Has anyone had personal experience of using these pads? Coollaboratory Liquid MetalPad Are they easy (ish) to remove? How well did they work. I'm considering using them on an i5 Ivy Bridge with the HeatSink removed and an Antec 920 water cooler.
You mean without the IHS? It could work, but you'd never get the CPU off the waterblock without breaking it...
Or superheated cheese wire... But yeah, that's the issue. It more or less fuses the CPU IHS to the heatsink, usually, applying it to a raw die would glue it straight to the heatsink, which would mean you'd either have to get down there with an absolutely microscopically thin razor blade, or you'd have to try and work it off the die while still hot. On the cooling front; those things are outright amazing. They provide some of the best temps out there, but the issue is the startup; When you're using them; YOu'll get scarily high temps as it melts and changes into the solder-like compound, so it can only work on Intel processors. Secondly; You can never truly remove it from either the processor or the heatsink without Lapping it, which removes the processor ID codes from the top, because they're just etched into the metal, and you've just rubbed some of that metal off.
I was considering it a week ago but I don't want CPU welded to waterblock. Can't remove cpu unless the stuff is heated and using razor blade not an option for me. I'd rather buy an aquarium chiller to get truly low temps than feck my cpu, mobo and waterblock.
And this is why AMD's ancient socket design has an advantage; if the damn processor will not let go of the heatsink because the thermal compound has sealed it; a sharp enough tug will remove the processor too. Doesn't even bend the pins if you pull straight up!
I wooden wanna go back to pin matrix processors. Used to have bent pins on my P4 because it was being unplugged so often for refitting of peltier/waterblock. Used to have to straighten the pins under magnifying glass. Feck that.
How rough are you with your processors? my FX8120 has laughed at everything i've thrown at it. Heck, even my old Athlon64 (Dead, before anyone freaks) was sat pin-down on the floor for three months. Only the right edge of pins were bent from where I'd dropped it previous, the rest were fine.
As I've said before; For a machine that's going to be running for a very long time; It's outright amazing. It'll last almost forever and it transfers heat exceptionally well; It's just a transformational compound, it melts, then FUSES the two surfaces together. This provides a massive amount of thermal throughput, it's just the issue is it's basically low-temperature soldered the heat-sink to the CPU. Hence the issues in getting it off. Tl;DR; If you're never going to take your PC apart again, or not going to do so for at least five years; this stuff is awesome. Otherwise; It'll annoy the hell out of you because it's such a swine to remove. (So put this shiz in Servers. That should increase the lifespan of those chips by one hell of a bit.)
Useless they are, I tried one on a CPU and it never bonded, my temperatures were 5C above normal and when I took the waterblock off the pad was still sitting there without bonding. I have a couple of these going spare if any toby wants them for nowt, you will have to collect as I cannot be bothered using a stamp and going to the post office, that's how useless they are. Itchy Rim
Depends on the CPU. I hear you need to hit at least 85 degrees through the pad itself to get it to bond. So it may take some extreme overclocking just to get the thing to behave. All I know is; AMD can't do it. It just can't.
I bitched mine up to at least 82C to 83C for a few hours and it never bonded, mebbees I should have bitched it higher? Itchy Rim
Perhaps that pad was faulty? I'm not the expert on these things, I only report what others have told me. That or they've got scarily high melting points, which I wouldn't advise anyway.
I thought the melting point was in the 90's? And it doesn't require hours does it? So long as you reach correct temp it happens pretty quickly as far as I know.
Well, I got two spare as freebies, plus the brillo pad and solvent sachet they give you to remove it from the HSF/CPU if any toby fancies giving it a go. They come with a wealth warning - this crap can seriously damage your wallet, past performance is no indicator of future results. Itchy Rim
Just for clarification, melting point is 58C. I'm interested in these, Coollaboratory always does the awesome but risky stuff ^^
... I call bullcrap on that, otherwise it'd be compatible with AMD processors. And it sure as hell isn't.
@Itchy - I might be interested, though I could just pick some up from Scan. Anything in particular you want tested? Bah, maybe your temp monitor is being too generous with the numbers? ^^ I found a datasheet on tom's hardware if anyone's interested.
