More Marketing Lies? Minisforum Retail PC opened and Polymer analyzed by Tescan (SEM)

[Music] hi and welcome back to a follow-up video you will remember minis forum hx90 you might also remember the debacle from like gamers nexus from my video that's yeah there were some things missing and some things were not as intended so for example if you look at the outside shell they were advertising carbon fiber and at least me personally i was expecting the typical carbon fiber you're used to from like the automotive sector you have in your car like the nice looking carbon turns out that they meant carbon fiber filled plastic so it's just plastic with some carbon fibers inside and yeah i mean this is just visual so eventually i said this is still i mean technically it might be okay to advertise this but if you tell people it's carbon fiber and you have an image of this surface area right here i told them this is still to me this is misleading marketing but anyway so i thought let's just contact our friends from tescan which are doing scanning electron microscope analysis because with that we could technically look inside the plastic and see if that's even true so we're going to cut away one part of the shell and send it to tescan and then there's david from our community german guy thank you very much because he offered that he will provide his hx90 he got a retail unit just last week so his should be one of the first very first retail units of the hx90 um yeah i mean i ordered one myself after making the first video and it's supposed to be shipped end october so his will be much better and it will be very interesting to see what they changed if they change anything if the screws are different and if they managed to apply liquid metal and how it looks inside very curious fortunately we will only need a very tiny piece of plastic for the scanning electron microscope as you can see i started cutting already to just see if this is easy to remove i will cut one tiny piece out of the bottom shell right here which is part of the entire like plastic piece going around the case and then we will see what we will find inside so this tiny piece here will be sent to tescan see sonic the heart of your system we had some interesting developments over the past days well first of all you should check out a news video from gamer's nexus steve found some very entertaining and interesting things in some videos that mini forums posted on their own youtube channel because they posted some videos about like dropping tests of the units and how to disassemble the pc well not completely because you're obviously not supposed to take off the heatsink with a liquid metal and everything we will do that of course but then um i mean when they were first talking about the drop test i was i was so close to perform a drop test myself to just walk outside my apartment and just drop it on the floor because they were talking about like 80 centimeters and one meter 30 height test like dropping test i was close to just dropping this on the concrete floor i mean when i first said they were doing uh like drop testing with this unit and i looked at this and i was like i mean those edges they still look perfect how did they do the drop test and then i thought about doing the drop test then we found out in the video that they did the the drop test inside the packaging it's good that we didn't do it otherwise uh yeah it wouldn't look that great i guess but we will pick up our third unit actually because this is the unit from david which we received it's a retail unit he bought directly from minis forum i hope that this will be like full retail status with the updated screws with the full liquid metal inside and everything and then minis forum for whatever reason send a third unit to us even actually without asking but we will check that see if things changed if things improved but let's just start with the retail unit we got from david so thank you again very much for providing the retail unit the only thing that basically changed are those phillips screws i mean originally they used those annoying security torques so they replaced this which is great and apart from that i mean we still have this fake carbon fiber visuals from the outside on all the sites which we already saw in the original review so just from the outside cannot really tell anything going to open it up and then we check if there is like liquid metal spills or whatever underneath the cover we can spot a one terabyte western digital black which should come from david i don't think this was included he also told me something about that he ordered some like memory and ssd so that should be his ssd and just looking at the mounting frame the back plate frame whatever of the cpu this is definitely different from the first unit so this is for sure different they actually tell us that this assembly is prohibited uh yeah yeah we're not going to care about that the first check regarding the case was good so no spills of liquid metal nothing yep that's actually how it should be so minis forum also posted some videos online where they show assembly and disassembly of the cooler well not really disassembly when it comes to like a guide but they show how you could theoretically remove it because they also glue the heatsink to the chip which is a very weird way of mounting i'm not sure why exactly they're doing that but yeah we will talk about that in a second also the video of mini's forum is also quite funny in some regard but we will get to that in a second what they did is heating up the backside simply to make it easier to remove the heatsink i will just simply heat it from the front and then the heatsink will be warm and that should already help starting off with the heatsink we have this sticky frame underneath which is gluing together the heatsink and the chip and we can spot the liquid metal in the center one detail about this cooler is also different from my review unit and you can see that there is a tiny elevation in the center so this part in the middle which makes contact with the chip itself is elevated which means they probably milled around here probably also because they added the sticky tape which is quite thick and otherwise if you would have this in between it was one of my concerns because i thought there's not that much space around it so they changed the cooler in order to have enough space for the seal around it we are inspecting the cpu with our macro lens so first of all we have the chip with the liquid metal in the center and this is surrounded by a protective like frame