Liquid Metal on naked GPU die after 3 months – bad heat sink fit!!!

Learn from my experience with liquid metal and hopefully this can help you troubleshoot your setup, avoid the problems I have here, and avoid the even worse ones where your hardware is KILLED by liquid metal squirting everywhere.

Clevo make some heatsinks better than others, and heatpipes are very easy to bend out of shape. Mine weren’t good. This video is part way through a long process of perfecting the fit.

As a result you can see here what you SHOULDN’T SEE from a good application of liquid metal – partly dried up liquid, and big blotches.

The yellow tape is there as a precaution against spills, because I knew the fit wasn’t good.

Note: this is a revised description because loads of commenters below seemed not to get the point of this video. It’s not a how-to on doing it perfectly.

Original application slightly over 3 months ago.

Approx 1.5 months ago, after being the same as the master GPU’s temp, the slave’s temp started rising – over the course of a day the delta to master GPU temp got bigger eventually it was idling at 80C and thermal throttling in seconds under any load. So I took the heatsink off, the liquid metal had dried up completely. So I attempted to realign it and added more LM.

This is what I found when I pulled the heatsinks off to check a couple of months later… the liquid was still liquid except where, due to not enough liquid metal and an imperfect heatsink fit, there was insufficient contact, and it looked dry. Immediately prior to this video the slave GPU temp was still only a couple degrees C hotter than the master after the last application.

After this video 1.5 months ago, I further realigned the heatsink, added LM to the slave GPU and carefully replaced the pads with new pads of appropriate thickness. When I pulled them again yesterday, both looked exactly like the left GPU on this video – complete die contact. The 75C maximum even when overclocked 30% (1350mhz core) says it was still cooling really well.

Hopefully this video helps you understand liquid metal a bit better so you can use the appropriate amount because the thermal performance is unreal!

If you can’t fix a big gap you may be better off using a paste instead. The liquid metal can run if there’s too big a gap to fill and it will do Bad Things if it escapes due to its conductive nature.