Gather round, grandpa is telling the story of how he liquid metaled the FW16.
This is a continuation of this thread CPU Benchmarks and TDP but I think it’s interesting enough to warrant a new thread. TLDR at the end.
My FW16 always was thermally limited. As soon as any all core load runs, it would immidiatly hit 100°C. I thightend the screws of the heat sink a bit, which helped a little bit. But than it got worse after a couple of weeks, until it could barely sustain 3.8Ghz.
I also noticed that the temperature difference between cores was 7-10K. The air expelled by the fans was also kinda cold. So I concluded that there is something wrong with the thermal interface material.
I could reach out to support, but I didn’t buy a framework to have other people have all the fun.
So I ordered some Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut, which arrived yesterday.
This morning I went to it. Getting the mainboard out was easy enough, some connectors where a bit fiddly, but ok. Remember to BIOS disconnect the battery before.
Getting the heatsink off was not so easy. The stock liquid metal is not liquid at room temperature, so I heated up the cooler with a heat gun. Surprisingly heat pipes are very good at conducting heat away, so the whole thing was too hot to handle and I almost dropped it.
I than cleaned off the stock not-so-liquid metal with repeated use of the heat gun, cotton swaps and alcohol pads. The alcohol dissolved the glue of the foam barrier and some of the protective glue on the SMD components. I also sprayed around some liquid metal. Lucky for me it was already solid again so I could just pick it off the mainboard.
On the heatsink there are small hexagonal shapes imprinted into the copper. They look like dirt - but they won’t come off. Cleaning to thing was really annoying, it doesn’t come off, it turns solid real fast and sticks into the tiny creavase around the CPU, I never got it out of there.
Applying Conductonaut was easy, I think because everything was liquid metaled before it spreads easier than usual.
I reassembeld the laptop, fighting with myself if I trust myself that I did everything right, or listing to Linus, who says to never close the side panel, before turning on the machine for the first time.
Plugged in the power supply, the led on the side turn orange - first success, I press the power button, it lights up, second success. I look at the screen - nothing.
I contemplate all my life choices that led up to this point, I’m the stupidest person alive. I broke a 1000€ mainboard just for curiosity. I will delete my forum account. Nobody needs to know how stupid I am. Why can’t I be happy with what I have?
The screen turns on. The framework logo appears. It was just memory training.
The BIOS forgot the iGPU memory setting, one needs to turn it to normal and than back to gaming.
I run Cinebench 24. 895 points (7840HS), so about the same as before. But I don’t hit 100°C anymore and the fans are a bit quiter.
TLDR: Do not liquid metal your FW16. It’s not worth the risk. I know you gonna do it anyway. Don’t blame me.