whatever this is great i mean that alone would already work to seal off the liquid metal to make sure it's not leaking what i recommended and what they also did is also shielding off the smd caps by adding some kind of like protective glue stuff on top of it looks like protective paint something like this the only thing that is kind of bugging me is that on the left there's a single capacitor which is not covered by the glue and also on the right side there is one single cap which is not covered on top by the glue the rest is done well so generally speaking that's something you can absolutely do to use liquid metal in mass production generally speaking also this frame in the center already would be enough even without like sealing off those smd caps having the frame sealing off the smd caps and i also want to add that i mean it looked like on the left and on the right um the top part of the smd cap is not covered by the seal and it's also possible because this is very sticky that this is sticking inside this stuff somewhere like this the part of this uh like sealant about this conformal coating but yeah i'm not right quite sure why they even like sticked the heatsink itself to the cpu that's not necessary you could also just add a second form frame totally around the chip or even that's what most of the people do just have a part like this as a foam sticking to the heatsink and then stick it on top it does doesn't have to be sticky on here to to seal it off but yeah i mean this will work for sure looks good execution i think it's done well also the amount of liquid metal looks very good and i think the temperatures will be all right i'm going to check that now time to check the temperatures so far what we could see in idle was absolutely online and what was expected now let's check performance and temperatures on the load so that is absolutely lower than what we could see in our first review unit i guess about 15 to 10 degrees celsius less at the end of r20 i'm expecting about 80 degrees celsius because the heatsink slowly keeps heating up but overall this is a much better result than what we saw in the first pc 5200 points as expected so that's absolutely in line and far better than the first unit so far so good just to be sure we will also double check the second unit they sent to us the second review sample also features the correct screws no more security torques also checking the case itself i couldn't find any kind of strange residues any kind of liquid metal spills whatever and also pcb cooler everything looks totally clean now going to remove the cooler and check what we can find underneath i'm expecting that it's exactly the same as the retail unit but we will check just to be sure i'm very happy that i just damaged my review unit and not the unit from david but apart from that the like glue frame whatever came loose on the heatsink and just ripped apart a tiny bit everything looks good the liquid metal amount looks good the quality of the foam around the die itself looks decent the only thing i noticed that also here the conformal coating is not the best quality is not the most accurate i guess it's because they do it by hand it's still okay because it's like a level two security part and you don't really need it because of the foam frame itself it would also still work without even a conformal coating so i'm totally okay with that i think i'm just going to remove the glue part on my unit reassemble this but this looks also good before we get into the material analysis of our plastic we will first take a look at some screenshots i took from the minis forum website so the first one is taken on the 13th of september where you can see on the bottom right the carbon fiber material and if we switch to a screenshot from today from 27th of september then you can see it changed to efficient heat dissipation so that's already quite interesting what i found more entertaining is taking a closer look at screenshots which i took from the bottom part of the product page with the carbon fiber material so the first screenshot is taken on the 5th of september that was prior to me and steve publishing our videos regarding like the carbon fiber critics and everything where obviously they stated the pc body is made from carbon fiber materials with grain designs on the surface looks modern and agile blah blah blah so that's what we criticized and after we published our videos they changed it to carbon fiber composite materials and they said part of the pc body is made from carbon fiber composite materials carbon fiber composite materials is not only rich in texture and delicate in hand but also has very high strength have very good thermal conductivity blah blah blah and so on so after i saw this i was again in email contact contact with them and told them again that this is even though they changed it this is still misleading because this still suggests to the end customer that you're getting some type of like carbon fiber for example this is part of a bike it's i'm not sure what's called the handle of the bike basically it's a like a replacement part and this is proper carbon but this is still a carbon fiber reinforced plastic cfpr cfrp cfrp but this is like 60 percent carbon fiber and like 40 percent matrix material some kind of glue which keeps the like the fibers together and that is what you would typically that is what you would assume you would get if somebody is advertising carbon fiber and since we all know that's not the case and i told them again this is misleading they changed it again so they changed it and this screenshot was taken on the 27th of september and that is much closer to reality they changed it to carbon fiber composite material part of the product shell except the bottom shell with two screw holes to mount the vase amount is carbon fiber composite material which is pc abs flame resistance and carbon fiber it is carbon fiber reinforced plastic it improves the strength of the product shell and also has good thermal conductivity and corrosion resistance so basically it's just plastic with a small proportion of carbon fiber inside which we will analyze in a second what i still find kind of entertaining is that they're still advertising good thermal conductivity of plastic we all know thermal conductivity of plastic is not great let's get to the analysis now i send our carbon ring as a reference to tescan and most of you might remember tess can when we did a video last year about 40 nanometer versus 700 meter analyzing some transistors inside the cpu and tescan such an awesome company and uh