Now I know individuals have proposed a cooling unit for the diy edition before either as an expansion card or in the unit as part of the fan/heatsink itself. What most people haven’t considered is this: the reason liquid cooling works in a tower is because with enough space and air flow the amount of coolant used is sufficient to transfer heat away from the cpu and gpu. That’s not true with the slim form factor of a laptop. My idea is this: using liquid metal in the same fasion as you would a regular liquid cooler only scale it down for use in the framework. After all, if it can successfully work at reducing cpu temps why couldn’t it do the same thing in a liquid cooler?
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What metal are you proposing? The only metal that’s liquid at room temperature is mercury which is hard to get in quantity. It’s environmentally hazardous and extremely toxic.
Gallium is liquid a little higher than room temperature (30 C) and safer, but it would be solid until the CPU heats up.
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Pure metals yes, but for example gallium-tin alloys have a lower melting point than pure gallium (liquid at room temperature) and can be used as thermal paste (very carefully of course, as gallium reacts with aluminium and solder and makes it very brittle). But at least not as bad as mercury.
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Interesting idea! If you have the materials this would be interesting!
You can buy liquid metal thermal paste freely from Amazon: Amazon.com
But again I don’t recommend it. The thermals might improve slightly, but metal obviously conducts electricity and as I said it can dissolve solder or aluminium (like if dropped onto the case). So if you accidentally spill it or it seeps out from the cooler you can easily damage your laptop beyond repair. Also you’ve to be sure that your heatsink or chips aren’t made out of aluminium or other corrodible metals. And sponges or paper towels and so on will also not absorb metal, so it’s very difficult to remove.
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my reasoning is simple: Gallium alloyed with indium remains liquid @ room temps (72-98 degrees) I mean I don’t know the specifics, but from what I’ve read It maintains a high viscosity @ lower temps than other metallic substances. Now on that note I never mentioned gallium because unless it’s used in conjunction with a Nickle plated surface it has a tendency to produce massive corrosive effects. Now, mercury, used in conjunction with glass tubing and an impeller pump (possibly in an expansion card) would create a syphon pump that could potentially lower system temps without harming said systems. Just saying. Too bad you couldn’t use red mercury.
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I know LTT and the like have done liquid metal laptop cooling video’s before.
Yes it does help. BUT in the end the best way is hust to make the laptop thicker and fit a larger fan and heatsink.
EDIT: Re reading. Oh you mean like an AIO or custom cooling loop.
The main reason is space. Pumps that are small enough are very loud.
LTT has tried a couple of hybrid (air when travelling and liquid for desktop, they where worse than just standard air cooling. on high end laptops.
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Well, I won’t deny it, you’re right, the only way to get more efficient cooling temps is to sacrifice space and while a slim form factor is nice (in a laptop) it doesn’t offer much in the way of computational power and high-end graphics that you can find in more traditional rigs (especially for gaming). I still use my “chonky” older laptop for such things. It seems that more and more I’m seeing more cloud-based computing which allows for a slimmer pc design but also sacrifices some things. Well, it was just a thought, a good thought though and maybe it will lead to something someday.
Pesonally, I wouldn’t mind seeing pc’s with a holographic interface. I think that would offer a whole new layer of AWSOME!