Foam dam barriers for Liquid Metal safety insurance guide.

I LM'd my laptop years ago, had it thrown around in a truck for over a year and after deciding to open it up for the hell of it, never once did the LM ever run off and did all the fearful things this post is suggesting. I suppose if you really dont know what your doing when doing a LM repast and use LM like paste as I have seen people do, then it doesnt hurt to do this, then again, maybe I just got lucky

 

I haven't have time to test this yet. But at first glance I'm pretty sure this is the ticket. It's about .5 mm thick, very porous, and compresses enough that your really can't feel it between your fingers. It's super cheap, and really durable. My only concern would be it's resistance to heat. Im without laptop ATM, so I won't be able to try it for a couple weeks. But it's definitely worth a shot for anyone looking.

https://www.amazon.com/Cramer-Underwrap-Athletic-Headband-Pre-Wrap/dp/B071YV5XZM

https://www.amazon.com/Jaybird-Mais-Foam-Underwrap-Pre-Wrap/dp/B07KMNHL57

I mentioned going to the craft store to my girlfriend to look around, she came up with this in about a minute lol.

 

I'm wondering if anyone here might be able to weigh in on whether running a thin bead of silicone sealant around the die so that it seals against the heat sink might be a good idea. AFAIK it's designed for sealing and is rather easy to peel off, especially if the bead is not massive. Seems like it would be easier to do than finding and cutting foam perhaps?

 

Gluing the heatsink to the mobo is a bad idea, and creating a vacuum as well might be even worse - some thermal pastes create a great deal of suction all on their own (lift chips up, stuck to heatsinks etc.

If you mean using silicone to create a gasket, with vaseline or something to prevent the silicone adhering to one or both surfaces, I think Mr fox did something like that, no idea how it went

The foam isnt tricky to do and should only take a few minutes, all you need is a sharp razor blade and rough measurements of the die.

 

The problem is anything that is thinner than the distance than the die height won't work at all because then it won't work as a dam. And such things also can't be used on LGA chips around the socket or video cards too. Foam or a conformal coating is really the best choice.

 

Has anyone tried aquarium filter sponge?

 

The nice thing about pre wrap is it's ease of use. You could easily stack two or three pieces on one another. It would give you the ability to get a perfect fit, and it would take under a minute to cut and apply it.

 

HI guys

I will be soon doing LM repaste in my GE72VR 7RF.
My cooling looks like this ( https://reho.st/view/self/fa6f5631d170870de3ec84fd80a0ed4bce0ca7e7.jpg / https://reho.st/view/self/5c7e24caaabf402e0a5fae85ceafd31fd86fcde6.jpg)
Those are from ge72VR 6RF thread but cooling looks identical.

I will be going from TGK to TGC on CPU and GPU and while waiting for TGC and few other stuff for some cooling mods I want to ask few things regarding safety in using LM.

My plan is this ( please correct me in some points if you have better solutions)
First I will be taping around CPU and GPU dies with Scotch 33+ to prevent any damage from LM then I want to make barier to prevent moving LM on the mobo and here is my question, I have spare Phobya insulating mat which looks like this ( http://www.angela.pl/galerie/n/noise-absorber-120x120mm_39570.jpg / http://www.angela.pl/galerie/n/noise-absorber-120x120mm_39568.jpg / http://www.angela.pl/galerie/n/noise-absorber-120x120mm_39569.jpg ), of course I want to trim it down to arround 1mm or less so the heatsink will make proper contact with the dies, also this mate has one side glued so it will be easier to hold this to the schotch tape and prevent moving arround. Is this will be any good? I also have some spare K5 PRO paste and my second thought was to use this insted of this mat but here I have some doubts because how to aply this paste properly because I think using this K5 pro to much will end in the paste on the die instead of the LM.
Or I was also think of using the thin rounding from insulating mat and K5pro around the foam barier to make double barier.
I also have another idea of using 0,5mm adhesive tape: I have this (https://www.aquatuning.co.uk/therma...acool-double-sided-adhesive-pad-100x100x0-5mm )
It is compresible and I think the very thin rounding from this tape could also work as a very good barier. What do you think??

As I will be doing LM repaste for the first time ( but I have did multiple laptops and desktops with traditional repasting so I have some knowlage) I was thinking of making some adjustments to the foam with traditional paste first and runing some cpu and gpu stress test to see if the contact is good. I have leftover of TGK and I want to use this paste for testing pourposes of foam cuts as I know my temps now as I have TGK now on dies so I will know that contact is bad if the temps will sky high.

 

Can you squeeze it to thickness of human hair? I haven't done lm repaste with sponge barrier myself but from this thread I understand that you want very porous sponge which would trap LM drops inside those holes. I found that aquarium filter sponge is quite porous and looks like sponges that people use in this thread. Though I'm not sure how it squeezes and how well it works. Here's sponge I'm talking about:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Fish-Tank-...078538?hash=item1cac41d00a:g:a38AAOSwgmJX1CZC

 

15mm for sure not but I think trimed to 1mm should work ok.
But I will visit my local aquarium shop to take a look at the filers sponge.
But I think that you are mistaken about those holes. I think that they don't trap LM inside but only help in squeezing the sponge but maybe I made mistake here