Crude mix of materials instead of pure copper
We take off the cooling system once and at the latest now surely even the last one knows what just had to go wrong here! The LM residues on the CPU heatsink are certainly not pretty, but can be removed with abrasive means (sandpaper). By the way, we can already see the radiator block after the recommended steel wool was used, but in the end it only made cosmetic changes. The left heatsink for the CPU is made of a copper alloy (not pure copper) and the right heatsink for the GPU is made of aluminum!
Which brings us back to the introduction on the first page, where I wrote something about “you get what you paid for”. Clevo offers various cooling solutions ranging from pure copper with nickel plating, to regular copper for all surfaces, to the very affordable hybrids of copper and aluminum as purchased by the vendor of this barebone. Surprisingly, the customer’s request was answered like this:
Nothing can be “polished”, nor completely removed, but only scraped off by force and sanded off layer by layer! It also completely attacked the GPU heatsink’s aluminum and the aggressive liquid metal combined with the base aluminum to form a kind of alloy, even creating smaller holes that can no longer be ground off. The CPU heatsink is also not made of pure copper, but a copper alloy, which leads to irreversible surface damage.
The surfaces of the GPU and CPU also show sticky residues and I would definitely not recommend anyone to act roughly with “steel wool” here. The CPU still looks quite usable under the copper heatsink, while the GPU shows permanent battle scars under the corroded aluminum. This is almost impossible to remove with standard household products.
But what is actually behind such liquid metal? It is almost always a gallium-indium-tin alloy, in slightly varying proportions depending on the supplier and grade. Use on aluminum heat sinks is thus not possible with gallium-based liquid metal, since the formation of a local element with the aluminum results in the elimination of the oxide layer that otherwise protects the base aluminum. This is also pointed out by the suppliers of such products, who can also do nothing for the case that occurred here.
There is only one case for safe use!
However, since you don’t know anything about the purity of the copper used in case of doubt (unless you refer to the mass spectrum for once), you can only advise to generally only consider using liquid metal in the notebook for nickel-plated surfaces. Funnily enough, Clevo also offers something like this to the customers of the barebones, but such a solution also minimizes the retailer’s profit a bit in return. Real copper or, better, nickel-plated copper would certainly have been a more honest solution for the customer. But aluminum is completely off the mark.
I’ll show you from a simple self-experiment, how such a surface looks with the nickel-plated Heatsink. And if Clevo knows what you’re up to, there’s even “leak protection” for the liquid metal right in the bundle. First, we look at the surface of the purpose-built Clevo heatsink covered in cured liquid metal, where you can also still see the outline of the CPU clearly:
This nickel-plated heatsink of the barebone can also be very easily cleaned again from the residues, so that it looks almost like new again afterwards. This is because the material flakes off almost by itself, even on the protective outer ring:
Summary and conclusion
Generally speaking, liquid metal can be used in notebooks without hesitation and provided all necessary protective measures are taken, otherwise companies like Schenker & Co. wouldn’t offer it. You can also try the conversion yourself, but only if the material of the heatsinks meets the basic requirements. Nickel-plated heatsinks are the ideal case; here, liquid metal can definitely bring out a kelvin or two. Thus, it is not absolutely useless, on the contrary.
But if a dealer or system integrator offers something like this, then the customer should and must be able to rely on it. The absolutely inappropriate use of LN2-suitable thermal paste from the overclocker sector is pure money-grubbing, but at least not harmful for the hardware. However, if the supplier chooses the cheapest barebone configuration and cooling systems with aluminum heatsinks are installed there, the use of liquid metal is not only useless, but extremely dangerous for the entire product.
As a provider, you not only know this, you have to. This is actually something like commercial destruction of expensive hardware, even if the effect of the corrosion only becomes fully visible after years. But when the occurrence is already measurable and noticeable, it is already too late for the material. The only thing that can help is a complete replacement of the entire cooling construction. And this would now have to be borne in full by the customer. Says the dealer. But that doesn’t really work at all.
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