NOOB uses Liquid Metal on an RTX 3080...

now in my mind i've always seen liquid metal in the same way that i see a fugu fish yes if you know what you're doing and you take your time to fillet it carefully you may get some tasty performance improvements but if you screw it up which considering that it's me doing it there's a good chance of that then it'll kill you but when a good friend of my neo reached out and said that he so badly wants to see me play with liquid metal that he'll actually send me a tube i just had to go all in and try it on my rtx 3080. but before we get to that we have a sponsor for today's video today's video is again sponsored by govi's rgb ic strip lights govi is having a christmas sale from the 3rd of december which was like 2 weeks ago until the 25th of december if you want your christmas tree to have a dazzling rgb effect all you need to do is add govi's rgb ic light streaks kovi's light strips are also a great way to make your gaming setup more festive during the festive season and beyond you can either control it from this remote or when you inevitably lose that remote like i always do you can still control these lights via the app which works surprisingly well the thing that always gets me about govi is they've sent me a couple of these packages with their rgb in it and every time that i unbox it and start unraveling the role of rgb i am shocked at how much lighting all of these kits actually comes with so thank you very much govi with your rgbic live strips for sponsoring today's video check them out in the link in my description below [Music] for those of you that are regulars to the channel you'll know that the fact that i'm still sitting in this couch after the intro is played means that it's time for david's story time and david's story time inevitably means that something went wrong and if that's what you're thinking you are 100 correct because this was one hell of a process now it all started yesterday when i received my tube of liquid metal from neo which thank you very much for that but yeah so after i received the liquid metal i tore down my shiny evga rtx 3080 xc3 and in the process of tearing it down it was actually quite difficult because there are so many thermal pads and thermal putties and stuff that they stick quite hard so after pulling quite a bit the cooler did come off of the gpu but unfortunately i did seem to damage a couple of the the thermal pads that were on the cooler before although they they seemed okay so i thought i could reuse them this fact is important for later on in the video but after i did that i nicely cleaned up the gpu die and the contact plate on the cooler now when it comes to liquid metal applications there are a couple of things that you need to make sure of before you actually start spreading the stuff all up in there now the first thing is that the contact plate of the cooler that you're using shouldn't be aluminium because if aluminium and liquid metal come into contact with each other war will break out in hungary for some reason but we've got a copper plate here so that's fine although it does mean that we may need to reapply liquid metal later on because copper absorbs it and stuff like that but that's later's problem and then the second consideration is you need to protect all of the surface mounted componentry around the actual gpu die because liquid metal is thermally and electrically conductive so if it touches any of those components it'll short it fire will happen and then war in hungary which again is not something we want now how i went about actually protecting these components is by using a clear nail polish and then just put like three or four coats over all of these components so that the liquid metal can't actually contact those components now with those procedures out of the way i felt safe in actually applying liquid metal to the gpu die which i did now all of the pictures that i saw was like a small little bobble of liquid metal and this was the amount that i put on it and then i used the included q-tips to spread the liquid metal all around to try and get an even layer over the gpu die now after i did that i wasn't a hundred percent sure if i had too much liquid metal on there or too little liquid metal on there so i sent a picture of it to neo who then was shocked at the amount and said that i definitely needed to remove a bunch of them which i then did i did remove a bunch of the liquid metal from the gpu die and went about reassembling the graphics card very carefully and then took it plugged it into the pc and and yeah this is what happened okay well it hasn't immediately exploded we've got rgb on the card it works it's not dead oh thank you oh all is well in the world i didn't destroy my rtx 3080 with liquid metal but there was definitely something wrong the moment that i loaded up a game even though the gpu core reported a temperature of about 60 degrees celsius which was way cooler than before the gpu fans ramped straight up to 100 fan speed and i was getting thermal throttling on the core frequency which was was pretty weird now what's really annoying about this issue specifically with the xc3 evga card is that for some reason it only has one temperature sensor on the entire graphics card so you don't know what temperature your