one.
😂
Since Louis touched it, will it assimilate him?
Laser Space Ninja, no, unless he’s actually a machine.
"It never eats, it never sleeps, it never stops cumming" - Schwarzenegger
There is a right amount and there is "That will completely f up your device" amount.
The right amount being none.
@@BenderBendingRodriguezOFFICIAL if you don't know what you are doing.
The right amount is "use something that is thermally but not electrically conductive"
@@travcollier you ar gonna have a really hard time finding something that super effective conducting heat but not electricity
@@da4127 It is called "thermal paste" -_-
Been on a cycle of feeling like shit lately. I needed this. Felt nice to smile for a bit.
Aight then, back to work
A vacuum pump such as used in a desoldering tool,( or any vane pump) used with a trap to catch the metal, would work good for picking up this liquid metal. We used to use that setup to collect spilled mercury back in the days when mercury was used in blood pressure apparatus and lab equipment in hospitals. A plastic micropipette or eye dropper makes a good nozzle.
Liquid metal, also known as Gallium loves to "invade" solid metals, especially aluminum. Just search "gallium vs can". Also no hate, but it was done by an macbook owner after all, just saying.
It also has indium and tin, not just gallium.
It's not gallium, it's an alloy, which has significantly different properties compared to pure gallium. It's already lost most of it amalgamation potential and isn't likely to "invade" other metals to such a degree, especially if we're talking about nickel-plated heatsinks and such. The aluminium oxide layer will also slow it down significantly, you're only going to see dramatic "Ermahgerd, it broke it down in an hour!" reactions when you expose the pure aluminium underneath to pure gallium, but that's highly unlikely on multiple levels.
Also, gallium is almost exclusively used in the manufacture of semiconductors and various other components in the electronics industry, so every computer out there already has a small amount of gallium (alloy) in most of the chips. It's not some doomsday gray goo that instantly destroys everything it touches. The short-circuit possibility is certainly a much greater issue with liquid metal thermal compounds.
@@MunyuShizumi it clearly fucked the solder on the components on that gpu
@@Myemnhk It did, but if it were pure gallium, half the SMDs would fall off while cleaning them with a Q-tip. Considering the absolutely insane amount of liquid metal, I'd be surprised if the aluminium case itself didn't start falling apart in places. Fun fact though: if it were lead-based solder, you'd barely see a difference, gallium dissolves most metals used in lead-free solder quite well but doesn't affect lead really (and only lightly affects tin).
It's not that liquid metal thermal compounds don't dissolve stuff, they just do it rather slowly compared to pure gallium. Regarding heatsinks, if it's nickel-plated, it'll be fine. If it isn't, it'll get damaged somewhat (aluminium quite badly, copper very lightly). Personally, I'm sticking to my MX-4 as Rossmann suggests, but I wouldn't call liquid metal thermal compounds something inherently dangerous if applied correctly, the main issue is that they're not idiot-proof (as seen in the video) and don't offer tremendous benefits compared to typical thermal paste.
How do you even do that, all the liquid metal syringes come with "Use a cotton swab" in the instructions.
Probly just squirted the syringe too hard. See Linus, did the exact same crap.
the problem is they didnt take into account where it could flow. liquid metal is awesome in the right application with the right precautions. i feel like if he had properly coated the board ahead of time it would have been fine even if it came off. but you can tell the person used WAY TOO MUCH liquid metal. and also it seems you have to rub it in on the mating surfaces to get it to stick well. so many wrongs i understand louis's hatred of this situation, if the end user was a bit smarter or did a little research he wouldnt have even been here saying this. so IMO this is an end user error. find better end users. or in louis's case this is money. so i guess chalk it up to the food chain lol
@@Blox117 cause you won't be able to get it off the components. Then it's like hard solder, so you've to heat it up again an whoops, you're fucked up again^^
I'm running a laptop with liquid metal for over a year and it's working like charm. Here's a heavy layer 8 problem. Way to much liquid metal and absolutely no "defense" for near components, so they can't get shorted, if some tiny (really tiny) sprinkles of liquid get of the DIEs.
That's a brilliant example of "more isn't the best way to do everything".
Sry for my bad grammar, I'm from Germany and got stuck on local sayings, which can't be great transfered to English.
