The second that tech companies like Sony
and Asus started putting liquid metal in their electronics, it was a matter of
time before this happened. Through some combination of an imperfect seal and
maybe a little bit of user carelessness, some of the liquid metal in my Asus ROG
Flow X13 laptop leaked out from under the cooler, which resulted in this. Man,
I still want to try to resurrect it, but if I'm being honest, this thing is
probably hooped. See, regular thermal paste is intentionally so non-conductive
that we were able to game on a PC that had its CPU socket literally filled with
the stuff. Liquid metal on the other hand, well, it's highly conductive. It's
metal. And it only takes the tiniest spill to bridge a couple of contacts,
cause a short, and probably brick your device. Man, I really hope not. This is
like a current-gen one with like a 4070 in it, but nothing's over till it's
over, and this isn't over until we dig deeper and see if we can resurrect this
machine. Just like I'm going to resurrect this
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>> [music]
>> After my Framework investment disclosure, the first thing I've got to do is come clean to you guys because I
have not exactly been careful with this machine. I'm talking everything from
holding it by the corners while I'm typing on it, tossing my computer
backpack around with the laptop in it,
uh lttstore.com, and even while it's
still warm, putting it vertically into
my bag, which is perhaps the most dangerous thing I did. But real talk,
aren't we all a little careless sometimes? I mean, this doesn't seem
that bad, does it? Stop it. No, leave it alone. There's
been no real damage to the chassis, so Asus has clearly built a pretty rugged
machine, at least on the outside, but a
sudden impact, especially while the machine is warm, may have contributed to
jarring some of the liquid metal loose from the protective shim. First, I'll
just give you guys a bit of a tour of what I saw when I first opened it up.
So, I cracked it open and first noticed this. The way it was spread out told me
that there had been some force involved in the liquid metal coming loose. I then
continued to poke around inside, finding liquid metal on this heat spreader here,
on the PCB here, and as far away as this
screw in the corner of the machine here. That one was scary. That is very far for
it to travel. The symptoms weren't actually exactly what I showed you guys
at the beginning of the video. It does power on, it just
doesn't [music] boot. So, I'm maybe a little bit hopeful, but not that
hopeful. Oops, I'm definitely doing these in the wrong order. Oh, what is it going to be?
More dead? I'm giving myself a 20% chance of this thing working again after
today. Oh my god. I thought like, oh,
it's probably that time that I like really tossed my bag, and it probably
all came No, no, no. This has been like seeping out, boys. Just like Sony, Asus
developed a gasket that is intended to keep all of the liquid metal between the
CPU die and the cooler without allowing it to leak out onto the sensitive
components that either could be shorted out or, in some cases, even corroded. Uh
most liquid metal that I'm aware of contains gallium, [music] which is highly corrosive to aluminum,
for instance, which is often present in computer systems. In order to achieve a
good seal, it's typical to have a protective covering around the chip that
the gasket seals against. As we can see here, though, the mounting pressure of
these springs is not that high, which
appears to have allowed the liquid metal to seep out in between. And it's
like everywhere. To be clear, there's nothing
wrong with using a low mounting pressure. Dawsdude1, back when he came
up for our collab upgrading MacBooks, pointed out that Apple uses extremely
low mounting pressure on some of their cooling solutions. The difference is
that Apple uses [music] a special thermal compound that is designed for
low mounting pressure applications. Liquid metal, on the other hand,
definitely benefits from high mounting pressure and definitely benefits from
not spilling all over the place. Sorry, Asus, I'm not trying to harp on you here, but like, yikes. Do you think
trying to turn it on and off again was dangerous?
>> Yep. >> [laughter] >> Applying power to any device that you
think has been shorted or corroded or experienced liquid damage in any way is
extremely risky and dangerous. I had no way of knowing, however, that that was
the issue with this device because I hadn't opened it up yet, and I hadn't
exposed it to any water or corrosive materials. The leak was inside us all
along. The real leak was the friends we made along the way.
I was really hoping to avoid taking out the battery, but I don't think that's
happening. That tray? Oh my god, it's just tape. My
motherboard is taped in. Okay, if it's all over the back, I think we could
[music] be cooked. The back is clean. Well, that's a good sign. How the devil
did it make it all the way over here? I have a theory. If it was traveling along
the heat pipes of the cooler, it was probably staying warm the entire time while it was traveling down.
>> [music] >> Interest. You know what? We might be able to
resurrect this bad boy after all. First thing we need to do is clean it.
And speaking with Allen Splave, who you guys might remember from some recent
overclocking adventures we've done, he said the best thing is an organic
solvent. So, I guess good old-fashioned isopropyl and elbow grease? Allen
recommends starting with a spatula or a scraper. So, we're going to get up as
much of this as we can using that before we start to wipe. Step two, wipe up as
much of the grease as possible with paper towel. I don't know how well this
is going to work for in between some of the components on the board. Oh god,
there was a lot in that crack for this fan filter. As soon as I started to wipe
here, it spread out like nuts. I think it's kind of a cool aesthetic.