vrm is running at or your vram is running at or anything else for that matter so how do you diagnose an issue like this you just kind of have to stab around in the dark until you find the issue now my first thought was it has to be the thermal pads that i broke so maybe the vrm is overheating and that's why we're getting thermal throttling so i took the card out very sadly tore it back down and then replaced all of the thermal pads with well stacks of various sizes of thermal pads that i had lying around now it is real savage replacing one thick thermal pad with multiple thinner stacked thermal pads but i was in a pinch here and i gave it a quick goog and apparently it was okay so yeah this is what we're gonna be doing for this video and for some reason thermal pads are really difficult to get your hands on on short notice in canada i don't know why but nobody really stocks them on a regular basis so after stacking various thicknesses of thermal pads on top of each other on various locations on the graphics card i put it back together put it in a pc and had the exact same problem if anything it was a little bit worse this time so then in my head i thought okay so it's not the thermal pads maybe i don't have enough liquid metal on the gpu so i took it out put a little bit more liquid metal on put it back together put it in the pc exact same problem and i repeated this process maybe 10 times until there was a decent coating of liquid metal on the gpu and i realized that that definitely wasn't the problem after this i started playing around with the thicknesses of thermal pad that i was using to see if that led to better contact on the gpu because it was clear that the contact between the cooler and the gpu wasn't great you can see here that only bits of the liquid metal actually touched each other but again playing around with the thermal pad sizes didn't seem to matter and then on neo's recommendation what i ended up doing was just removing all of the thermal pads completely screwing the cooler back onto the car to see if proper contact was made between the die and the gpu cooler which it was so there was definitely a thermal pad issue apparently one plus one plus one doesn't equal three when it comes to thermal pad stacking who knew so i ended up putting just really thin thermal pads on everything it seemed like there was barely contact being made between the cooler and the thermal pads but when we got to this point yes we got better temperatures the gpu was still thermally throttling weirdly with a hundred percent fan utilization but the temperatures were much higher and it was much less severe than it was before so this was clearly the issue now after that i took the gpu out again and actually put even more liquid metal on the die again i was adding very little bits every time because i didn't want to accidentally have liquid metal leak on stuff and destroy the pc [Music] so after an entire day and several dozen nerve-wracking tear-downs of my rtx 3080 we finally got to a point where when i put it into a pc and started gaming with it we didn't immediately get the fans ramp up to 100 fan speed and the core frequency was sitting at about the same point it was with the stock configuration throughout the gaming session now with the stock configuration after about half an hour of playing battlefield 5 the temperatures were sitting at about 75 degrees celsius with an ambient temperature of 22 degrees celsius and then when it comes to the temperatures of the liquid metal application and all of my blood sweat and tears we get 70 73 degrees celsius so so it's two degrees cooler with the same ambient temperature uh which is not ideal and the fans are still behaving a little bit weirdly i have to actually manually keep them at the same speed that they were with the stock configuration so i think that some of those thermal pads aren't making proper contact somewhere uh that problem i'll fix i actually ordered all of the correct sizes of thermal pad so don't worry i'm not gonna run it like this for any extended period of time but yeah so we got about two degrees celsius which i think is very worth it considering the huge amount of effort that we put in there um now some people do get much bigger temperature improvements going with liquid metal but i think that this small improvement shows that the actual thermal interface isn't the bottleneck when it comes to cooling in this specific rtx 3080. it's got a pretty small cooler on it so yeah i think the cooler is definitely the issue and it's not the tim and with that it brings me to the end of the video thank you very much for watching and thank you so much neo for sending over the liquid metal and helping out over the course of yesterday with all of my noob questions like and subscribe to the channel if you like this video and go check out some other videos on the channel if you're interested and until the next video [Music] bye

Channel: Dawid Does Tech Stuff

Views: 448,305

Keywords: liquid metal, rtx 3080, noob, noob uses liquid metal on rtx 3080, dawid does tech stuff, graphics card, gpu, video card, is liquid metal worth it, overheating, evga, evga rtx 3080 xc3 ultra, 2020, tech, pc gaming

Id: Q-xfHUl0BQE

Length: 10min 47sec (647 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 16 2020