Liquid Metal Laptop Cooling – 20C LOWER!
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,475 words · ~7 min read
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so if you've ever owned a laptop you've probably got experience with your CPU
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getting hot enough to boil water causing your fans to spin up to blow dryer
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levels and your performance to fall as a result
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but what can you actually do about that
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well in the fringe pc performance tuning
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scene swapping out generic manufacturer
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provided thermal paste for high performance alternatives has been found
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to improve CPU and graphics card temperatures significantly
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so we took one of the best products on the market a liquid metal based material
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to find out if we could improve the cooling and performance of a gaming
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laptop and spoiler alert it worked
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really well and we're going to show you guys how to do it after we show you ek's modular
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liquid cooling phoenix lineup this is their next generation of modular and
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all-in-one liquid cooling solutions check them out at the link below and
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thanks to ek for sponsoring this video
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liquid metal has a thermal conductivity of 73 watts per meter kelvin this is a
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staggering 16.2 times higher than even a
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good aftermarket thermal paste like i see diamond
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so then with performance like that why is everybody not using it
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well there's one big problem liquid
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metal is well metal and that makes it not just
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thermally conductive but also electrically conductive so if you have a
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slip up during application and it gets onto the capacitors resistors or traces
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on your CPU GPU or motherboard the only
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thing your device will be good for is making black smoke
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and even that only for a short time
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so with all that in mind we decided that the best laptop for this job was the
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three thousand dollar acer predator triton 700
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this 18.9 millimeter thin laptop packs
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an Intel core i7 7700 hq and a gtx 1080
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max q but while it's out of the box thermals
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are genuinely impressive given its size under a combined load it does experience
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thermal throttling giving us an opportunity to not only improve
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temperatures but also potentially performance
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so before we began we needed to establish a baseline so we ran a fairly
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comprehensive battery of tests then it was time to head down to the
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workshop and get started this is everything you'll need a set of
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screwdrivers we recommend the ifixit protect tool kit some conformal coating
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electrical tape cotton swabs and of
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course liquid metal we chose thermal grizzly conductonaut a
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tin gallium and indium eutectic alloy for its insanely high thermal
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conductivity and its endorsement from overclocker extraordinaire dare bower
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now disassembly of your laptop if you're following along will be different please
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consult a guide online but the triton 700 requires the removal of the bottom
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screws and actually the keyboard area up top
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one pro tip is to always be careful when lifting pieces away from a laptop
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because there may be fragile ribbon connections that need to be removed
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first with the heat shield and the fans from
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either side of the heatsinks removed finally we can get to what you've all
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been waiting for removal of the heat pipes and fins
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always undo the socket mounting screws in reverse order of the numbers by the
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screws and then very carefully lift up
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from both sides slowly working it until it all comes off at once
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from here then it's goop removal time
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for us this took an especially long time because we were trying to get it out
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from all the resistors and capacitors surrounding the GPU die
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but patience here is important these are not only extremely fragile but they're
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also the most likely thing to get shorted out if our liquid metal
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application goes poorly some isopropyl alcohol on a cotton swab will help you
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get in between them next step is to apply some conformal
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coating to the areas around the CPU and the GPU dies
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this stuff forms an insulating layer that should help prevent short
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circuiting if our liquid metal seeps out
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if you feel like masking all day you can spray this stuff on but to save time we
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applied two coats 15 minutes apart with a cotton swab
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bringing us then to the do or die moment
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application of our liquid metal it is crucial that you only put a super
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small drop on top of the die so that it
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doesn't seep out very carefully put
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um okay you know what we meant to do that
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because without some liquid metal to clean up for you how would we show you
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what to do in the event of a spill sure that's it so anyway
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since it's metal you can't just soak it up with a cloth
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but as it turns out wiping it with alcohol can be successful so after about
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half an hour of cleaning we were ready to give it a second go
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we cleaned out this parts tray to allow us to get the right amount just on the
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tip of the applicator and then moved over to the die and
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actually that looks about right now we're back on track so then the next
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step is to spread it around using the included cotton swab until it makes a
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very thin film you want it to be fully covered but it
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shouldn't look like pooled up water then what you do is rub any excess on
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the bottom of the heatsink where it contacts the die
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the process was similar for the GPU liquid metal on spread it around and
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we're good to go we also added some last minute electrical tape just because we were a
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bit sketched out and a physical barrier is always a great second line of defense
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so then with the machine slapped back together
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wow ah that super stupid boot sound i never
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thought i'd be so glad to hear it the laptop works
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although that's not much of a surprise if you guys have been paying close attention to
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the video now anyway let's talk results now we were expecting our temps to be a
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little better but to be honest at least for me anyway like i kind of thought the
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main limiting factor was the dissipation capacity
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of the tiny heatsinks that you find in laptops
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not the thermal resistance between the processors and the heat pipes
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i was so wrong in ida 64 we got a 20
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degree improvement to CPU temperatures
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under full synthetic load and under a combined CPU and GPU load it
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still gets hot sure i mean it's a lot of heat
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but nowhere near the overheating that we saw before
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3d mark saw modest performance gains and then i mean did you guys really think we
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were going to stop there we fired up the Intel extreme tuning utility opt the
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turbo boost time to as long as it will allow then we hopped into MSI
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afterburner to see how much we could get out of the GPU and with everything said
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and done we had our GPU clock at 1950
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megahertz and over 5 gigahertz on the memory bringing us up to real gtx 1080
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specs i mean that that is proper crazy stuff in a laptop
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as thin as this one so recommend it
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so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked then
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you know what i actually don't have much to say this is a cool video you did it
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wrong but if this video was awesome hit the like button get subscribed or check
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out the link to buy the stuff we featured in the video description also
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