Liquid Metal vs thermal paste

Warm-ish, I don’t have a way to measure it with me. Its been constant all day though.

That explains it.
I have a 20°C ambient temperature and mine idles at around 37°C with the stock thermal paste.

Edit: This is the temperature for the package, the cores idle at around 32-33°C

Edit 2: I just noticed, that you have the i7 variant. That explains the difference in temperature

So I just switched my i5 framework to using conductonaut as the laptop was overheating after playing daggerfall unity for too long. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a good benchmark suite on gentoo to capture good data like AIDA64 so my data is pretty much just running sensors with a stress-ng burnin.

Anyways with stock I was getting thermal throttling with 1 core hitting 100c and the others around 85c-90c. Obviously with the thermal throttling the fan was autoed to 100%

After switching to liquid metal I’m getting much better temps. This was the first time I’ve ever done a liquid metal install (Gamers Nexus has pretty good videos on what to do) and I’m quite impressed with the results. With liquid metal and the same burnin test I’m seeing all cores around 75c and fan speeds are noticeably lower and quieter.

If you are willing to risk bricking your mainboard for better temps and quieter loads, I would recommend taking the plunge

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Its a little wierd, that your framework runs so hot. I cant get mine even close to throtteling with synthetic loads. Gaming should be less stressful that stresstest tools. From which batch is your framework?

You are running linux, if I see that correctly. Did you change any power settings for the CPU?
I just ran prime95 and furmark and never got above 80°C with my i5 framework

I was in Batch 4, the existing thermal paste appeared to be applied correctly when I replaced it with liquid metal. If anything there was more paste than necessary but that’s way better than not enough paste.
My kernel only has ‘performance’ and ‘schedutil’ cpufreq governors built and ‘performance’ is enabled by default. P-states are enabled and stress-ng is taking advantage of that with the --ignite-cpu flag

I am not familiär with that Tool. How much Power is the CPU allowed to draw during the stress test?

Performance will pin the cpufreq at max which I guess is 4.2GHz for these i5’s. As far as I’m aware there is nothing on this machine that would prevent the CPU from running as fast as it can

I assume stress-ng with ignite is more aggressive than prime95. Probably closer to IntelBurnTest

Linus Tech Tips made a video a few weeks ago where they tested different Stress test tools. Why Overheat your CPU on Purpose? - YouTube
They found that prime95 put out the most heat on intel. This test was done on windows though, which means I have no comparison for stress-ng.
Can you get a power reading from your system?

During stress-ng the battery is discharging 3301mA at 13.997V so… 42.6W it looks like

under prime95, my system pulls 43W from the battery, about the same as yours. The highest temperature I measured with the stock thermal paste is 81°C.
Its a little wierd that your framework runs so much warmer.

A good alternative to liquid metal with ~ same cooling perfomance is the honeywell tpm 7950 thermal pad (its not a normal thermal pad because if themperature goes up it gets liquid like thermal paste).

Here a video from LinusTechTips: Reddit told me to buy this – PTM7950 Thermal Pad - YouTube

There are more vids on youtube, just type name of it vs liquid metal. But i linked this one, because there you can see it can get “liquid” like thermal paste (not like liquid metal). So i think it’s great for CPU and GPU, but im not sure you want to use it for example on vrm like a thermalpad, because probably it will just melt. But im not sure about that.

It seems to be as good as liquid metal and it’s said to be last long and dont try out like thermal paste. So seems to be perfect for laptops. But it’s expensiv.

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@Michael_Wu et al have provided a well-researched and documented examination of PTM 7950 and its use with Framework 13s: [Honeywell PTM7950 Phase Change Thermal Pads/Sheets] Application, Tips, and Results

Dino

edit: I borked the link. Now fixed.

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Yeah, I’ll toss in my support for PTM7950. On my framework laptop it dropped my temperature running s-tui by ~8℃ and on my steam deck it increased my FPS on the dying light 2 video setting performance test by ~5 FPS. Its non-conductive and framework has a nice metal rectangle cage around the area with the CPU so you’re not going to have to worry about it damaging things. I’m going to put this stuff on everything I can.

The only cooling-related issue I came across is a couple months after applying it, my fan started doing an eerily perfect imitation of a spinning rust hdd but I have no reason to suspect it had anything to do with the PTM7950 (my theory is maybe I mishandled the fan when it was out of the laptop or the bearing in the fan was just crap to begin with. No idea which it is, and no way to tell, so I bought my own replacement fan instead of contacting support.)

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Have you seen any tests, where ptm7950 and lm are directly compared?
I havent seen any direct comparison, sadly

The Linus Tech Tips video compares the two, starting at approx 7 minutes.

Lol…

I posted a video directly in this post you quotet and another one postet a forum-post with exactly the same topic 1 post below. And also you can just type on youtube “ptm 7950 vs liquid metal” and scroll a bit. You will find ~3 more videos.

I was reading a lot about ptm9750 in the last couple of days.

There are cases, where ptm7950 can be a lot worse than liquid metal, but not always. If you apply it on a NOT-direct DIE cooling method, i often heard (but never saw in videos/tests), that it had bad perfomance. BUT:

  1. I also red often, that some people had to burn-in the thermal pad for several hours (or just using it normal some days), before reaching the whole potential.

  2. Because the thermal pad melts @45° celcius, it (my hypothesis) could be bad on desktop-cpu, where you have not a direct contact to the CPU-Die. So the surface where the thermalpad is mounted on, has lower temperatur than the DIE itself. So that MIGHT give probelms. BUT i also saw videos with desktop-CPUs, where ptm7950 were way better than high-end thermal paste.

  3. There is a rumor (i never saw any real test who evidence that), that with high mounting-pressure (like on a desktop-cpu), ptm7950 has bad perfomance. But again: I also saw some tests with desktop-cpu which were worse. But i also red from users, which had implement it on their laptop and where trying it then on their desktop and then it was not good anymore.

Conclusion: On direct-DIE mounting (like Laptop CPU/GPU and desktop-GPU) i think it should be a super cooling solution. In the other cases you should be warned. It can be good (i saw some cases), but it can also not be good.

The question is now, why are there cases with good results and cases with bad results. One solution could be, that the results which were good had used coolers, which had lower mounting pressure (but again… i newer saw a test). Another reason could just be, that the good results were, because they were not able to apply the other TIM correctly, so ptm7950 looked good against them.

There are several possibilities which are all wild guesses.

But also important to say is, that ptm7950 lasts longer than thermal paste, but probably not longer than liquid metal on nickel-plated coolers, but i dont know. Probably about the same on copper-coolers. It’s said, that you have to reapply (without scratching the old layer away) liquid metal on copper-based cooler-surface. But i never saw a tests, how long it lasts on the second apply.

But from copper i saw in videos cooling-perfomance-degradation after ~ 1-2 years. But i did not find a tests, how long it lasts, after you applied it the second time. If it lasts “forever” or only 2 years.

Same for nickel-plated coolers. I saw some tests after 1 year, but i did not find tests after 2 or 3 years.

I saw on reddit a user, who tested ptm7950 several times. after 8 months it was about the same cooling perfomance like on start. After 12 months it started to get worse. But he also stated, that normal thermal paste get worse after 2-4 months. So keep that in mind.

Sorry, i didnt express myself correctly. I meant, there are no direct comparisons on the framework.

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