Cotton swab is used to spread the liquid metal on the surface
Hi Louis! I saw the pinned comment, reading it was just for the "lol". But if you happen to deal with Liquid metal and do really aim to recover the mess i would suggest you to put the board in the fridge/freezer. The melting point of this liquid metal is generally around 20-35°c so putting it in the fridge/freezer should make it more solid and easier to scratch it away or pick it up with your tweezer!
This looks like a scene straight out of Terminator.
Looks like the T-1000 blew his load on it.
look like somebody spilled mercury inside
@@freeman2399 rofl
I've been applying liquid metal to GPU's and my laptop multiple times, and never got a spillage, but you need to take your time and probably even reapply it a few times because its hard to work with. I usually capton-tape off all the surrounding SMDs just for safety and also thought about possibility to make a barrier out of lithium grease around the chip (as it is non-conductive, heat-resistant and so on), but usually been too lazy to add it. I wouldn't recommend any casual user to apply LM if you're not an overclocker or hardware enthusiast
"an overclocker or hardware enthusiast" doesnt make you smarter or an engineer just because you repasted a heatsink.
liquid metal has zero value in term of cooling and even regular thermal paste last years.
When I replaced the toothpaste in my blade 15, I made a protective dam with nail polish around the gpu die, as well as using WAY less liquid metal. You really only need a tiny little bit.
Louis Rossmann in the Upside Down: "Hey everybody, how's it going? Today we're going to go over how to properly apply liquid metal to your MacBook. Step One: Don't. This is why you don't do self-repairs. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk."
Apple: *confused Tim Cook noises*
I mean, I've never even used liquid metal, but I researched it enough to know how to apply it! That same research told me to not bother using it, but shit, this fucktard BOUGHT the stuff and didn't even LOOK at a fucking youtube video on how to apply it??? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
@@ballsrgrossnugly Dude bought the whole tube and he had to use the whole tube lol. That shit is crazy expensive.
@@jellybr3ak Not to mention you're just paying for branding tbh. Gallium is actually pretty cheap if you buy it direct.
@@jellybr3ak And it also eats metal over time I hear... such a good idea to put it on a $500 cpu or gpu! XD (I certainly hope there was no aluminium in there!)
@@ballsrgrossnugly Only some types of metal.
That gallium goes and bonds with aluminum at the molecular level. Yikes.
Doesn’t it only melt at human body temp, mercury might be more likely as its liquid at room temp
@@donniehdea9281 No I think gallium makes a amalgam with aluminium. A very popular reaction, people tried to use it on locks or something.
@@donniehdea9281 It's gallium. Mercury isn't electrically conductive to my knowledge (could be wrong) so it wouldn't have shorted it, but also it's a consumer product so it probably just wouldn't be a highly toxic chemical.
Edit: I was wrong. Still a horrible idea to put free mercury in your computer unless you like getting violently ill.
A video on youtube by Backyard Scientist shows the host putting a couple drops of gallium on a scoooter deck, and a bicycle frame. they were going to allow it to react for a couple hours, then try riding. An hour or so in, they heard a crash, they find the bike frame dissolved, which allowed the bike to collapse.
The scooter did a little better, he rode it about 10 yards before it collapsed too.
Someone online said it is illegal to trasport any amount of it on a commercial flight due to its volitle reaction when it contacts aluminum, it sounds believable, but I didn't fact check that info.
More like the nobler Ga forces the less noble Al to give up its electrons and the electron-short Al atoms become ions that flow into the liquid connecting the galvanic pair. The leaving ions cause the decay of the less noble metal. A liquid metal can double as the required electrolytic fluid between the two metals. This is known as 'galvanic corrosion.' With two solids, the electrolyte is usually water.
Btw, Louis. You can get some very cheap vaccum pumps that would solve this way better than tweezers and cotton swabs. One of those with an in line liquid trap(which can be cobbled together with basically any bottle that can hold up to a slight vaccum) and a syringe tip on the end would make quick work of cleaning that crap up... At least the bits of it that aren't underneath things.
Then I would have paid for a vacuum pump, for the once-every-three-years that I get sent a board with liquid metal all over it that is unfixable anyway because 12v got sent to CPU/GPU vcore by the gigantic blob of crap shorting everything on the board. I would damn near sooner spend my money on a macbook.
@@rossmanngroup I mean, fair enough, but for what it's worth my liquid isolated vacuum system cost all of $6 and 10 minutes of assembly time.