Yeah, thanks, Stephen. How much you think's under here? Oh, not bad. So,
there's a bit here, here, here, here, and here. [music] These little balls
here that are shorting out on stuff, these are bad balls. He really
recommends spatulating this before I cuz I feel like I've got kind of an
opportunity here to kind of slide it all off of this thing. I mean, if you want
to say in front of the world that you think you know better than Splave.
I'm just going to >> To be fair, the instructions you you [music] sent it seems like they're for
his like hybrid product, right? >> No, it should be fine. You know what?
Here's what we're going to do. We're going to pull this off, and we're going to wipe that off. Okay, good. That wiped
off super clean. The bottom of this heat spreader, though, yuck. Oh, man, we
started out so tidy. This has clearly devolved at this point.
Okay, mostly clean. I mean, I'm like
oscillating between extremely confident and zero confidence here.
Sounds like me in high school. I found your problem, Asus. You've got so much
freaking liquid metal in here. Look at all of this. Does more liquid
metal result in better performance? No. But it results in a more consistent
application where you definitely won't have too little. Can you see all that?
That's all the stuff that's not even on the die. I understand why they would do
it this way because if you have too little liquid metal, it's obviously not
going to be able to do its job. Not a big chunk of it. At what point would you
just go, we're going to dip it? Basically, if you get off as much as you
can, and it's not enough. Yeah, you can do the dip. But I'm going to try to get
off as much as I can. I'm going to try to set a good example here. See, that little dot contains now, but once it
melts, the way this stuff spreads out, man. Actually finding the knife blade pretty
good for removing chunks of it. But isn't that dangerous for damaging the
PCB? I mean, what am I going to do? Make it more dead? Imagine if Yeah, imagine
if I was to Oh. [ __ ] Ah, shoot.
What'd you do? I was trying to peel liquid metal off of a little capacitor,
and I pulled it up. [ __ ] Did I rip the pad off, though? Maybe
not. I think we can salvage this. >> got soldering tools. Yeah, we got
soldering tools. Ooh. Yeah, I see. I think the pad's intact. Okay, well, if
the pad's intact, we're Yeah, we're fine. Fine. Oh, no.
Dude, I think the liquid metal is loosening the solder. What?
That doesn't even make any sense. What's the material of solder? If it's
lead-free, then it's usually tin and or silver. This one right here was like
flooded in liquid metal and [music] just lifted right off. Liquid metal can
absorb into solder, making it brittle and causing components to detach [music]
from the board. I knew I didn't push on it that hard.
>> Dude, we're using a knife. No, no, yeah, but I was I was using the knife as a
delicate tool. [music] That's what my father's murderer said. Are we going to try and attach
components to the board? >> I think we should try. Before we can reattach those components, however, I do
want to get off as much of the liquid metal as we can. So, what we're going to
do is use this hot air station at the lowest possible temperature, and then
use some solder wick to try to get up the last bit of it. And it just walks
around. Get over here, buddy. It's not grabbing the solder wick. Mhm. You know
what? New method. I'm using the solder wick as a brush. This might be our best
bet right now. >> I can't wait for the 500 comments all
detailing the better ways to do this. Oh, yeah.
If you guys wanted the better way, you wouldn't watch LTT, though.
Man, I wish I could blow even harder, which normally would not be something
you would want. You can actually see a lot of the little pieces making their
way to the edge here. This is crazy. I would never do this to a working board.
Oh, yeah. Oh, we're moving it. See that?
Not really. You don't see it moving? >> Yeah, look at all that residue that you're creating.
>> Andrew sees it. >> Yeah, I got it. Yeah, but the residue I can deal with. A big glob between these
components that's bridging them, I can't. You can see how much of it I'm
getting out of there now though. Okay,
okay, things about to get crazy. We're already way past the crazy crazy zone,
man. That's what you think.
Guess what? It's lined day. We are squeezing the Do you want a smaller
vessel? Nope.
I don't think we're going to get much cleaner than that. Now I just have to clean off these caps that fell off the
board. Those kind are non-polarized. Nice. And with this cleaned up, we can
head over to the workshop and try and reattach them. I mean, look, Das Dude
one did stuff that was like a tenth [music] this size. So, if I can't do
this, then I might as well just hang up my screwdriver. This is wild, dude. I
was not expecting this adventure to be so interesting. Damn, there's still a
little bit of liquid metal on that one. Oh, we'll wipe it off. There. Okay,
where's our tweezers at? I actually never really work at this station, so
that one goes there, and this one goes here. Hey Justin, you might want to have
a look at this. There's one that I'm not 100% sure on, and it's the right
>> side one here. It looks okay to me though. To find out if that pad's intact, Justin's throwing some flux on
the board, and then he's going to tin it. If the tin sticks,
it means the pad's still there. Well, we appear to be okay. Nice. Yeah, just do
the one, Justin. >> [laughter]
>> I'm just messing with him. I said I'd do it.
I gave up. Justin's doing it. Okay, so you got one on. I feel a lot better
because this is taking him a little while.
Oh, jeez. Yeah, oh, I guess you're done then. >> you go, Mr. Lines. Brilliant.
And you guarantee it works, Justin? Yeah, 100%. It's not going to fail.
