This Cooler Ruined an entire Company - LMX Liquid Metal Cooler

foreign welcome back to a new video on my table we have the Dynamics LMX air cooler which is a liquid metal air cooler it's quite unique quite special it's from 2010 and it's probably the most dangerous CPU Cooler ever made which we're going to check out in today's video if you take a look at this cooler first it might appear as a normal heat pipe air cooling unit because the setup is pretty much identical we have cooling fins and in between you can see something that looks like heat pipes but in this case the heat pipes are not filled with water typically heat pipes are filled with water at decreased pressure so the water evaporates this and then condenses again at the cold area probably up here around the fins that's how heat pipes work but in this case we have copper pipes that are filled with a liquid metal and Dynamics back then in 2008 thought that this might be a superior way of improving coolers because in their opinion they seem to be limited by the capability of transporting heat away with the heat pipes so they started having the lm10 which was kind of released in 2008 but not to the public they send it to some reviewers and the performance was kind of disappointing so yeah Dynamics said okay we will go back to the drawing board and improve the cooler and that's how the LMX was born the LMX was sent to reviewers about March 2010 February 2010 and by around August September 2010 Dynamics as a company was liquidated which doesn't mean necessarily that they went bankrupt but probably they didn't see any kind of business opportunity anymore so they shut down their company I'm not even sure if the LMX ever officially went on sale in shops or if only a small quantity made it it was always very hard to find apart from the reviewers who had them there were a few circling around um on some like eBay or something but I always tried to find one never managed and then Tori reached out to me via email last week and said hey I found this in my basement and I said that's amazing can I please have it and test it so that's how we ended up here as you probably already noticed this cooler is not in the best condition and Tori also didn't know if it even still works or not but first look as I said before we have all those fins to dissipate the Heat and in between we have the pipes that look like heat pipes which are not and also just a normal nickel plated copper base if we take a look on the top part then you can see typically a heat pipe cooler would just end directly on yeah the Top Fin right here but these pipes extend further I will try to remove the cover in a second so we can maybe take a look inside plastic cover is gone but you can see there are wires up here and compared to an air cooler this entire thing on the top is completely unique and different because up here we have electromagnetic liquid metal pump which will be responsible to have some kind of flow inside those pipes to circulate the liquid metal inside so the thing is even back then I was reading news articles and reviews about both lm10 and LMX and I was just reading the liquid metal part and I kind of thought in my head that it was gallium indium alloy even though it was already stated back then that it's not then yesterday I thought wouldn't it be interesting to cut this open and see what the state is inside how the pump is built and I don't know after 10 years what the state of this liquid metal is and then I was quickly talking with Tori asked about if he has some kind of access to manual founded and yeah then on the first page I was greeted with a huge amount of warnings like if a small amount of the liquid metal escapes then you have this then you have to do this and that and if a big amount of liquid metal escapes be careful because it will self-ignite and don't try to extinguish it with water because then it will explode and I was like why this seems odd because in my head I was still thinking about galuminum and then continuing reading I found out that inside is a sodium potassium alloy which is certainly interesting because I'm not sure how it went for you but for me at school I don't know like fifth sixth grade when we had basic chemistry we were experimenting with the alkali metals because both sodium and potassium are alkali metals and they are highly reactive if you throw a small portion into water you have those like impressive explosions and that's inside here I'm not sure why they thought it would be a good idea to to do that and I can also promise you after I'm done shooting this video it will not end up in my basement I will make sure that it will be removed from my apartment because I mean just just imagine you drop this on the floor and it cracks somewhere and then all this stuff comes out and burns your house down not so sure about that and also generally speaking I'm not even sure why they picked this especially also over water I'm not even sure if it's better because the heat capacity of sodium potassium is about a fourth of water so the heat capacity is how much energy in Joule or kilojoule you need to heat up a material of one kilogram by one degree Celsius or one Kelvin and the heat capacity of this specific metal alloy is about a fourth of water so it can take a fourth only of the energy to reach the same kind of temperature change at the same time the thermiconductivity is a lot higher it's about 30 times higher than of water but typically in this like transporting heat scenario it's the same with a water cooling Lube water is superior because it has a very high heat capacity not that high thermal conductivity but that's not necessary because thermal conductivity would describe the heat transfer within the material which is something we don't really care about in this scenario because we only want to remove the Heat and take it up and not conduct it within the material so yeah the entire material choice is quite odd I also want to point out that I have no clue if this thing still works there is also this controller board included which looks kind of like an inverter it's powered by a four pin Molex and also I'm not even sure if that was a review unit or like an early sample because just looking at the connectors already those are different from what you can find online in review is because they had like a normal connector to plug in whereas I have to kind of figure out where they go and which polarity could also be that polarity doesn't matter and that it would just pump in the opposite direction that is something I have to find out and when it comes to mounting this is kind of similar it's very close the socket 1700 I think it was made for maybe 1366 so that's quite close I bend it a little bit to shape so we can mount it on a recent 1700 socket and see if we can get it to work I did some basic measurements to just check if there is a short somewhere or some like catastrophic failure on the PCB but like in between the mosfet and like those caps caps here in between the output