I delided my i7 8700K and put on liquid metal directly on the die. Used some nail polish to cover any blank contacts and glued everything together with heat resistant silicone glue. Got my Temps down by ~20° and has been working fine for the last 2 years.
Was my first and so far last time doing that.
What I'm trying to say is, if done right it can make a huge performance difference. If done wrong it can wreck your expensive stuff.
You can remove liquid metal with a very fine nozzle + suction. The syringe that e.g. Conductonaut is packed in will work very well for sucking up any excess liquid metal back in. The syringe has a very fine metal "straw" at the end.
When linus did this, he got like a 8 degree C reduction under load.
He also said you should absolutely not do it...
Screw the liquid metal, it will stop working after Linus drops it anyway.
As soon as I saw liquid metal all over the board my first reaction, "yep she's dead jim". Liquid metal is nasty once it gets on your electronic components.
This video reminded me of an old sh*tshow that I took back in University Repair Class in which we took broken parts and machines from students and tried to fix them or diagnose the problem. So, one day arrived a MASSIVE Toshiba laptop with all the gadgets one would expect from a desktop PC like a subwoofer, massive heatsinks, DVD-R/W, a full array of USB/Firewire, and a MXM graphics card back in 2011-2012. So he said that the laptop turned on but he had no screen or external image after he tried to clean it himself. Young back then, I just thought he simply either shorted something or didn't plug some important cable. Long story short, after it took 2 millennia to open it I arrived at the CPU-GPU heatsink combo and I see something that made my heart drop. In the MXM area, there was this white fluid all-over the card. At first, I thought he just put too much paste on the GPU effectively short-circuit the thing around it, and after a quick bath in the sonic cleaner, we could get it working. Nope, after I lifted the heatsink I was met with absolute horror. The ENTIRE MXM card and the CPU were flooded with cheapa*s thermal paste top to bottom, the reason? when he cleaned it he threw away the thermal pads for the VRAM and the GPU controller and he either didn't buy new because he forgot or didn't care to spend a few cents more or didn't know, so he used a CRAP ton of thermal paste on them. The thermal paste was the cheapest sh*t you could buy, not even eBay or AliExpress sold that stuff, it was like a face cream or sun cream protector that got put on a syringe and slapped "THERMAL PASTE" on it. When the VRAM/GPU heated up it melted and got EVERYWHERE especially under the VRAM. I didn't even bother, I simply told my teacher that the laptop was LONG gone, not just the MXM card which we thought and I simply put it back together and gave it back to the guy. He was furious we didn't even try to fix it and I simply told him "That's what you get for buying stuff without knowledge and try to do it on the cheap." He wasn't happy at all, the only thing I could offer was to make a backup of his data since the drive was ok, but he wanted to give him a "temporary laptop" to finish his assignments, which we didn't of course.
He probably did not understand the difference between thermal paste and thermal pads.
A can of Dust Off "liquid air" goes a long way toward cleaning up GalInStan cleanly. It has a freezing point of about -20C, so if you freeze the board hard enough to solidify it, you can then pick pieces off. Doesn't really help with the stuff under components, but worth knowing.
Also, you can mix hot solder in until it forms an alloy that is not liquid at room temperature.
It was my first thought. Use freeze spray and just sweep it away with toothbrush:D
@Louis Rossmann
Here's a tip as far as removing LM goes:
While it's mostly gallium it has some additives to bring the tripple-point (ie. the temperature at which it will solidify) down to below what they consider reasonable ambient temperature.
For Thermal Grizzly conductonaut this will be around 5-8'ish degrees. Other compounds will be somewhat similar.
So if you want to harden it to easily chip it away (it won't griip as hard like solder) then you can just use a common electronics-troubleshooting freeze spray to cool it temporarily.
A common compressed-air can held upside down works the same role in a pinch. You can pre-cool the whole board in the freezer for an hour or so to give you more time to work and not use so much spray.
But when LM comes into contact with solder-points like here, or important aluminum parts - it's a kind of moot point. It will chemically react and drastically weaken the materials.
Any soldered component compromised by LM can no longer be trusted. If it didn't fall off right away - it probably will in time. This is why you don't mess with LM without thoroughly insulating beforehand.
Halloween Horror Story. I'm a tech enthusiast and I have never once had a problem with liquid metal...
Maybe because I don't squirt the entire syringe onto my CPU.
A pin-head size amount, on the die, with the included black q-tip.