Barring what Linus did. Wait.
Yeah, you can't even tell where it was, dude, can you? I know you put it in the wrong spot.
What do you mean? >> [laughter]
>> All right. >> for real this time. Yeah, I mean, that kind of looks on there, right? I was poking poking it
with this. It wasn't moving, so I think it's okay. Okay. Well, let's see if it
works. Good luck, everybody. Good luck, everybody.
Ah, fudge. I got so absorbed in the adventure that I forgot to clean the
cooler. Dude, what an adventure this has been, whether we get a working laptop
out of it or not. Yeah, the real laptop was the friends you made along the way.
Thanks, David. Time to get my birth-iversary on. Hell yeah. Everybody,
it's Justin's birthday. Hey, happy birthday, Justin. Oh, thank you. The
real birthday. I mean, there's certain things that I
don't really have to plug in just to find out if it's going to work, like these Wi-Fi antennas, but feel like if
I'm putting it back together, I might as well swing for the fences, right?
>> Yeah, baby. Is uh liquid metal good for you? Oh, dude, Silver Surfer. Direct
contact with liquid metal can be harmful.
And the severity depends on the specific type of metal.
Liquid mercury Okay, no. What is it? Is it liquid Yeah, but what is it? >> It's a gallium. Yeah, you're fine. No,
I'm just So long as you don't ingest it. Uh okay, let's get some PTM 7950.
So, we were looking it up. Are your fingers feeling tingly yet? No. But
my brain is feeling pretty excited about my laptop working again. Unlike the
liquid metal we had on here before, it doesn't actually matter if we apply too
much PTM 7950 [music] because it is non-conductive, and it is an ideal
thermal paste for direct die cooling like we're doing here. I still can't
believe that it knocked those components [music] off the board. Yeah, does that
mean that there's more than a little bit on it? Potentially. But they didn't
break right now, so Yep. So, they're not my problem. Okay,
battery's connected, boys. This is it. It's showtime.
>> [sighs] >> Ah. >> [laughter]
>> Work. It continues coming to screw I really want this to work. I really like
this laptop. And now that I've gone and trashed on Asus's thermal compound,
Asus is probably not going to send me another one. So, I really need to fix
it. Here we go. Oh, these are coming soon, by the way.
Finally, I just saw the final packaging design very recently. I'm super super
excited for our cables. Is it even Is there a charging
indicator? Normally, yes. Wow, this is like
more deader than I would have anticipated. The only thing I'm thinking
is that cap might not be
on right. Is it worth putting all the screws in like It is probably worth
trying, yes. Wait, I missed a fan header. Okay, that
actually might prevent it from doing anything. Like a couple I can see, but
for it to not have any indication whatsoever that I have something plugged
into it, like
The charging light's on. >> [sighs]
>> This is this is the behavior that I saw before. So, let's not get too excited
here. I think we're cooked.
Try the like Asus charger. Who knows? It can be a thing though. Using the OEM
charger can enable it to quick charge a little bit faster from a very dead
state. Hey, well, definitely thinks it's charging still.
So thirsty since I didn't drink anything today. >> Five minutes later.
No days through. As tragic as that was, we still want to
find out if the liquid metal is worth risking the life of your laptop for. To
do that, we're going to hand this laptop over to the lab so they can test it before we replace the liquid metal with
PTM 7950. Well, we [ __ ] around.
Time to find out. Unfortunately, we were not able to repair my machine, but we do
have our backup machine here, and we ran a bunch of tests in the Labs with the
liquid metal from the factory, and now we've replaced it with PTM 7950 to find
out. We really like F1 24 as a thermal benchmark because, yes, it stresses the
system extremely hard, especially when we're running it with ray tracing like
this, but also, it's a real-world load.
We're not in just running a power virus. That's what they're called? Really?
Yeah. Sounds so hardcore to say. Like combustor or like OCCT. That's my
favorite metal band.
And this is not what we expected. We
intended to just do an ad hoc test here on the set and be like, "Hmm, yeah,
well, the CPU temperatures are they look about the same." Yeah, that's not what
happened. It turns out that our result was that with the PTM 7950 thermal pad,
we actually got either slightly better thermals or we got about the same
thermals with a slightly higher clock speed on the CPU, meaning that the
liquid metal did not outperform our phase change thermal pad except in
extreme CPU loads. So, we can see why Asus chose to use it. We need to be
really careful about this because that pad is available on lttstore.com, and we
didn't want to oversell it. We don't know for sure if on a higher-end
configuration of this laptop, you would get the same result. Remember, this is
not quite the same machine that we originally started with. Maybe Asus has
certain configurations where the liquid metal really does give a tangible
benefit, but as far as it went here, no, it didn't. And PTM 7950 is supposed
to improve ever so slightly over time
while lasting a very, very long time, which I couldn't necessarily say about
my liquid metal situation. So, take all of this with a grain of salt like you
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link in the video description. If you enjoyed this video and you just like the
energy of me and David ripping things apart, how about the time we both
upgraded our retro handhelds? That was fun.
I have used it twice [music] since then. I used my Vita a lot until it fell off
the roof of my car.