Gadgetory

oh it's it's just kind of embarrassing I feel like a sometimes have it all together and sometimes I just have no idea what I'm going to create next but that's because you're not listening hard enough there's an ambience a sound that you can hear if you just take a second and three you hear it just breathe very deeply and then don't make a sound you'll hear it trust me okay okay all right here we go the liquid battle on a graphics card what liquid battle on a graphics card alright alright I think we're gonna realize very quickly why this isn't such a good idea now that it's a bad idea and I will have to double-check and make sure that the cooler gigabytes using for this card is not aluminum you see the liquid metal we're gonna use in today's video reacts with aluminum it's actually the same liquid metal that we used when we diluted ri9 CP you can check out that video or right here but because of that concern I want to make sure that this cooler doesn't have any aluminum contacting the GPU die and directly doesn't appear so that's the case most of these beefier cards are going to have copper or nickel plated copper blocks and then with integrated aluminum fins if you will that attach to it it's really no different than a traditional CPU cooler if it's like a copper base and then aluminum then that tends to be how it is and that's because aluminum doesn't hold on to heat as as much as copper does so it actually is a better dissipative heat although coppers a better conductor of it and that's why you see copper blocks and aluminum fins a little bit of backstory there now this cooler by the way from gigabyte appears to be an aluminum thin cooler but with a solid copper base which means that we're gonna be okay I expect when we take this thing apart and apply our liquid metal compound all right so we'll need of course the gigabyte cooler we do have the connect anot kit this comes with an application tool as well as a cleaning kit of sorts and of course the liquid metals in there and then I also have a paper towel just to clean up some of the initial thermal compound that will be on the cooler and then a small tool set so us get into the graphics card these bits in here these screws tend to be rather small and that's why I can't like this will do us just fine now I want to start first with the backplate I think this will be pretty straightforward some back plates are integrated with the coolers on the front though and that's something to watch out for so I'm just gonna remove as many screws as I can and just keep going but starting with the back first because this will block a lot of those other screws underneath that are pressed against the PCB likely holding the cooler against the GPU so back plate first these are gonna be fairly small Phillips screws not a problem I expect these four right here are holding the cooler directly against the the GPI by the way while we're doing this I went ahead and took the liberty of testing the card beforehand so before the liquid metal application just to see cuz the whole point of this video after all if the liquid metal makes any difference and I expect that it'll make a small difference but not as big a difference of course as it would swapping out the Tim that's included in stock Intel chips that's because Intel chooses the absolute worst compound known to man to use between the die and the IHS of that CPU you know sometimes you can just give this a little force and usually the the GPU paste and even the thermal pads will help adhere the cooler to the card even without any screws attached to the cooler so yeah I should have checked that earlier on but you can just pull it apart be careful II don't want to flex the PCB at all you can see here we have a perfectly detached cooler from the PCB save the backplate which is still on here but it's not really going to affect our ability to remove and replace the thermal compound so we'll go ahead and clean this up and then we will reapply with liquid metal you know as I'm cleaning this I'm noticing that the thermal compound already on here stock is not that bad the consistency is about what I'd expect from like mx4 you know arctic mx4 paste so maybe that's attributed in part to the fact that this is a brand new card but I've replaced brand new GPU paste before and a lot of it's been pretty disgusting so good on gigabyte here to include stuff that's not crap out of the box and again we're gonna keep cleaning this off we want to get as much of it off as possible before we apply the liquid metal because that stuff's gonna get really messy in its own right and we don't want any of this preventing a liquid metal from making perfect contact with the cooler or the dye underneath all right so you can see we cleaned up quite a bit of that now I'm going to use the included cleaning kit with the conduct not stuff it just has a couple alcohol pads in it I'm gonna clean up the rest of this paste around the die and then we will apply the liquid metal now one thing I've definitely noticed is that the Turing dies the equivalent Turing dies are much bigger than Pascal dies which means we're going to need to apply a lot more liquid metal to this entire surface area so all of this is going to generate a heat and we want to make sure we cover all of it as evenly as possible so that we get an even