Direct die cooling

stupid candy · February 22

Hello,

I wanna unlid my cpu, but i'm really scared of killing my pc with liquid metal. So is applying liquid metal almost as safe as applying thermal paste ? No risk of it flowing when i put my pc back to vertical ?

Is it completly dumb to use a good thermal paste instead of liquid metal on the die ? Liquid metal is better than thermal paste, but does it worth taking the risk ?

WereCat · February 22

The biggest risk when deliding... is the delid. If you're scared of applying LM then don't delid

But to give you an answer, LM is a pain to work with and there definitely are risks involved which you can reduce if you take your time and cover exposed components near it with a nail polish or electrical tape, etc...

It can flow if you use too much of it and don't let it bond. You want avoid using it on aluminium, tin, etc... because it will eat it up. It can also diffuse into copper so over time you may need to reapply it again on copper surfaces but the bigger risk there is that when it diffuses it also tends to harden so you may also rip out part of the die with it.

Or you can just get PTM 7950 and use that instead which will get you almost all the benefits of LM except it's non-conductive and can be more difficult to obtain and will probably perform just slightly worse.