and everything there was no short all the values seemed realistic so looks kind of okay and also I think polarity should not really matter I mean if it's a normal electromagnetic pump then might just spin the opposite direction so I will attach it just on here then we will attach it to the Molex and see if there is anything we can figure out in addition I also now added current clamp simply to see if whatever is going on if something is going on because it could also be that you cannot even hear anything of the pump not fully sure to be honest I think I heard some kind of a clicking noise is at the beginning but we have a green LED on the PCB which looks good for power there's also one for temperature which does not light up so that should be fine we can also read that something is going on because this current clamp translates one millivolt every 100 milliamp that are flowing and we can currently read 300 millivolt this means if we Translate the current clamp of 330 millivolt roughly which is one millivolt per 100 milliamps that means currently we have about 30 amps flowing across those cables which also explains first of all why they have to be red or thick and why they are so warm it's insane like that's surely something between 40 and 50 degrees Celsius it's really warm not sure if it's supposed to be this way didn't find anything about this online about unusual cable temperature but I mean they probably made them beefy for a reason and we will because I I have no clue if this is like working or not um we will simply double check I have a test setup with a noct wire cooler we will run one Benchmark or like a game see what kind of Baseline temperature we will have and then see if this works and if yes how good it is also there was never a fan included so you always had to use your own 120 millimeter fan but I think we can just try to put the noctuar fan on top for a quick comparison I tuned the 12 900 KS to 5 gigahertz 1.25 volt in idle will definitely drop down under load as you will see right here so it results in a quite I would say good power draw of about 200 watt and the nocturnr u12a can easily handle that typically temperatures somewhere between 80 and 90 degrees Celsius when it comes to the P coil temperature in the gaming scenario obviously the temperatures will be much colder I first waited about five minutes for the cooler to reach a steady state when it comes to the temperature and we typically see a temperature on the course right now of about 40 to 60 degrees Celsius I would say on average so that's definitely quite a lot lower than what you would see in cinebench as usual finally managed to attach the cooler and if you think this looks crappy then I totally agree with you the thing is with this LMX by Dynamic I had to remove the plastic shot on the side because I just reassembled it but then figured out that the plastic shell just collides with the vrm cooler so I had to remove it now I have to figure out a way how to put the fan on top but I think it will just use some probably zip ties something similar to just hold it in place then wiring goes to the controller board and that's pretty much it now just a question if the cooling works or not which is hard to tell and then what about performance okay as usual if there are no explosions no fire no smoke that's already a very good start well at least I think in idle should be working fine because with the 1200 KS at that speed should definitely be warmer if the cooler was failing and like just judging by touching the copper pipes and also the top part easily 35 degrees Celsius this this has to be working then that's great now pretty much same gaming scene also waited another five minutes to get some heat into the cooler first but as you can see this looks pretty much identical to the noctuar cooler just in terms of raw temperatures we're also looking at somewhat between 40 and 60 degrees Celsius and I mean that's not a perfect comparison but yeah simply because of the changing gaming load all the time but overall I would say that's totally a usable cooler even though back then when it was launched it had pretty bad yeah results I would say but also mainly because of the price back then compared to now this cooler was extremely expensive about 120 same scenario CPUs is still in the same overclocked state same voltage same clock and we will rerun the city bench Now power door as you can see it's the same just above 200 watt now under load it looks pretty similar to the noctuar cooler but maybe three to four burst case probably five degrees Celsius warmer than the noctuar cooler but considering how old it is that's better than I expected I have to say I was surprised when it comes to Performance because back then watching the reviews most of them were not that good and especially because if you compare it to the u12a which is one of the best air coolers you can probably get this was not too bad it's like four to five degrees Celsius it was worse but then again I mean if you think back to 2010 the average air cooler price was quite a lot lower so this was fighting against coolers that were half the price and could often outperform this cooler it just it just doesn't make any kind of sense it just shows that the heat pipe overall is definitely Superior to filling this with potassium sodium alloy which also I mean it has a lot of dangers to it I would personally never use a cooler like that in my system I think steady state it's probably fine even if you store it I don't expect that something would happen but I also have no like experience whatsoever when it comes to corrosion of a block like that whereas if you look at a simple heat pipe cooler like this noctuar one it's a mount and forget solution it will not degrade over time you know what a heat pipe is it's not dangerous and yeah so it just makes sense that it never established itself on the market and I think if it was a mass product then we would maybe also see problems then I mean if you have millions of units on the market then once in a while something will happen that I don't know you transport a lot of these in in a truck and then the truck has an accident and the stuff comes out and then that's what when things becomes interesting which is where in normal water cooling or air cooling you will never have these kind of risks and that's probably why it's good that this cooler never made it as a mass product to the market but it was definitely an interesting thing interesting concept to see that you can have a cooler which is circulating sodium potassium alloy all the time and it also works after this long time sitting in someone's basement and was never touched that it's still working today that was interesting for me but also it's it's time to remove it from my apartment thanks for tuning in see you next time bye foreign

Channel: der8auer EN

Views: 215,202

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Id: e2o7D_LoYnw

Length: 15min 41sec (941 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 24 2023