Liquid metal on a Mac? It's not a GPU to have performance gains. IT LITERALLY HAS NO PERFORMANCE
Super wrong, LM will definitely give a huge performance boost: it's a laptop, and as all macbooks it is not TDP but only thermal limited.. Why do you write about something you clearly know nothing about? DId you ever actually used a macbook pro?
@@gabrielecarbone8235 the macbook is power limited most of the time lol
@@gabrielecarbone8235 salty as fuck about macbooks I see lol
@@DW_25 you clearly never ran intel power gadget on a macbook, and on a liquid metal / open chassis with vents one
tried on a 2015 4980hq and was pulling almost 70w no stop, 750 cinebench r15
it is always a thermal limit
@@mitcHELLOworld just about people that know nothing ad take time to write, lol
Liquid metal is not thermal paste! It can and will fuck up you day/pc. You use just enough to cover the die and the surface of the cooler with a very thin layer. If there are exposed components near the die, you can put a little amount of clear nail acrylic to encapsulate it to prevent shorts. Even still, a high grade thermal paste and proper mounting can do just a good. Some times a washer is needed to increase mounting pressure or removing a little material, like chamfering the screw holes can allow better contact with the heatsink/heatpipe. Linus had a video where they just made better contact with the heat sink with a good thermal paste and it really helped the thermals.
I'd slather everything except the contact point with conformal coating before attempting such a thing. And even then, it's just fucking stupid for what...a single degree?
i would never use liquid metal in a laptop
I've always been of the idea that liquid metal is stupid. Not only is it conductive and super easy to fuck up, but it also contains gallium which will eat away solder and traces, even if applied correctly! Fuck that shit, just use a good thermal paste...
Whoever did this just didn't RTFM, there is no helping these people.
How about do not use liquid metal at all and if you really want a faster computer then go buy a faster computer. You people looking for something for nothing or just cutting in the line of life disgust me.
I switched to graphite cooling pads instead of paste or metal. No mess and reusable.
Being someone that like repairing my own stuff, I realized that with normal thermal paste it gets squeezed to the sides always I don’t understand why people think that liquid stuff is not going to be squeezed out...
You are basically supposed to paint it on with the supplied qtips in a super thin layer, I've used it loads and never had it run. You DO NOT just put a blob of it in the middle and let the cooler spread it out with mounting pressure.
Looks like terminator couldn't hold back lookin at that hot "mother" board
Underrated comment
Splooosh....
Liquid metal isn't bad, The problem is this dude used way too much just like the people who get a tube of thermal paste and think they need to use the whole tube.
at least most thermal pastes do no harm if you over use them, they just make a mess.
the only problem that excess of thermal paste will not kill your board
He paid for the whole tube & he’ll be damned if he doesn’t use the whole tube
not only that but he obiviously didnt apply it he just put a junk on it and pressed it down lol. soeven if he had not spilled there was large junks of the DIE without anything and would have burned
Macbook Terminated by T-1000, must be the best crossover ever seen.
I have found the purely mechanical desoldering pumps to be very good for sucking up liquid metal, assuming you realized you shorted stuff before you ran power through it.
Pro tip: The nozzel adapters that come with Conductonaut kits can also fit (or be made to fit) on the tips of the desoldering pumps. Make sure to clean out the desoldering pump frequently, like after every pump, or you risk spraying it everywhere.
If this is like solder, maybe use solder suction tools? like, vacuum ones? Without heating them up.
Another idea is probably shaking it off, possibly by swinging violently OUTSIDE the lab?
Yet another idea is to wipe some kind of napkin across the board - it will leave residue but that can be cleaned off normally.
I wonder what it would do if you hit it with a solder wick or a pump or if you had like a industrial parts washer to blast it with alcohol
I was thinking that too given how well it was sticking the exposed pads.
I won't recommend some experiments in this direction. LM is very aggressive against most other metals and can destruct them fast. LM can aluminium "melting" in seconds, so don't do it^^
You had it at hit it. You just hit the board with a good rap and loose junk should fly off of it. I do it stripping boards. I heat the board up over a solder pot then real quick before the solder solidifies I slap it in an empty cardboard box. Solder and parts go flying into the box. With liquid metal you could take your time even. It is not like the stuff is going to solidify.
@@PsychEngel it doesnt melt it , it makes it brittle. and it takes hours not seconds...
