8mo ago

Intel reportedly denies RMA for crashing Core i9-14900K CPU due to liquid metal thermal paste usage — liquid metal erased the markings and serial number on the CPU

www.tomshardware.com

Liquid metal permanently obfuscates key CPU information that is otherwise visible after cleaning off conventional thermal paste.

9 comments

Cop out excuse. They sold broken shit. They should be accountable regardless of the current condition of said shit.
Woah, liquid metal is corrosive? Doesn't seem good for long term use.
- Gallium tends alloy with most other metals by just being near it.
  The bigger problem is application. It's easy to apply too little and have worse temps, or too much and have it squeezed out. It's conductive, so squeeze out can be deadly to your build. I won't touch the stuff anymore.
  
  Ideally it is just a few minor extra degrees compared to a good regular paste anyway. Really not worth it for most people.
  
  That's terrifying. I'm crazy-careful and I know that I would never be able to tell if .0001 ccl leaked out after tightening down the CPU, etc shorting connections...
- Well, it removes the etching, which is an extremely thin layer. That's a far cry from corroding through the integrated heat spreader that is 10,000x thicker.
- Liquid metal has never been good for long term use. It's great for tinkerers. But OEMs putting it on laptops like mine is the dumbest thing in the world. My laptop is only a few months old and I can already see that the liquid metal has started heat pump it's way out and my temps are getting worse. My friends laptop that was less than a year old was almost unusable because all of the liquid metal pumped itself out.
  As soon as I'm not busy with work I'm going to do what I did with my previous laptop, and install the PTM thermal pad on there and hope the liquid metal didn't do too much damage to my heatsink or CPU.
I refuse to believe that they don't have internal tools which could determine the serial number of a cpu
- They do.

9 comments