Why you should NOT buy Water Blocks made out of "Silver" - Thermal Conductivity measured & explained
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- Опубліковано 4 чер 2024
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Music / Credits:
Outro:
Dylan Sitts feat. HDBeenDope - For The Record (Dylan Sitts Remix)
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Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
0:58 Advertisement
1:35 What is "Thermal Conductivity"?
3:03 How to measure thermal conductivity
5:08 Wiedemann-Franz-Law
7:23 The Thermal Conductivity Meter
9:25 Measurement Tolerances
9:49 The influence of coatings on measurements
11:09 Thermal Conductivity Calculation
11:56 Rocket Cool Heatspreader
13:23 Silver bullion
14:24 Gold bullion
15:37 Comparison of copper alloys
16:29 Aqua Computer cuplex kryos Silver Edition
17:46 Conclusion Aqua Computer
19:08 Conclusion Rocket Cool
21:46 Outro - Наука та технологія
Re-Upload: Fixed the W unit mistake in the first part of the explanation so this should be solved. Thanks for the feedback
You really didn't need to do this! It sparked a nice in detail discussion and proved people are really eager for your in-depth videos. Thanks for your commitment and desire to go into details, but... you already did things perfectly (enough) round 1!
@@FreakyAngelus it was almost no effort and I agree that it should be following SI units
uh that's why I found it private and then reuploaded.. well looks like I saw the correct one then, thanks :)
I appreciate the dedication to accurate explanations :)
Fyi pure silver doesnt tarnish but its waay to soft
You really should make more vids discussing thermal conductivity, diffusivity, air temperatures, thermal camera stuff, COPPER SHIMS (huge personal favorite) etc, its incredibly interesting, really liked this video
@@pcoverthinkI suspect copper shims will become more popular in the future esp on rtx 4000 rdna3 and beyond, 8$ for 20 huge thick shims is an incredible value for anywhere between 10-50 (yes 50)c drop on gpu temp, amazing, only need like 10 shims on a gpu
@@pcoverthink just build a 1lb heatsink out of copper shims :kekbomb:
Copper shim expansion under heat load and the potential for damage if the tolerances are too tight, would really be a fun video. For example, when used as replacements for the soft, pliable thermal pads on GPU memory is becoming fairly common, and examining the risks of damage from both the copper expansion as well as the memory module case material's own thermal expansion would be great to see, since if you've been doing this long enough, you know of the disasters this has resulted in for many people over the years as this breaks GPU memory module solder joints or the ICs themselves.
@@bjn714 copper shim good
@@bjn714 PCoverthink's sandwich would seem a good compromise.
I worked with one of these equipments at college and some alluminum alloys. Really interesting how a few percent chemical composition can change the conductivity. Material science is great!
Incredible attention to detail, as always!
I love these technical deep dives, breaking down what people assume they understand to the literal formula.
Never stop, the industry needs people like you and Steve to keep the manufacturers (& community) honest!
Quick explanation: He is German. 😅
Honesty is a manufacturers kryptonite, like Nvidia won't tell you if their connector catches fire and AMD won't tell you you actually need better cooling to offset the higher temperatures caused by their own design "to please everyone"
Anyway, Keep it up Roman (& crew) I know it's not easy to do all this (and you're doing everything twice once in English and once in German others might just add subtitles instead of a reshoot)
Thank you for the detailed explanation and the 'short version' to, this went well beyond my field of knowledge, but I was actually very to know curious to know about the pro's and con's of copper vs silver thermal conductivity but didn't even know where to start. Nice video Der Bauer!
I'm about to do my first custom loop after about 15 years of building and being an enthusiast. Having to now take into account factors such the relationship between fluids (water, biocide, coolant) and metals (nickel, copper, aluminum), the flow of the pump in proportion to the dissipation of heat, and many other factors, is genuinely interesting and I can't wait to get it together
Love the detailed testing and physics background. Incredible work and science communicating.
In theory, as silver is a natural biocide, it's possible the silver block was made to prevent growth. I've always wondered about a pure silver cooler.
