Liquid Metal TIMs experiences

Gman1979

Gawd
Joined
Sep 21, 2011
Messages
643
I've been using the same tube of Mx-4 for years now. But it gets more irritating every time I use it as it's so thick and hard to spread thinly. So now I'm looking into trying something different.

It looks like liquid metal TIMs offer the best temps but I'm not one to really trust the numbers manufacturers put out.

What have your experiences been like when using any of these liquid type TIMs, especially on an AMD FX CPU?
 
All the articles i ever read was with in a couple of degrees. Unless you have very high end water shooting for a world record....i personally dont think its worth the higher cost for liquid metal. Use Gelid GC-Extreme and am pretty happy with it install and performance wise but then again it might not be much different to what your using already.

How often are you having to reapply it? Havent had to change mine in years:)
 
I haven't had to reapply it due to age. Just with hardware changes and my recent jump to a custom loop for cooling. I'm not really worried about a degree or two, but was wondering more about user experiences with the liquid TIMs as far as ease of application, and how long they last before needing to be reapplied.

The MX-4 I have stayed on my old Phenom II system without a change for almost five years without temps getting worse that I could notice. It's just such a pain in the rear to get spread as thinly as I would like. It got on my nerves enough for me to just say screw it this past weekend and just use AS Ceramique instead. I think the seasonal temps have made the MX-4 thicker than I'm use to as my office got shoved into an auxillary room when my daughter was born, and it's several degrees cooler than the rest of the house due to a giant window.


How easily does the Gelid GC-Extreme spread during application?
 
Maybe you can try not spreading it.
I have a tube of pk3 back I play with laptops since those are all direct die cooling. Now I play with desktop I just grab that huge tube of creamique 2, I don't need to worry using 2 much or getting a bad mount since it is not expensive. If thing go wrong I just wipe it and go again. 2-3 degree is not going to break anything.


Spreading liquid metal don't sound too "safe", accidently drop the spreader or a drop on the board or chip. Just saying.
 
I used Indigo Xtreme on a Sandy Bridge and a Haswell. Installation was a bit more tricky than normal thermal compound since you have to let it get really hot and reflow. Ultimately, I have no idea if it really made that much difference in temps. I probably would stick to a more conventional thermal compound in the future.
 
I've only used arctic silver 5 and never been disappointed.

Get the bigger syringe tube.
 
I used Indigo Xtreme on a Sandy Bridge and a Haswell. Installation was a bit more tricky than normal thermal compound since you have to let it get really hot and reflow. Ultimately, I have no idea if it really made that much difference in temps. I probably would stick to a more conventional thermal compound in the future.

Yeah I remember the Indigo thermal pads ddn't work with AMD chips because they'd crash before they got hot enough to liquify it and mate the cooler to the cpu.

The newer liquids are actual liquid at room temp. Looks like you just put a proper sized drop in the middle of the chip and it spreads out when you seat the cooler.
 
All the reviews I've seen say that the difference between liquid metal and some of the top standard pastes is just a few degrees. If I was going to get new paste, I'd use a tube of Gelid GC-Extreme or Prolimatech PK-3.

I've only used arctic silver 5 and never been disappointed.

Get the bigger syringe tube.

AS5 is outdated and outperformed by most of the cheap pastes OEMs ship with $20 coolers nowadays. That's not to mention that it is also dangerously conductive to electricity (compared to the non-conductive modern pastes) and can take 200 hours to cure properly (compared to the 0 hours of modern pastes).
 
Used that liquid metal crap on my laptop's 3920XM and my old desktop's 3930K. Within a year both were COMPLETELY DRIED OUT and were having temperature issues.

Do NOT USE THAT CRAP. (*unless you plan on changing it out every 6 to 8 months).
 
Try thermal grizzly kryonaut. It goes on easier than mx-4 and will cool better by a few degrees. Liquid metal stuff is corrosive.
 
i really liked one of xigmatek's TIMs. I forget which one it was though. It was SO easy to spread. I ran out and picked up Gelid TIM, which is way harder to spread.
 
i really liked one of xigmatek's TIMs. I forget which one it was though. It was SO easy to spread. I ran out and picked up Gelid TIM, which is way harder to spread.

The trick is not to spread it out yourself, you risk getting air bubbles in the paste that way. The best way to use heavier pastes like GC-Extreme is to put a rice-grain-sized blob in the middle of the heatspreader and let the mounting pressure of the CPU cooler coldplate spread it out for you.
 
I used Indigo Xtreme on a Sandy Bridge and a Haswell. Installation was a bit more tricky than normal thermal compound since you have to let it get really hot and reflow. Ultimately, I have no idea if it really made that much difference in temps. I probably would stick to a more conventional thermal compound in the future.

Well IX isn't that much better than an ideally applied paste, but tests have shown it is better, where it really shines though is that you can't really apply it wrong, it either reflows or it doesn't, so in test where they poorly applied paste vs an attempt to poorly apply the IX, the bad IX was the same as the good IX but the pastes were all much worse.
 
Well IX isn't that much better than an ideally applied paste, but tests have shown it is better, where it really shines though is that you can't really apply it wrong, it either reflows or it doesn't, so in test where they poorly applied paste vs an attempt to poorly apply the IX, the bad IX was the same as the good IX but the pastes were all much worse.
Indigo now has a new version, Indigo XS which they claim is twice as good as moving heat as Xtreme (~40W/mK vs. ~20W/mK). I can't find a single review of it though. I was tempted to try it on a new i3 build (HTPC), but the instructions are very clear it's only for i5 and i7 processors. I guess an i3 can't generate enough heat to make it reflow or something.

The older Indigo Xtreme is okay for i3, i5, and i7, but isn't supposed to be used on LGA 1150 or 1151. Of course I used it on a Haswell i7 without any issue before I knew you weren't supposed to. It installed fine for me though.

