Hi, I have a water cooling system with copper in my PC and I have been using liquid metal for years. I also used it on my laptop - everything is tip-top. It is recommended to work with a copper plate and not with aluminium. Don't worry, put it on and you'll be thrilled. I'm not advertising, just telling the truth.
On Youtube, someone posted a very nasty video who treated his laptop cooler (copper) with liquid metal, and where the whole thing eventually became insulating instead of conductive over time.
Someone explained it chemically (don't know if it's true). In any case, he said something like that the liquid metal combines/penetrates with the copper because of the particle charge, more and more over time, and thus actually irreversibly damages the heat sink.
Now my previous cooler was nickel-plated, but the Corsair AiO is pure copper. Now my question: What kind of weather is it in Shanghai right now? No nonsense, of course I'm worried about it now and since I just had to send it back under DoA warranty anyway, I'm now wondering whether I should leave it alone with a new cooler made of pure copper?
Thx
Hello, thank you for your answers!
Let's see if I can still find the post/YT vid. Somehow it's about pure copper with LM on silicon die and air. Whereas in my case pure copper of the WaKü (copper coloured) would go on nickel-plated copper (silver heatspreader). The statement was also that in the PC the whole thing with the heatspreader comes less into contact with air but that the LM basically reacts chemically with copper, therefore irreversibly.
I have been using LM for a while now. But with my previous cooler, the block at the bottom was also silvery, nickel-plated, so at first I thought it wouldn't work at all because it was aluminium. And the Wakü is pure copper, at least that's what it looks like, and no longer silver-nickel-plated, hence my concerns about the above.
Do you also notice a positive effect in terms of temperature or is it more for the good imagination? With the previous air cooling, I think I achieved a difference of several degrees... I don't know exactly. With the Corsair AiO, however, I now have the problem that it doesn't seem to lie flat on the CPU (Broadwell-E). As siXtreme said, I had to apply a whole lake to get it to make "sensible" contact somehow, and I ended up sanding the corners of the CPU and will probably (have to) sand even more, as it's obviously still not optimal.
What does "liquid metal dries out" mean and does that matter as long as the cooler stays on? Doesn't normal cooling paste also dry out? So far, the metal wasn't liquid any more within a very short time, at least not like it was from the syringe. It was more like a greasy, silvery substance. Maybe it's just deceptive because it's no longer as smooth and shiny as when it was new.
@siXtreme: You with your hydrochloric acid ;) I've probably already read that from you somewhere here... And what about soap, alcohol or cleaning sets? I've had good experiences with soap, normal WLP and LM, alcohol/cleaning spray not so much. But we're mainly talking about cleaning off nickel-plated copper or hands.
