Liquid Metal Disaster Destroys RTX 5070 Ti After DIY Thermal Mod Goes Horribly Wrong
If you're not familiar, liquid metal thermal interface material (TIM) is so-called because it is very literally liquid metal. The name isn't a cheeky marketing-ism; the goop itself is made partially from gallium, which is an elemental metal that is simply liquid at room temperature similar to the more familiar mercury. It has all the properties you associate with metals, and one of those properties is, unsurprisingly, electrical conductivity. Because it wants to seep into tight spaces (due to the capillary effect), you end up with liquid metal everywhere.
It's actually even worse than that, though. See, liquid metals can cause a phenomenon known as "liquid metal embrittlement" where the liquid metal seeps into a solid metal and wrecks its mechanical strength. Metals are crystalline structures and they have a 'grain'; the boundaries between the grains are less ordered and gallium can wick into those boundaries. When that happens, it disrupts how the atoms of the host metal stick together and so the metal loses the ability to hold itself together under stress. Components desolder themselves and fall right off the board under the tiniest bet of mechanical stress (like a GPU flexing under the weight of its heatsink.)
So it goes that when you splash liquid metal on your GPU, you have completely ruined it. It's not clear to us or NorthridgeFix how the enthusiast managed to get liquid metal all over the board; the repair tech finds it in places inches away from the GPU which was itself apparently completely smothered in the stuff. Despite that the customer claims he cleaned "most" of the liquid metal off the card, the tech continues to find more and more of it between and underneath minuscule components.
As the repair goes on, the YouTuber continues to find liquid metal underneath components, including the memory chips of the GPU. Early on he admits that there's about "a 1% chance" of the board actually working again; finally, he gives up and begins continuity testing. At first, there's a glimmer of hope, as the board is not bridged on the +12V rail. But unfortunately, the 1.8V rail used for GPU core supply is bridged, which means "shorted out." The card is toast.
Now, the thumbnail for the video says "BAN LIQUID METAL", and that's certainly a strong statement, but he surely says it for clickbait purposes as he doesn't actually suggest anything like that in the video. Still, it's easy to understand the sentiment from a repair tech's point of view. Let the video be a warning: liquid metal thermal compound is not a quick and easy trick for a few extra degrees of cooling. It does offer superior thermal conductivity, but the risk isn't worth it for the vast majority of applications. Stick to non-conductive pastes like MX-7 and Kryonaut, kids.