Liquid metal will "infest" and "crawl" along the metals. If I got a board with spilled liquid metal, I'd just toss it.
It's real fun stuff, eats aluminum for breakfast like a real glutton - and even solder joints get yummy yummy'd!
Little Macbook is gonna need more than a nice wipeup if it ever wants to see the light of day again..
A lot of times it will stick to a q-tip. You can also use a needle syringe to suck a lot of it up if it's pooled.
I use liquid metal on almost everything and yes, I've made some big messes with it.
You have to basically pressure wash with alcohol if you want to remove *_ALL_* of the gallium. Takes about 2 gallons of high-pressure spray to flush the board. And even then, you'd need to replace any aluminum component that contacted the gallium alloy.
Liquid damage they say... Looks like the T1000 just shat himself
HAve you ever tried thermal pads between the mobo and backplate? Depending on the model it can give significant performance boost by keeping the machine from throttling under load
Louis doesn't use MacBooks, he fixes them, it's literally all over his channel.
@@remty516 I’ve Lichurully been following this channel for lichurully 7 years
@@medmusic7977 he means between the other side of the board and the aluminium chassis, not between the cpu and the heatsink.
What Jorno said. I know he uses a thinkpad. Does everyone think I’m retarded for asking if he’s ever experimented with MacBook cooling?
@@taylorsharp5928 I'm don't think badly of you, but i would imagine Louis would rather just work on another mac book and make some more money than trying to reinvent the wheel. Also, even if he did find that a thermal pad helps, it might be a tuff sell for his clients. Your pulling the head off the board and dumping it into the chassis. Some people will not like that and might even feel cheated that they paid for it. Not worth the hassle imo.
can you use a magnet?
a vacuum?
compressed air?
maybe set it on a helicopters rotor blade and let it spin off?
I don't think that stuff is magnetic
Once that stuff touches the solder it makes the solder melt at near room temp. Similar to a product called chip quick to make solder melt at a lower temp for removing delicate parts. So even if you clean everything once the machine is turned on and warmed up all the contaminated SMD's fall off.
No one here seems to get it. Even if he had a magic wand that removed every single bit of liquid metal, it's already blown up the CPU and GPU (probably more stuff too) by shorting a higher voltage rail to their pins. So unless you have a spare CPU and GPU and the time/equipment to replace them, this board is toast.
Maybe a microfiber cloth? I don’t know, I’ve never worked with liquid metal. But I was thinking maybe try something besides a Q-tip since that obviously wasn’t working too well. Maybe Google “liquid metal clean-up off of PCB”?
Don’t know. Looks like quite a mess that I wouldn’t want to have to deal with either. I’ll say that much.
I worked in instrumentation in a Refinery in another life and when we cleaned up small mercury spills we used hazmat kits with what looked like little Brillo pads of really fine spun metal. They soaked up the mercury like a sponge. I bet these pads would soak up that liquid metal crap too.
www.absorbentsonline.com/Mercury_Spill_Kit.htm
Liquid metal tends to want to stick and pool to itself, but as you saw with the tweezers, it can also stick to other metals. However if something is made of aluminum, it will dissolve it in short order unless it has oxidized coating. To clean off the liquid metal from the caps, don't use a Q-tip. Just use your fingers, with toilet paper and the toilet paper coated with alcohol. You can then push the liquid metal around and then actually scoop it up with the toilet paper. This works very well as long as you can actually get to it (e.g. if it isn't under the green chip housing!). You can use LM's tendency to attach to itself to aid in removing it.
Been using LM for years and never had a issue.
Would of done over 100 applications for myself and others, Its all in the prep. Mask everything off you dont want it getting onto and use the minimum ammount so it doesnt spill.
Easiest way to remove it is with another syringe to suck it back up. Or if its old and dried out then a little bit of heat to get it soft again and desoldering braid sucks it up. But iv also seen people remove it the oppsite way by chilling it until its solid then just picking it off in bits.
How can liquid metal dry out? There's no water in it. It's probably the other way around, that it collects more and more crap which makes it go more viscous.
If it does indeed "dry out" then that means that 1) its a compound, which I believe does not apply to every liquid metal paste, and 2) that the liquid metal component has evaporated, which probably doesn't mean good things for your health if you breathed that air. That is, if it didn't immediately condense somewhere else on the board where it's cooler, potentially shorting stuff.
And even in that case, drying as a verb is usually reserved for water drying.
