Gadgetory

we've previously tested the aging characteristics of liquid metal trying to see how much it ages if it dries or cracks over the period of a year of testing and now we're looking at how liquid metal interacts with different metals that would include it nickel plated copper like you would most commonly find in an integrated heat spreader bare copper like you'd find on a rocket cool heat spreader or just a laptop cooler and aluminum conductor not is what we're using today this is a eutectic alloy it's a mix of gallium indium and tin and it's basically gallon stand but the individual mixtures of liquid metal have different percentages for each of the three main elements we don't know the exact mixture of conduct or not but we do know that it uses gallium indium and 10 and can look at how it interacts with the three main metals found in the heatsinks before that this video is brought to you by NZXT is new h 500 case which we recently found to have an impressively effective cooling setup that is entirely negative pressure when stock the H 500 is the successor of the s 340 and s 340 a lead offering high build quality that's all steel and glass and kael management features that are also a top class for the $70 compact mid tower case H 500 is a part of NZXT Zanu H series lineup which also features options from mini ITX micro ATX and full ATX builds learn more at the link of the description below testing for this is pretty straightforward we have three test subjects today the standard nickel plated heat spreader like this we technically we have lap to this one but we're not testing on this side so these are what you'd find on an AMD CPU or an Intel CPU these days this one specifically comes off of an AMD APU that's why you see the bump in the middle but it's still nickel plated copper and you can prove that by looking at the other side where we sand it off the nickel plating to reveal just the copper so nickel plated coppers typically what you would interact with with liquid metal because it sits between the CPU die the silicon and the heat spreader not between the heat spreader and the cooler that's not as common as you might think if it does sit between a heat spreader and a cooler though you'd have a nickel plated service on one side and then the cooler is a bit of a question it's either going to be a just straight copper surface kind of like this material or it might be nickel if it's something like most of Noctua schoolers for example and then there are of course aluminum cold plates as well and we'll talk about this one specifically in a bit so this is an ASA taxi I'll see you they don't make this specific brandt or the version anymore with the aluminum cold plate not many coolers do use aluminum cold blades but if you run into something that uses aluminum for its cold plate and not just a nickel plating that looks aluminum as some people tend to get tricked by the GPU coolers then it's problem you don't want to use aluminum with any kind of liquid metal and every brand we've worked with free liquid metal always makes that abundantly clear not to apply it so it's not like you're learning anything new but what we wanted to look at was why not what happens so that's what we're looking at today let's start with the worst case scenario to illustrate how liquid metal behaves with aluminum we pulled out an old days tech CLC with an aluminum cold plate then mounted it to a CPU IHS or integrated heat spreader with conductor not in between you are presently looking at the original aluminum cold plate prior to using liquid metal so it's clean and new thermal grisly it warns strongly not to use liquid metal with aluminum as do most of their competitors like cool labs and others and you definitely should listen to those companies but we wanted to answer the question of what if if we add liquid metal you'll see that over a period of about a night of just sitting there between the CPU and the cold plate the liquid metal ends up chalky and blackened and it embrittle the aluminum cold plate the cold plate becomes a weaker and you can start to sort of see pitting in it and corrosion this is because aluminum is highly soluble in gallium and will form an alloy with the gallium typically aluminum will build an oxide layer around itself which protects the aluminum from exposure to other elements or just air gallium penetrates the oxide layer that forms around aluminum and causes the gallium and aluminum to form an alloy to better understand this chemical reaction we asked dear Bauer for an explanation of how liquid metal interacts with various other metals there Bauer works with thermal grisley on product development and has a background in electromechanical engineering making him a subject matter expert for this question he said aluminum has an easy and huge solubility in gallium which is why gallium forms an alloy with the aluminum aluminum worked as he writes it aluminium is a very reactive metal in general but typically you don't encounter it because aluminum also quickly forms an oxide layer which then protects the aluminum gallium can go through this oxide layer and then form an alloy with it which in result makes the aluminium very Riddle aluminum also reacts heavily with water for example so if you have the aluminum dust with no oxide film and expose it to air it's extremely explosive the water in the air will give the o2 atoms to the aluminum to form aluminium oxide so the result of the reaction is hydrogen which is then very explosive since it's an exothermic reaction that can just blow up fun facts aside liquid metal is based on gallium and the indium depending on which manufacturer you use there will be more added thermal grisley also adds 10 but I know that cool laboratory as even more to the alloy gallium in general also reacts with the copper and leaves it pitted on the very top layer but the reaction is not heavy so it doesn't really matter to thermal grisley nickel has the function of a diffusion barrier and doesn't react with the gallium which makes it more suitable for the application and just to be abundantly clear here the side shoot about explosives the air power is about aluminum dust and it's interaction with o2 so it's not like using liquid metal is going to cause an explosion in your machine and using liquid metal on aluminum cold plates won't cause it to explode so just to be abundantly clear there there's not a risk of that it was just a side shoot that he had to explain how aluminium interacts with things so as a note here liquid metal is typically about 2/3 comprised of gallium it's about 66 percent depending on the manufacturer and reducing the gallium quantity means that there's going to be a higher percentage of indium and that means that you reduced the melting point by doing that imbalance towards indium ideally liquid metal mixtures minimize how many different elements are added to them as an alloy because the thermal conductivity worsens as a result of more metals in the alloy and it's also a fine balance of detecting the metals involved for the cold plate the IHS and ensuring that there's actually good thermal conductivity so this is an interesting scenario with these because thermal conductivity with liquid metal improves as the temperature increases this is why for themes like conduct or not they strongly recommend that you do not use it for liquid nitrogen overclocking where you are going to be below