I found This roundup interesting.
 
All the reviews I've seen say that the difference between liquid metal and some of the top standard pastes is just a few degrees. If I was going to get new paste, I'd use a tube of Gelid GC-Extreme or Prolimatech PK-3.



AS5 is outdated and outperformed by most of the cheap pastes OEMs ship with $20 coolers nowadays. That's not to mention that it is also dangerously conductive to electricity (compared to the non-conductive modern pastes) and can take 200 hours to cure properly (compared to the 0 hours of modern pastes).


Huh, didn't know that it was so obsolete. I just ordered another tube of it though. I'll try something else next time around.

I really don't care too much about temps as long as they're well within where they should be.
 
A bit late to this post but I've had Coollaboratory Liquid Ultra on my primary desktop for a couple months now. It was pretty expensive and a pain to apply, I probably won't opt for it again and only did because I bought a delidded chip.
 
Thanks all for the input. I got some Thermal Grizzly in the mail today.

After switching out the MX-4 to the TG, my temps have come down almost 2 degrees Celcius in a few of the Prime95 tests and a little over 1 degree in others.

I followed the directions about the amount to use and how to spread it, but it's like spreading wet sand and a lot of what I used ended up on the spreader edge by the time I was done. What I ended up with was almost a "haze" of the TIM over the entire heatspreader with a slightly thicker "haze" in an X pattern across the CPU. You can see right through it but it seems to be working well.

I'm going to pull the block and check the contact pattern to see if I need to apply more TIM or not to make sure I'm not leaving any improvement on the table.
 
Liquid Ultra did wonders for my Clevo P370SM laptop with a 4900MQ. The difference between Gelid GC Extreme and liquid ultra under load was 7-10C, and allowed me to up my OC another +200MHz. Ran it that way for 8 months, and when I took the heatsink off, the part firmly in contact with the die still had a nice metallic shine to it, but the periphery had definitely oxidized into white gunk.

IMO liquid ultra is only worth it for delidded chips or GPUs that don't use a headspreader due to the hassle of applying and removing. But if you're trying to squeeze every last C out of your custom loop, then liquid metal paste is definitely the way to go.
 
I've been using the same tube of Mx-4 for years now. But it gets more irritating every time I use it as it's so thick and hard to spread thinly. So now I'm looking into trying something different.

It looks like liquid metal TIMs offer the best temps but I'm not one to really trust the numbers manufacturers put out.

What have your experiences been like when using any of these liquid type TIMs, especially on an AMD FX CPU?

Just get a new tube of MX-4 or Noctua NT-H1 and apply using the "rice grain" TIM application method. I've used Liquid Ultra in two delids, and it works great, but would never use it between IHS and cooler for the reasons stated in this article (reapplication is a royal PITA if needed);

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2285595

BTW, even though the article is about a bare-die application, way too much TIM is being used in every case.
 
U dont spread mx-4 that is an old method of spreading and doesn't lasr long due to air bubbles. Use the ICD method of ball or line depending on your ihs/die shape. Mx-4 should be non conductive IIRC so leakage from too much tim isnt an issue.

But mx-4 sucks and icd is better...at least in terms of longevity. I would have to repaste mx4 every month or two because its junk. Icd lasted forever in my 920xm oc f@h laptop
 
Gelid for sure. I don't mess with anything conductive, not worth a degree or whatever.
 
U dont spread mx-4 that is an old method of spreading and doesn't lasr long due to air bubbles. Use the ICD method of ball or line depending on your ihs/die shape. Mx-4 should be non conductive IIRC so leakage from too much tim isnt an issue.


Yes, unless you have a cooler where heatpipes directly connect to the CPU do NOT spread the TIM. It leaves airbubbles easily. Rice/pea blob or a cross at the center are better methods. The heatsink presses the TIM down and squeezes it evenly from the center towards the edges, leaving no air bubbles behind.

Regarding liquid metal TIM's, arent they something you have to reapply quite often? If so then they are automatically out in my book. If TIM cannot last many years without drying up and losing efficiency then its shit and unreliable. I have better things to do than screwing out the heatsink, carefully cleaning the gunk and reapplying just to keep my temperatures safe on my overclocked CPU.
 
Yes, unless you have a cooler where heatpipes directly connect to the CPU do NOT spread the TIM. It leaves airbubbles easily. Rice/pea blob or a cross at the center are better methods. The heatsink presses the TIM down and squeezes it evenly from the center towards the edges, leaving no air bubbles behind.

Regarding liquid metal TIM's, arent they something you have to reapply quite often? If so then they are automatically out in my book. If TIM cannot last many years without drying up and losing efficiency then its shit and unreliable. I have better things to do than screwing out the heatsink, carefully cleaning the gunk and reapplying just to keep my temperatures safe on my overclocked CPU.

The reapplication was my biggest concern previously. But now that I'm back on custom water, it literally takes less than five minutes to swap out TIM since the block clamps down onto studs and I left myself just enough extra hose to allow for removing the cpu block without taking any hoses off. The issue that made it a no-go for me was cleaning the old liquid metal off without sanding seemed next to impossible.
 
The reapplication was my biggest concern previously. But now that I'm back on custom water, it literally takes less than five minutes to swap out TIM since the block clamps down onto studs and I left myself just enough extra hose to allow for removing the cpu block without taking any hoses off. The issue that made it a no-go for me was cleaning the old liquid metal off without sanding seemed next to impossible.

My HR-02 Macho is a pain in the ass to install, not to mention slightly dangerous to the chip since its so big and heavy so less reinstallations the better. But wait, the TIM it solders itself onto the chip and it needs mechanical removal? Thats even worse! :eek:
 
Back
Top