You need to “wet” the Q-tip first (with gallium based TIM) then it’ll attract the other stuff.
Honestly, just stick it in the sonic, it’ll come off and sink to the bottom
BTW, I use the stuff on my CPU and GPU’s. I’ve been fine for 4 years.
Doesn't it bond with the copper of the heatsink base, "eating" it overtime?
@@red9350 no, gallium based TIM does not affect copper.
It will destroy aluminum however, so NEVER use it with anything made of aluminum.
Liquid metal is fine, I've been using it for over 2 years. The guy who applied it is the problem.
When used in the right way it does lower temps by more than a few C. I de-lided my 8700k and used thermal grizzly conductonaut with a rockit IHS and my temps went from TJ max 100 C to a max of 56C under torture test. I have the 8700k OC to 5Ghz all core.
How does this differ than Thermal Compound?
I know this is risky, but still depending on the entire cooling system (pipe, heatsink, fan) right,
if just to get -10-20* lower then i might go with thermal paste instead? correct me.
Properly applied liquid metal hasn't moved in 5 years, and I've put it directly on the die too on my desktop.
Hell yeah bruther. Delid gang gang.
its fine in a desktop but in a laptop that is going to be at all kinds of angles while hot is no good
If sony can do it with the PS5, so can you. Lol.
Just need to make a foam seal that goes around the outside of the die, and use nail polish or conformal coating on the substrate to cover any caps or pads. And of course, don’t apply the entire syringe like this clown did.
@@imchris5000 I've got a LM'ed Razer Blade Stealth 13 that's been running fine for probably near a year now. Still running fine - if you aren't a fool, you'll be fine. Just use it very cautiously and make sure to not splooge it all over the place, and you'll be fine. Lots of people make the mistake of treating it like regular paste and just covering everything with a blob.
For me - it's been totally worth it. After LM and using throttlestop i'm getting pretty significant thermal gains.
I de-lidded and LMed an old processor running my HTPC for funsies, but yeah don't do this in anything mobile like a laptop or phone.
The person that sent you this has to be trolling you man. The only way I can see this happening is that they thought it was like normal paste and they just blobbed the hell out of both chips. Great video and gave me a good giggle in what's a boring morning. Thank you
Solder sucker? Syringe? Hell how about a Hoover you aren't too attached to?
Beat me to it, was about to ask him why he does not use a solder sucker. I would think that would suck this right up without an issue.
@Louiss Rossman, is there some technical reason to not use a solder sucker and instead use a qtip that seemed to be a nightmare to work with?
I won't recommend some experiments in this direction. LM is very aggressive against most other metals and can destruct them fast. LM can aluminium "melting" in seconds, so don't do it^^
@@Halaster He has said before he hates using solder suckers and that they always jam up on him, so my guess is he doesnt have one to use. Board was fried to begin with though
@@Halaster if the solder suction device has any exposed Aluminium, its a write off. Lq metal has Galium in it and that eats Aluminium. Could have used Goot Wik tho 👌
@@IcecalGamer Was not talking about an aluminum one, there are ABS ones that are cheap and work fine. They are cheap enough that even if you only got 20 or 30 uses out of them before you had to toss them it would be worth it, but they last way longer than that. If Lq metal though reacts with ABS I suppose that would be a good reason. Was just confused since the method he was using seemed like it was super annoying for him, and he was even trying to pick the stuff up with a tweezer, when I expect an ABS solder sucker would have sucked it right up, including out from the cracks that he was saying it seeped into. I could be completely wrong as I have never worked with the stuff before, but from just watching his video and seeing how it behaved it LOOKED like it would have worked far better than qtips. :)
Which is why I was asking him if he had any input on why he didnt use it. Others did reply though that he does not like Solder Suckers.
to remove use your copper braid solder wick but instead of applying heat use dry ice. It will solidify to the solder wick
Can you use vacuum for that? I mean, there is a cheap desoldering pump, but I guess you can adapt pretty much any vacuum cleaner for that.
The lesson here: liquid metal is not flux
Can confirm its also not lube.
It sure fluxed this board up though.
@@ericov.o.2399 what are you trying to say?
@@manatster peepee hurts
Also also, for those who are saying he gave up too quick - Liquid metal corrodes every metal it touches that's not protected by nickel. Gold, solder, aluminum, all that's corroded and toasted. Whoever applied that liquid metal absolutely ruined their computer beyond help.
