so if you've ever owned a laptop you've probably got experience with your CPU
getting hot enough to boil water causing your fans to spin up to blow dryer
levels and your performance to fall as a result
but what can you actually do about that
well in the fringe pc performance tuning
scene swapping out generic manufacturer
provided thermal paste for high performance alternatives has been found
to improve CPU and graphics card temperatures significantly
so we took one of the best products on the market a liquid metal based material
to find out if we could improve the cooling and performance of a gaming
laptop and spoiler alert it worked
really well and we're going to show you guys how to do it after we show you ek's modular
liquid cooling phoenix lineup this is their next generation of modular and
all-in-one liquid cooling solutions check them out at the link below and
thanks to ek for sponsoring this video
liquid metal has a thermal conductivity of 73 watts per meter kelvin this is a
staggering 16.2 times higher than even a
good aftermarket thermal paste like i see diamond
so then with performance like that why is everybody not using it
well there's one big problem liquid
metal is well metal and that makes it not just
thermally conductive but also electrically conductive so if you have a
slip up during application and it gets onto the capacitors resistors or traces
on your CPU GPU or motherboard the only
thing your device will be good for is making black smoke
and even that only for a short time
so with all that in mind we decided that the best laptop for this job was the
three thousand dollar acer predator triton 700
this 18.9 millimeter thin laptop packs
an Intel core i7 7700 hq and a gtx 1080
max q but while it's out of the box thermals
are genuinely impressive given its size under a combined load it does experience
thermal throttling giving us an opportunity to not only improve
temperatures but also potentially performance
so before we began we needed to establish a baseline so we ran a fairly
comprehensive battery of tests then it was time to head down to the
workshop and get started this is everything you'll need a set of
screwdrivers we recommend the ifixit protect tool kit some conformal coating
electrical tape cotton swabs and of
course liquid metal we chose thermal grizzly conductonaut a
tin gallium and indium eutectic alloy for its insanely high thermal
conductivity and its endorsement from overclocker extraordinaire dare bower
now disassembly of your laptop if you're following along will be different please
consult a guide online but the triton 700 requires the removal of the bottom
screws and actually the keyboard area up top
one pro tip is to always be careful when lifting pieces away from a laptop
because there may be fragile ribbon connections that need to be removed
first with the heat shield and the fans from
either side of the heatsinks removed finally we can get to what you've all
been waiting for removal of the heat pipes and fins
always undo the socket mounting screws in reverse order of the numbers by the
screws and then very carefully lift up
from both sides slowly working it until it all comes off at once
from here then it's goop removal time
for us this took an especially long time because we were trying to get it out
from all the resistors and capacitors surrounding the GPU die
but patience here is important these are not only extremely fragile but they're
also the most likely thing to get shorted out if our liquid metal
application goes poorly some isopropyl alcohol on a cotton swab will help you
get in between them next step is to apply some conformal
coating to the areas around the CPU and the GPU dies
this stuff forms an insulating layer that should help prevent short
circuiting if our liquid metal seeps out
if you feel like masking all day you can spray this stuff on but to save time we
applied two coats 15 minutes apart with a cotton swab
bringing us then to the do or die moment
application of our liquid metal it is crucial that you only put a super
small drop on top of the die so that it
doesn't seep out very carefully put
um okay you know what we meant to do that
because without some liquid metal to clean up for you how would we show you
what to do in the event of a spill sure that's it so anyway
since it's metal you can't just soak it up with a cloth
but as it turns out wiping it with alcohol can be successful so after about
half an hour of cleaning we were ready to give it a second go
we cleaned out this parts tray to allow us to get the right amount just on the
tip of the applicator and then moved over to the die and
actually that looks about right now we're back on track so then the next
step is to spread it around using the included cotton swab until it makes a
very thin film you want it to be fully covered but it
shouldn't look like pooled up water then what you do is rub any excess on
the bottom of the heatsink where it contacts the die
the process was similar for the GPU liquid metal on spread it around and
we're good to go we also added some last minute electrical tape just because we were a
bit sketched out and a physical barrier is always a great second line of defense
so then with the machine slapped back together
wow ah that super stupid boot sound i never
thought i'd be so glad to hear it the laptop works
although that's not much of a surprise if you guys have been paying close attention to
the video now anyway let's talk results now we were expecting our temps to be a
little better but to be honest at least for me anyway like i kind of thought the
main limiting factor was the dissipation capacity
of the tiny heatsinks that you find in laptops
not the thermal resistance between the processors and the heat pipes
i was so wrong in ida 64 we got a 20
degree improvement to CPU temperatures
under full synthetic load and under a combined CPU and GPU load it
still gets hot sure i mean it's a lot of heat
but nowhere near the overheating that we saw before
3d mark saw modest performance gains and then i mean did you guys really think we
were going to stop there we fired up the Intel extreme tuning utility opt the
turbo boost time to as long as it will allow then we hopped into MSI
afterburner to see how much we could get out of the GPU and with everything said
and done we had our GPU clock at 1950
megahertz and over 5 gigahertz on the memory bringing us up to real gtx 1080
specs i mean that that is proper crazy stuff in a laptop
as thin as this one so recommend it
absolutely as long as you don't mind risking your
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