liquid metal it's a hell of a drug you know
first you delid your CPU and then that
high wears off so then you like liquid metal your laptop and again you're
rewarded with amazing temps and even a performance boost and that keeps you
going for another week or so and then
you notice something getting kind of hot in your pants
you know the idea it starts small but then it grows and grows getting more and
more solid what if you could make your phone
run cooler and faster with liquid metal
well guess what that's a super risky maybe even bad idea
so we're going to show you how to do it after we tell you today's video is
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so it is common for phone performance to
nosedive during any workload that takes more than a couple of seconds with
gaming being a common culprit so your processor starts out cool and fast then
the hotter it gets the more it thermal throttles so
liquid metal likely wouldn't do anything for that initial cold performance but
it could allow us to maintain peak performance for longer so we chose the
razer phone as our vic excuse me a test subject
compared to most phones its thermal design is very respectable but it is
still not perfect check this out our
first 3dmark result puts us in the top 83
of razer phones so that looks pretty good but then a second run immediately
afterwards gave much worse results and
it dropped all the way down to 20 worse
after a 15 minute stress test that is the kind of performance impact that you
would notice in an extended mobile gaming session
so let's get started then you'll need a good set of screwdrivers and prying
tools some isopropyl alcohol some paper towel some conformal coating cotton
swabs and a heat gun because getting inside phones sucks and of course you'll
also need liquid metal we'll be using thermal grizzly conduct-a-knot now your
phone's disassembly process will be different unless you have a razer phone
but we'd recommend watching this whole process anyway without skipping around
if you plan to follow along so first we made sure the device was off
then we took a heat gun to the speaker grilles with the adhesive softened we
peeled them off with a prying tool next we removed this combination of regular
phillips and torx screws we recommend always placing things like this in a
parts tray in the same positions they came out of the phone in so you don't
have to guess which ones go where during reassembly
then we used guitar picks to keep the phone from snapping back together while
we pried it apart until well it pried apart and the screen popped off then
once we got inside and took off the cables for the lcd screen and battery
giving us our first good look at the razer phone's heat pipe cooler it's
insulated from the battery and actually seems to be designed to use the screen
to increase its surface area for heat dissipation pretty cool with the stock
thermal paste removed it wasn't entirely clear actually how to proceed we lifted
this small copper heat spreader very carefully with a razor blade not to be
confused with a razor blade and then had a planning session so if liquid metal
gets on anything aluminum the gallium in it will destroy it with corrosion so
what we've decided is to put the best thermal compound that we have between
the copper sheet and the processor and
then liquid metal the heat pipe to the copper
heat spreader with regular thermal compound all around it time then to
execute we applied conformal coating around the CPU with a cotton swab to act
as a line of defense if the liquid metal spills off the CPU then to put our
copper heat spreader back on we used arctic silver thermal adhesive which you
mix up in equal parts and then spread across the surfaces that you want to
stick together just like an epoxy we then cleaned the copper spreader and
carefully placed it back on removing any wrinkles with a guitar pick and clamping
it all together for about 20 minutes to make sure that it was set
moving over to the back of the screen we applied a generous amount of thermal
paste here and then it was finally time
for liquid metal we put a small drop in a cleaned parts
tray then picked up a tiny bit with a cotton swab
this was carefully spread out over the copper heat pipe you only need a little
bit of this stuff to do the trick time for reassembly if you are performing
this mod on a razer phone by the way i would strongly recommend that you get
new speaker grilles first because they don't just stick back on so we used what
we fondly refer to as that sticky tar crap to put them back on as best we
could um i i give it a 4 out of 10.
anyway hitting the power button it boots
so now it's time for the payoff or lack thereof we weren't sure given that we
weren't liquid meddled all the way to the chip itself
if this was even really gonna work so in 3dmark we immediately recorded our
highest result yet but
not by a very significant margin cautious optimism at best at this point
then on the second run whoa
no decrease in performance whatsoever
also in the vulcan test which comes after the opengl one has finished
running we went from very middle of the road performance compared to other razer
phones to being in the top four percent
and our other benchmarks saw modest gains in performance too so this phone
right here it's got ugly grilles but you could game on it indefinitely and see
virtually no drop in performance an a
plus result so then would we recommend performing this
operation the answer is no
given the low mounting pressure for the cooler and the way that phones get moved
and tossed around all the time we believe that the chances of the liquid
metal shifting and damaging the aluminum inside your phone or even shorting
something out and bricking it entirely are too high
also we can't know how much of the performance increase came from the
liquid metal and how much was simply from re-pasting the phone with a higher
quality thermal interface material so bottom line then unless you're going
for phone performance records it's really cool and the results surprised
even us but i wouldn't recommend voiding your warranty over it
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generally goes under the radar do you actually think the editors are going to
take the time to go through all this footage and listen to it i really
strongly doubt it