distribution of heat and heat transfer to the cooler now something else to note is that conductor not is of course conductive which means you don't want this stuff coming into contact with anything that it's not supposed to we just want to cover the die we don't want it touching any of these smaller bits around the GPU if we of course don't want to touching anything else on the PCB so we're gonna be very careful about how we apply this and because Turing is so large and because these smaller components on the on the GPU or so close to the die we're gonna have to be especially careful that none of this stuff touches any of those other components okay so it dies as clean as it's gonna get and we're going to apply the liquid metal now this is again a much larger surface area so I expect we're gonna need about twice as much as we've used in the past for say the 8700 kg lid maybe as much if not slightly more than we used for the i9d lid so I'm just gonna apply a small amount here and then we'll spread it as much as we can I think that's a good start you can see it just kind of balls up like that we're gonna take one of these little applicator tool to literally just q-tips and we're gonna spread this out as much as we can I'm gonna start with the right side over here Pepsi's no no this is no time this is no time for a cat this is important business I could fry a $900 card $800 card it's removal cheaper than a serious one it's still spreading again I want to be very careful not to get let this stuff run over the edge of the die that's the mirrored part in the center of the chip we do not want this stuff touching those smaller bits around the die and I think I've just about spread out this as much as I can given what we put on there I might need to add a little more let's see how far we can take this all right now I'm pretty sure I have covered the entire time you Center it up there see the entire die looks to be covered I've never done this before I've never applied liquid metal to a graphics card I figured touring would be a chance for me to kind of go all in here and just put it all on the line all 800 bucks or so with a hardware that gigabyte sent me and just wing it I don't even know this is worth it I have no idea if temperatures are even gonna drop by that significant an amount where it might be worth it for some of you so maybe the card runs cool or maybe it runs quieter as a result how quieter though I don't know because I've never done this before and I don't even know if I'm gonna fry the card maybe when we apply the cooler back to the other side it's gonna kind of push this liquid metal one of those smaller bits and then we'll fry the chip and the whole boards dead so it's one big risk but I figured turning will be a cool place to start because this is the new hot thing right now not not literally but something that would catch you guys's attention so let's see I'm gonna apply more liquid metal to the cooler side of this you can see we have the bare copper here I'm gonna apply liquid metal to that just to make sure we have proper contact on both sides and then we'll put it all back together and run our temperature tests a few moments later okay so to keep the story short and sweet I couldn't apply liquid metal to the bare copper it just wouldn't stick I probably could have realized this if I had done a bit of research but I wanted to do this firsthand you know and document without knowing much about this at all just so that I could learn firsthand I think that's something that's important for a lot of people we don't really get that much anymore we just look things up on the internet and that's how we learn but I wanted to do it again with my own hands just so that I could see for myself what happens if I try to do something that doesn't work so we're just gonna stick this cooler back onto the die and hope that liquid metal makes proper contact with the anyway if it doesn't we'll know by the temperatures a quarter run a lot hotter but if the temperatures are lower then we'll consider it a successful liquid metal application and who knows maybe I'll even recommend this although I doubt it alright so this is actually a pretty simple car to take apart now that I've done it up front and I realize that there are only about seven screws to remove in order to get to the GPU so that's actually really nice it's the nice thing about this card a lot of cards overcomplicated I know EVGA cards in the past have been very difficult to take apart now that they expect you to take them apart so they make it easier for you but if you ever want to get down and dirty under there and it's nice to only have to worry about seven or so screws so good on gigabyte for that aspect of this card okay so the card is back together and now for the moment of truth I'm gonna put this back into our test bench the same one we used in the last video and hope that it even posts to begin with I would be totally fine if this card posted but then got too hot it would just mean that we aren't making proper contact with a cooler although I expect we we are I don't I would be surprised if it's not contacting the cooler properly I would honestly be more surprised if this card even posted to begin with so let's do that and cross our fingers that's really all we can do at this point okay I got the system set up