Gigabyte's Liquid Metal TIM On Aorus RTX 5090 Tested With Surprising Results
As it turns out, all Gigabyte GeForce RTX 5090s do use a liquid metal TIM, just not to the extent that users would believe. The key is in what Gigabyte calls its "metal composite grease", which Gigabyte does not describe in detail, but claims is on all except its water-cooled RTX 5090 / 5080 GPUs. To clear things up, der8auer decided to perform an extended analysis on a Gigabyte Aorus Master GeForce RTX 5090 and its thermal compound grease in order to determine its true nature, and the result proved quite interesting.
So, "metal composite grease" both is and isn't liquid metal. While common thermal paste can also be called a compound or "composite", Gigabyte's phrasing here is actually referring to a blend of standard thermal paste ingredients with droplets of liquid metal in order to further enhance thermal conductivity. This is actually a little bit dangerous, though. Any amount of electrically-conductive liquid metal has about the same level of risk, so traditional wisdom would indicate that you'd just go all the way if you're using it at all. It's most likely a cost-saving measure though, and and testing found that the metal composite grease performs somewhat worse than full liquid metal, as you would expect--to the tune of about 5°C under sustained load.
Is the trade-off worth it? Perhaps. It does seem to be more thermally conducive than standard thermal paste, and coming within striking distance of full-liquid metal is still pretty good. We certainly aren't surprised that Gigabyte used liquid metal for its flagship, top-end liquid-cooled GeForce RTX 5090, though, since the GeForce RTX 5090 is still the most power-hungry GPU we've reviewed to date.