@@mycosys Exactly, all those poor caps and resistors that got bathed in it are toast like a ghost. D:
@@backslash_iii this begs the question how much does nickel plating the heat plate (cooler surface) cost?. LM if applied correctly is definitely worth the upgrade.
In my day even crap TIM was still conductive. That never happens unless the folks that apply it do crack. Much less with the super high wetting properties of galium based alloys. I mean they are conductive and the wet the crap out of stuff, blessing, and a curse, you have to apply it right. It was not the issue with liquid metal TIM, that was a user error.
I was really thinking about regular thermal paste as nonconductive, thanks for sharing your experience
@Louis: thank you for this video!!! I just built myself a computer ground up, first time in 20 years, and the thermal paste was my biggest, yet cheapest, hurdle.
I didn't want water cooling because I'm too amateur to risk putting water near all the brand new parts, the fan cooler was an easy decision but lots of people were trying to sell me on liquid metal - I didn't even know it existed. I went with normal thermal paste in the end to stick with what I know - I didn't even consider, and nobody even mentioned, the risks like what you've just shown.
I'm glad I didn't choose the liquid metal, I definitely would have spilled some or applied too much, and I would have cleaned it thinking nothing more, and power on only to fry my board and my soul.
I was even shocked to see the little pins were no longer on the CPU - they're in the board now!! Still didn't make installing the CPU less stressful, I bent and broke pins on a chip decades ago and literally cried because it took so long to save up for and gone within minutes of opening the packaging.
Anyway, I enjoy your videos and am appreciative that you take the time to create videos showcasing your skills, passion and educative knowledge. Thank you!
Kind Regards,
Nathan Adams.
Ive used LM once and after that I stopped doing it because it left a stain on my heatsink, you also have to be careful not to use too much because if you screw it down and it spills out it will cause problems for you. How do you clean this up?. too risky for something like 1-2 degrees lower temps compared to a traditional thermal paste.
Three important things to know about liquid metal conductant:
1) when used properly it rates in the to 2% most effective heat conductors you can possibly use.
2) when used properly it doesn't degrade like mixed thermal conductors making it perfect for high flow server's.
3) if used improperly it will obliterate everything about your computer you enjoy and laugh about it.
BE CAREFUL WITH IT! ITS LITERALLY A LIQUID HEAT/ELECTRICAL CONDUIT!
Why not just use a soldering wick or solder sucker. Basically the same thing one would do with regular melted solder.
because this litteraly make amalgam with other metal like mercure this board is toasted the liquid metal is probably eating the processor and the gpu internally at this point
Omg I've never seen his hands in these videos, I thought black gloves were just permanently attached
Well, he's doing a post mortem not a repair, so...
Well, over time the black gloves gets absorbed by his body and changes shape, so that is why he needs to add a new layer every now and then.
You just caught him between his changes.
inverse disney character
Just a thought could you not simply put the board in your oven upside down at 100C to remove the liquid metal? This should raise the flow rate of the LM higher than surface tension making the LM drop free of the board.
holy smokes, that's a lot of liquid metal!
you only need a very small amount, about the size of a surface mount resister (or even smaller). It will spread to the size of the chip easily with the spreader/q-tip.
I wonder if you could suck the liquid metal using some de soldering braided wick.
would the capillary action work since it's a liquid.
two things:
if that mess behaves like liquid solder maybe wick coud work.
Also I noticed many tech youtubers shilling for liquid metal
Yea if applied properly, it is by far the best TIM for air/liquid cooled CPUs. Not the safest, and won't always make a performance difference, but for laptops in particular it does an amazing job at helping cool the cpu/gpu... If you can properly apply it.
We've finally found Louis Rossman's match and Arch Nemesis...a 1ml tube of liquid metal. Hahahaha.
Liquid metal is good when you know how to apply it. It's just that this guy didn't. He assumed that you apply it the same as regular paste and this happened.
I know exactly what he did. He probably never spreads his regular thermal paste either. He put a big drop in the center and just pressed his heatsink on top of it. All he had to do was watch one video beforehand.
@@cemsengul16 You don't need to spread regular thermal paste. That only really helps if you're trying to conserve it. Liquid metal has to be spread though.
This is one reason I never bought into liquid metal. I personally really like IC Diamond, but it is impossible to completely remove after application, and it practically glues the heat sink onto the heat spreader. It's not electrically conductive, though, so that's a plus.