Pepsi's over there chewing cables while my white balance is so off on this camera and we're going to power it on right now okay it's lighting up that's a good thing fans are kicking in by the way the monitors on the ground don't make fun of me I just have no space in its office anymore that everything set up all right so f1 2017 is loading up right now I use this benchmark loop to stress test graphics cards and this one is actually not turning its fans at all at the moment that's a good sign it means that the card when not stressed has its temps in check so see they're just idling not moving at all and now we're gonna start the benchmark and see just how hot this card gets under load check the deltas with the tests I ran before I recorded this video and see just how hot it gets I want to make sure that the in-game settings are identical just for consistency sake we'll benchmark Australia heavy rain and show the frame rate Conor that's fine and we'll loop it and let's start the test well pretty much what I expected this card did not benefit at all really from liquid metal application we saw one degree Delta but that's to be a simpler than the margin of error and it's a testament as well to the fact that manufacturers of graphics cards are not putting absolute crap between their dies and their coolers not so much the degree that we equate this to Intel and they're terrible thermal interface material being sandwiched between their IHSS and dies so now what I want you to take away from this is that liquid metal ocation on most graphics cards is an absolute waste of time now if you have a really old card and it's just got really chalky thermal paste and you know it needs to be replaced then maybe you might can make a case for liquid metal application but honestly you're gonna be just as fine using something like mx4 and and that's gonna cost you a lot less it won't be as you know time-consuming to spread out and it you don't have to risk any of your components around the die frying which will essentially render your graphics card a brick I really expensive more than likely so I'm glad this card still works but I mean this was ultimately just a big waste of time that's why you don't see people left and right for replacing stock thermal compound in graphics cards with liquid metal it makes no sense the deltas are non-existent we saw literally no change in the sound test either I mean these are these cards sound the same before and after because the temperatures were basically the same before and after all so if you're wondering why this card ran cooler than our beefy asu's card it's because the ACS card was running at a higher clock speed so around 2000 megahertz out of the box whereas this one was running at about 1900 out of the box pretty consistent and the temperatures leveled out pretty much where I expected them to given those clock speeds so I hope that if you didn't learn something you at least found this video slightly entertaining but if you were curious as to whether or not liquid metal occasionally graphics card was viable in the first place it is not and if anybody says otherwise it reference this video to them at least for any new ish card liquid metallic ation makes no sense so I'm glad we were able to confirm that in today's video I don't want you guys wasting your time that's part of the reason why I went ahead and just followed through with these tests also I want to say that the gigabyte card is a really nice one this card did appear to be slightly louder than I expected in our sound test because there is a fair degree of coil whine with this at least this specific card here there wasn't any coil line that I could hear from the Asus card so this one here a little bit more coil on again though when your case is closed and everything running and especially under load you're not really gonna hear the coil line as much it's just where I had the mic place when we were running the sound test that it became a little more noticeable especially daring playback the rest of the card is built very well it's still a plastic shroud on top but I like the fact that gigabyte got rid of the orange accents so it matches pretty much any system any build you could potentially put together out there black and gray much anything else so that's a nice touch it's a quiet card it's a much cheaper card than the ACS card but it's still expensive still in RTX 2080 and you guys know how I feel about that so please let me know in the comment section below what you think about these tests if you've done something like this before and what your results were like to know the conditions in which those tests were run if you like this video give us one thumbs-up I appreciate it thumbs down for the opposite feeling or if you hate everything about life you guys click that red subscribe button if you haven't already become a member if you wanna come special with it and we'll catch you in the next one a minute to Miami actually this weekend for a bit of fun and I will be back Monday making regular content again so stay tuned for all of that good stuff I might vlog in Miami I don't know maybe I'll do that you guys seem to be kind of on the fence about vlog some of you really like them and so you don't care at all so maybe we'll experiment just a bit more in that realm this is science studio thanks for