Gadgetory

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 gonna show you guys how to do it after we show you eks muddler 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 sixteen point two times higher than even a good aftermarket thermal paste like icy 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 on to 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 $3,000 Acer predator Triton 700 this 18 point nine 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 Pro Tech tool kit some conformal coating electrical tape cotton swabs and of course liquid metal we chose thermal grizzly conductor not a tin gallium and indium eutectic alloy for it's insanely high thermal conductivity and its endorsement from overclocker extraordinaire Deir Bauer 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 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 heat sinks 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 part strayed to allow us to get the right amount just on the tip of the applicator and then moved over to the dye 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 dye 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 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 heat sinks that you find in laptops not the thermal resistance between the processors and the heat pipes I was so wrong in i-264 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 it's a lot of heat but nowhere near the overheating that we saw before 3d mark saw modest performance gains and then the team did you guys really think we were gonna stop there we fired up the intel extreme tuning utility upped 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 nineteen fifty megahertz and over five gigahertz on the memory bringing us up to real GT X 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 device speaking of recommended Squarespace Squarespace is the easy way to build your own beautiful responsive website it starts at just twelve bucks a month and you get a free domain if you by Squarespace for the year and they've got tons of great features including their logo designer they're built in commerce every website comes with a free online store cover pages which allows you to set up a 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