I've found that you tend to need to break the surface tension of the liquid metal enough that it attaches to the Q-tip and then once you have some on there, the rest will follow, you may need a syringe to extract some of the excess from the Q-tip after a while but it's helped me in the past when I had more compound applied than needed. I used liquid metal because my cpu was maxing out at around 100*C whilst building lighting for a project and the change in paste was enough to drop the temperature down far enough to stablize my workstation.
Even IF somehow that macbook was ok after having all that stuff shorted, the liquid metal would have likely infiltrated most of the solder joints and made them really brittle. That macbook would never be the same. Other than lighting it on fire that might be one of the most thorough ways to fuck it beyond repair even with the most patient repair shop on planet earth.
Easy. Just soak it in liquid nitrogen and give the board a twist like an ice cube tray. That way we can forget this one and not try to XOC the macbook next time.
Edit: but seriously what about a plain desoldering pump? right after the mistake I mean. Before it rots away the solder.
theres probably some liquid metal on the aluminium, and liquid metal has gallium in it. not to mention the fried gpu/cpu from shorting it out
what's the point when the board is already shorted
@@mychem20 well like of you just fucked it up and you see the problem, you don't need to power it on and seal it's fate.
I'm just talking about removing the tim in general not saving this particular board. That's why I said turn it to dust in the first place lol
Yes the person who spilled that crap on the board should have fixed it or had it fixed rather than putting it together and trying to turn it on.
LM isn't even compatible with LN2 lol
Liquid metal is the worst thing for laptop reliability since lead-free solder :(
Got some on mine for 4 years now.
One of the two parts holding the screen broke, but I never had problems with the liquid metal.
And yes, it also surrived a few drops.
Key is to use as little as possible (while covering the whole DIE) and putting some electrical tape around the chip to catch anything in case of a leak.
it pollutes the solder weakening the joints too.
Get Noctua NT-H2 it is good
It's awesome when it's applied correctly(tinly, use the the right q-tips to smear it on, used a 2-3mm ball of Grizzly conductonaut on the gpu and a 3-4mm ball on the cpu as some of it stays on the q-tip), i use clear nail polish or high temp electrical tape on the components around the cpu/gpu to avoid shorting something if it for some reason goes wrong. have done it to all my gaming laptops without issues just so i can overclock to a maximum. Did this last spring on my Asus g703VI, and running the i7-7820HK at 4.7ghz(no boost, and a small undervolt) and GTX1080 at +170mhz core and +1200mhz memory at under 60/65 on cpu/gpu degrees celsius att full load, was about 10-15 degrees higher with arctic silver. So no need to run the fans on boost and max anymore.
Going to do the same whit the next one, if they release a model with Ryzen 7 5800H cpu and RTX 3080/6800XT gpu(if it's not already done from the factory).
Louis I thought you're enough of a professional to know that liquid solder is removed with solder sucker, why you didn't use it?
1. Mostly sucker has aluminum inside, it will break because it's liquid gallium not liquid tin
2. Even if the sucker has no aluminum inside, high probably the liquid will stay inside forever
Been using liquid metal for years on my gpu and cpu and never had a problem with it ever getting on any components other than where I applied it. You are supposed to quite literally use only a paper thin layer on the heat sink where it contacts the die and another paper thin layer on the die itself. The person applying the TIM on this board had absolutely no clue what he was doing or his head was planted firmly inside his rectum during application. On another note, while Louis was correct that the temperature drop vs traditional TIM is negligible, the thermal conductivity of the liquid metal is vastly superior when you are overclocking the cpu/gpu. Ive seen plenty of examples with a 15c drop in temps on my personal machines. With that being said, unless you are overclocking heavily or just want the extra cooling and dont mind the risks involved then just get the Arctic MX. Most importantly, dont be stupid and research application methods by watching a few of the dozens of videos showing the process.
Maybe throwing that into your ultrasonic cleaner could help
That's the first question I had, but I think this liquid metal could get underneath the chips and just spread everywhere on all the connections...
Also, I don't know if the ultrasonic cleaner tank is made of aluminium or stainless steel but if it's made of aluminium, gallium can ruin it.
Gallium's melting point is 85.58°F
solder melting point is 370 °F
you could have use a hair-drier and melted it off. and taken a Solder wick
to it.
any aluminum that was exposed was corroded by the gallium.