a zero degrees far below it in most cases so for for those instances thermal paste is just better but liquid metal will improve its thermal conductivity with a higher heat and it will just not work when it gets to liquid nitrogen sub-zero temperatures because it loses all of its thermal conduction performance and there are other complications involved as well so if they're all hey it's better for that moving on this brings us to the next metal nickel plated copper most integrated heat spreaders are nickel plated copper including every heat spreader currently used on modern Intel and and the desktop CPUs and HTTP CPUs there are some heat spreaders sold by external companies like rocket cool that are bare copper although lapping and IHS would also remove the nickel plated exterior what's been on screen and is still on screen is a shot of a nickel plated IHS before liquid metal application you've all seen this before any CPU that's new and packaging or even one that's only ever been used with drawl paste will look like this it all wipes off pretty well and you're left with just a nickel plated exterior applying liquid metal between the IHS and the die will result in a look more like this one on screen now it's slightly stained but the staining is largely removable you can slowly remove more and more of these stained surface color but ultimately solve it will permanently remain acetone and rubbing alcohol can do a lot to clean off an IHS stand with liquid metal you can use something like nail polish remover as an example to really get some of it off without causing any major damage there are two things to discuss here first in our testing the standing does not impact general performance in any measurable way it performs in our testing just as well as it did before any of the liquid metal standing at all so this is something that a lot of you have been concerned about is if you remove an IHS after using liquid metal between it and the dye is there a significant impact to performance once you have that stained surface on there the answer now we've not been able to measure one and if there is any thermal impact there probably is it's outside of any scope of measurement that we have which is going to be below about a degree Celsius so you have nothing to worry about in that instance now secondly here because at liquid metal is typically about two-thirds gallium the compound is more tenable to use with nickel and nickel plated coolers than it would be otherwise as we noted earlier the gallium mixture is heavier and tends to work a bit better that way with nickel then if you went heavier on the indium side so using more gallium can reduce the will reduce the potential for ion migration and this is what you'll see when mixing copper in various oxidation states with the liquid metal alloys as opposed to nickel plated copper so it's a different response there and nickel plated the heat spreaders are completely fine to use the liquid metal you don't have to worry about it at all if you've had concerns about it don't just drop them because the only real concern is once you start looking at bare copper which we'll get to momentarily or definitely aluminum as you saw that's a pretty bad reaction so it's completely cosmetic on nickel-plated heat spreaders we have never been able to measure a performance Delta even with a stand raw copper IHS by the way which is what we can talk about next finally we can move on to the Rocket cool raw copper heat spreaders in this instance there is more electro mechanical potential for galvanic corrosion with liquid metal than in the nickel plated example depending on the mixture of liquid metal this use case will display different results we use to conduct or not as stated earlier we have some before shots of the rocky coal I adjust that we can show we've worked with a few of them now it's clean new copper and very shiny applying liquid metal will result in heavy staining this is similar to what we saw with nickel but much more extreme and effectively impossible to remove even with a lot of acetone even if you soak it in acetone that's because we're starting to see ion migration into the copper with some of the liquid metal permanently plating the copper gallium has a negative potential and copper has a positive potential or voltage which will cause the gallium to migrate and plate the copper over time so in terms of answering the question what can and can't you use liquid metal with safely well keep it in mind all the other considerations of could metal like the fact that it is electrically conductive so if you're not careful with it in something like a laptop you could short something and damage it or destroy it keeping those in mind strictly from a chemical standpoint definitely never use it with aluminum but that's made abundantly clear in the packaging normally and we only worked with conductor not here but they're all gallon stand compounds and some of them have a bit more gallium somehow more indium some might not even have 10 so depending on what you're working with the reaction or the extremity the how how bad it is in this regard will change but for conduct or not that's what we end up with and with any of these liquid metal compounds even if it's a different composition just don't use it with aluminum pretty straightforward there with nickel-plated heat spreaders like this one the underside of this one or the top of basically every heat spreader on the market currently you have nothing to worry about it will stain it so if you put it on the top of the heat spreader you might not be able to see the word Intel or AMD anymore when you clean it off it'll be somewhat stained and most of that's removable you can get it off with acetone if you're really worried about it but some of it will probably stay there somewhat permanently especially as it goes through more aging and thermal cycles and things like that but don't worry about it from a performance standpoint and from a chemical standpoint it's fine at least with conducting ah and with cool labs and I think we've tested two or three other liquid metals as well but they're all pretty much fine with copper and this is something you would find in a laptop that a lot of you have asked about like if you have direct contact between the silicon die and the copper cold plate for the laptop cooler you'll get some pitting there on the surface potentially and you'll definitely get staining like this but this heat spreader and we've tested this a few times now with different different versions of this rocket cool heat spreader it works every bit as well as it did when we first got it it was brand new so it stains it doesn't look as good but the performance is still there it's not not a use case either by the way that these companies recommend against it's only alloy or aluminum that they recommend strongly against so the nickel plated definitely fine aluminum definitely bad copper for the most part is fine but the mixture may influence how much it stains or pits and we only tested conducted on here today so that's it for this one thank you for watching as always you can go to patreon.com/scishow Cameron's next stop set rectly where you go to store it I came to Texas net to pick up one of our mod mats back on backorder again but we have them on the way already so if you order soon you'll get one in the next round subscribe for more I'll see you all next time you