thank you very much for helping us out so maybe if you're looking for your next scanning electron microscope to put it in your garage then just buy it from them thank you anyway so if you switch to the second page of our analysis on the left side you can see an image of the chamber inside the chamber on top you can see the carbon reference so that's our ring and on the bottom you can find the case polymer specimen and on the right side this is just an image of how the tescan clara looks like the sem with the edx built in an edx is basically using electrons that are hitting the surface and then you have some x-rays being emitted from the surface and this way you can determine what kind of atoms the part is made of now magnified on the left our carbon ring and if you pay closer attention to the bottom you can see a scale which indicates the raw size of two millimeter on this specific size and on the right side we can see the case polymer again on the same scale for ideal comparison tess can perform some grinding on the surface just to be able to compare both specimens the same way if we zoom in further on the left side again the reference carbon which is our carbon ring and on the right side you can spot our case polymer and also the right side you can already see some like white dots and also some of those yellow lines and those are the carbon fibers inside the polymer if we now switch to a different view this is much more clear especially if you compare left to right and pay attention to the white areas which are the carbons or the carbon fibers on the left this is as expected about sixty percent carbon fiber sixty percent white material and about forty percent uh the black material which could be some kind of like matrix material some kind of glue sticking together the fibers but now if you look on the right side there's a lot of black stuff there's not that much white stuff which indicates that the amount of carbon fiber is very very low and this is confirmed if we switch to the edx analysis on the left side we have a ton of those green spots and the green spots mark carbon or the carbon fibers and everything that is marked blue is oxygen which indicates that it's the polymer especially if we switch to the right side and you can see not that much green not that much carbon and a lot of blue stuff indicates uh yeah we don't have that much carbon inside the polymer what i found interesting is that they even compared the carbon fiber itself the carbon fiber reference from the left has about a three times higher carbon density than the carbon fiber on the right which basically just indicates that it's lower density of carbon compared through the different carbon fiber materials doesn't necessarily mean a lot but if we switch to the next view to the edx analysis then you can spot that the right side only features about three percent of carbon fibers inside a polymer whereas we have about as expected sixty percent carbon fiber on the left so yeah that is the end of the report from tescan so tesca and thank you very much for this like very nice analysis and uh for this very quick help on our matter three percent carbon fiber for sure three percent carbon fiber will still impact the plastic from a mechanical standpoint it will still be tougher it will be stronger to be used as like a case material i'm not going to argue about that it will definitely help and it's also typical if you do some research you can find anything between like 0.5 carbon fiber to up to like 15 carbon fiber in injection molded plastics but advertising that it's increasing the thermal conductivity if you add three percent carbon fiber i don't think so and also i mean it wouldn't change anything even if you would mill this out of 100 gold or copper which has like a 20 times higher thermal conductivity it wouldn't it wouldn't change anything it like thermally doesn't matter what your case is made of and especially three percent carbon fiber is not going to have any kind of impact of your on your thermal performance it will make the case probably more rigid i guess not sure if that's even relevant not sure how many of you are planning to drop your case from the fifth floor but i guess that's something you can advertise to make it stronger but this is far from anything i would consider a carbon like a carbon material technically there is no straight definition what you can call a carbon fiber material like a cfrp there is no straight definition if you have to have like x amount percent of carbon fiber inside to be allowed to call it carbon there is no such definition so technically they can probably call this carbon fiber material but with three percent i'm not sure how relevant this is generally speaking though like let's just recap the liquid metal application is done very well it has basically three levels of security and already one should be enough just the form ring around the die itself is usually enough to prevent any kind of liquid metal spills then they have the conformal coating around the smd caps and even if there is one cabin exposed since this is like a level two security thing it wouldn't really matter and then they also glued the heatsink to the chip which i'm not sure why they did it but this will make sure that no matter if you drop it from your fifth floor it will not spill liquid metal so the liquid metal application is done well but again i'm not sure why they even use liquid metal i mean it's a 5900 hx which doesn't have that much it's not dissipating so much heat the temperature usually even with the conventional thermal compound could be i don't know let it be 58 degrees celsius 90 degrees celsius peak in cinebench how often are you going to perform cinebench on such i think probably never and then the liquid metal will drop your temperatures by 10 degrees celsius but you need a lot of effort to be able to use the liquid metal i'm not sure if it was the right choice to use liquid metal in there because you cannot overclock the cpu anyway might have been better to just use a better heatsink just increase the size of the heatsink a bit maybe and this way maybe have this the fan spinning lower instead of using liquid metal just use polymer tim might have been easier but just judging from the like thermal performance everything is fine the whole marketing thing was just garbage and um yeah i guess they learned from it i hope so alright thanks for tuning in see you next time [Music] you

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Length: 21min 7sec (1267 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 29 2021