Published in Reviews

Replacement for thermal grease

by on20 April 2007

Index

Performance

The pad should liquefy itself at about 60 degrees centigrade. This process is called burn-in, and during it the liquefied film should fill all the gaps and irregularities on the memory chip and cooler surface. After the process, the film should become solid again, but now it should act like glue. This means that it should keep the cooler in place.

We have left the pads to burn-in for four days. Some of the cut parts have finished the process, some haven't even started.

The fastest burn-in was recorded on the X1950s GPU mosfet. It is well known that this chip exceeds temperatures of 120 degrees centigrade, and less that 20 minutes were enough to glue the cooler to the mosfet.

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Cooling the mosfet on the X1950 series is the key to successful overclocking.  Some of the smallest chips (voltage regulation) were a big trouble during installation, because the pads on them were extremely small. They would fly away even when you looked at them.

With our GPU we didn't have instant burn-in as with the mosfet. Nevertheless, the process finished in two days.

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We turned off the fans to get higher temperatures during the first few days of burn-in process

We were a bit disappointed with the burn-in process on the graphics memory and our CPU. Unfortunately, even now the film looks the same. When we observe it with a magnifying glass, we can't see the anything engraved in the film. Usually, if the thermal pad is applied well, you should be able to see the memory model numbers engraved in it. We’re not sure what went wrong. The memory coolers are polished to make the surface completely flat, so we have ensured that each and every memory chip is in contact with the cooler.

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Unfortunately, we had burn-in problems on the RAM.

We had a similar problem with our CPU – the burn-in has slowly started yesterday, four days after we applied the film. Maybe the problem is in the temperature of the CPU. Only 25 degrees in idle and 31 at 100% load are maybe not enough for the pad to burn in quickly enough.

Conclusion

LiquidMetal is a great idea. No more grease on your hands, no more worries about dosing, and rather easy application are the biggest advantages over standard thermal compounds.

But, as we said, there are problems. You have to have a steady hand, and calm nerves. If something goes wrong you can't collect the remains and mix them up again as you could with standard grease. Its main advantage can become its greatest disadvantage for impatient users.

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When compared it to a Nanotherm PCM blue (which had only 24 hours for burn-in), we can say that the ThermalPad performs a little bit better. The GPUs temperature was 2 degrees lower when the film was used. This is not a big difference, especially if you know that today the air temperature is 1 degree lower than yesterday when we were testing MetalPad.

Nevertheless, MetalPad is a great product, and we can surely recommend it. The recommended price is about €4,99 (if bought in a one pad package).


CoolLaboratories has a list of resellers here.

 

Big thanks to Innovatek for giving us the LiquiPads, and an EHEIM pump. Without your help, this test wouldn't be possible. 

 

 


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Last modified on 03 May 2007
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