Liquid metal with copper?

[Aleksey]

I am thinking about replacing thermal paste with liquid metal (CooLaboratory Liquid Pro), but when I was looking for the information, I found this video:

 

It shows that after some time the heat conductive material, presumably copper, was damaged by liquid metal. I am not sure if this is cooper, might be some alloy. In any case this is very disturbing. I do not want to replace the thermal paste just to find a year later that it performs worse than with a compound.

[MaratM]

Where are you planning to use LM? Is it delidding or is it notebook heatsink or is it between IHS and a cooler?

[W-L]

7 hours ago, Aleksey said:

I am thinking about replacing thermal paste with liquid metal (CooLaboratory Liquid Pro), but when I was looking for the information, I found this video:

It shows that after some time the heat conductive material, presumably copper, was damaged by liquid metal. I am not sure if this is cooper, might be some alloy. In any case this is very disturbing. I do not want to replace the thermal paste just to find a year later that it performs worse than with a compound.

It created an amalgam with the copper which is normal the copper structure itself is not damaged but it just need to be cut back to remove the thin layer of liquid metal. If you do plan to use liquid metal on a CPU especially on a laptop your best to conformal coat the board to ensure if any material spills it does not short out

[tikker]

It's normal for the copper block to stain, as the liquid metal forms an alloy with it. This reaction is relatively fast even at room temperature already, hence why you need to reapply it so soon.

 

 

On a side note, have there been tests about how much this staining affects the heatsinks real-world cooling performance?

[Aleksey]

On 8/6/2018 at 10:37 PM, W-L said:

It created an amalgam with the copper which is normal the copper structure itself is not damaged but it just need to be cut back to remove the thin layer of liquid metal. If you do plan to use liquid metal on a CPU especially on a laptop your best to conformal coat the board to ensure if any material spills it does not short out

I am not looking for trouble. I am assembling a server machine for heavy computational tasks (machine learning stuff). I want it to run smoothly without being monitored all the time. So I thought that keeping it cool would be a good idea. I am thinking about delidding the CPU and installing a liquid cooler with a copper base directly on the die. I was thinking about liquid metal, but since it may destroy the cooler surface and eventually need replacement, maybe it's not such a good idea. A decent thermal paste would do better. And if it works, then I thought maybe I could use liquid metal on my MacBook Pro. But now I am not sure if it worth the risk. Even if I install it correctly, it may eventually fail because the liquid metal will penetrate cooper and stop doing it's job.

[W-L]

46 minutes ago, Aleksey said:

I am not looking for trouble. I am assembling a server machine for heavy computational tasks (machine learning stuff). I want it to run smoothly without being monitored all the time. So I thought that keeping it cool would be a good idea. I am thinking about delidding the CPU and installing a liquid cooler with a copper base directly on the die. I was thinking about liquid metal, but since it may destroy the cooler surface and eventually need replacement, maybe it's not such a good idea. A decent thermal paste would do better. And if it works, then I thought maybe I could use liquid metal on my MacBook Pro. But now I am not sure if it worth the risk. Even if I install it correctly, it may eventually fail because the liquid metal will penetrate cooper and stop doing it's job.

It won’t damage it, the amalgam is superficial but if you want to have less worry your best to just get a good quality thermal paste like MX-4. 

[MaratM]

If you want to use LM on direct die and worry about LM “destroying” copper use a nickel plated cooler. I reciently changed thermal paste on my 10 years old sony vaio, but it looks like i missed the die spot while applying LM on the heatsink, as a result it overheated instantly

I ended up cleaning all LM off the dies and heatsink and used thermal grizzly cryonaut instead. The temp dropped by 15C under load.

[Aleksey]

So, I built a high end 8700K system with water cooling and CPU overclocked to 4.7 (original CPU is 3.7) and Nvidia 1080 Ti. I ran a memory, CPU, and video stress tests at the same time for a few hours. GPU stabilized at 80-83 degrees celsius, but CPU runs at 95-100 degree. I am thinking that delidding and installing the water cooling directly on the die might help.

[MaratM]

Deliddig will help, what is your watercooling system? Gpu temps looks a bit too high for a watercooled one

[Aleksey]

2 hours ago, MaratM said:

Deliddig will help, what is your watercooling system? Gpu temps looks a bit too high for a watercooled one

GPU is not watercooled - it's three fan system - MSI DUKE. Actually after some time the GPU temps went up to 90 degrees celsius.

 

CPU watercooling is MasterLiquid Lite 240 by Master Cooler.