90% of the coolers will be nickel plated and not real silver. pure silver would work about 5 % better(as its about 5% more conductive electrically) , but cost about 10 -20 times what a regular 40 $ cooler would .
You are better off with just just copper or nickel plated copper anyway. I wont write a dissertation here about it but you want your loop to have like metals all the way though due to the galvanic effect. Silver doesn't play well with copper or pure nickel (nickel chrome alloys are better with silver). As most radiators are copper its best to just stick with the copper and use a biocide in your loop. Any benefit from the silver in the biocide department are simply not worth the cost.
@@amindamok lol some rich mofo now contemplating building a loop with all solid silver parts. Jks but I'm sure someone will do it at some point.
I knew about lots of these things but not to the extent that was explained. As always great video. Very informative.
I've got an MSc in Materials Science & Engineering, and I've learned something from this! (Or, at one point I did learn this at university, but I forgot...)
One remark on the gold plating for pins and connectors: gold is relatively soft, so gold plated pins tend to offer less frictional resistance as well. That's not very important for pinned or LGA'ed CPUs, but it _is_ beneficial for connectors that make sliding contact, so USB, PCI-e, HDMI, DP, etc.
hm
I love when you go in depth behind the physics like this
Greetings from Brazil! descent of German here !! Great work! tks! for this masterpiece video .
It's really cool seeing how dramatically purity effects performance. I wonder if CPU playing is so thick to protect against wear. A really thin coating would be more efficient, but a lot easier to accidentally wear through.
I like how systematic and logical your approach to the topic is. This is a top quality channel.
On a side note - I wish this guy was my physics teacher. It would have made a lot more topics approachable to me.
You're all casual here, I'm using diamond IHS for good thermal conductivity. Copper and silver is so amateur 🥸😏
it was really interesting to see the rockitcool ihs tested here. its amazing how some LM and a slightly different profile IHS can drop temperatures more then 10c at max load. I agree that it should also be nickel plated.
this was super informative, thanks a lot for taking the time to test this stuff.
Great detail! Just had PTSD triggered when i heard "heat conductivity of copper" and the memories came flooding... MAN HEAT TRANSFER WAS A PAIN!
Thanks for the video and information Roman🙂
I really liked this video.
Most of my subscriptions are either PC tech or physics channels, and this video was applied physics.
Side note: I got into physics videos originally to learn more about Quantum tunnelling, like when a CPU gets hot, and what happens, also about how cosmic rays can either cause a pc to crash or the very least corrupt data.
I wonder if given unlimited budget a diamond block would make much of a difference. Obviously it would cost a fortune to manufacture, but would be cool.
Roman, in the thermal conductivity over temperature graph you showed early in the video it was noted that the thermal conductivity of alloys can INCREASE with temperature, unlike pure metals that DECREASE with temperature. Would it be worth testing both of the Aquacomputer IHS's with higher temperature? Is it possible, at say, 70C that the thermal conductivity of the sterling silver IHS increases enough to overtake that of the pure copper IHS?
Both alloys involved (copper and silver) have the same temperature/conductivity relationship. Bar some mad interaction between the two when alloyed, the trend will be the same. The point he was making was that by alloying brass in to an alloy, then you can benefit from the increasing conductivity trend brass has, as well as the raw conductivity of the (typically) copper..
Nope, the sterling and pure silver will outperform copper,
Only thing better is diamond.
The water block needs corrosion resistance so silver oxide doesn’t form on the waterside and insulate. Dissolving silver would increase thermal capacity but it would just clog things up. And any oxidized area traps heat
Science over ignorance, myths and misinformation. Thats why I like this channel, keep it up man.
Really great man. Love the explanation on how to use the equation. Thank you!
Wow, this was a great video on this topic. Thank you for the class.
Awesome video and keep up the great work.
I just want to say you have a great proportionality Mr Der8auer.
Fantastic - learned so much - thank you - will be watching it again
So glad you pointed out that silver water coolers are worse, I've only bought copper water blocks for decades now because someone tested this years ago and said the same thing. Glad I have followed that advice and it helps when buying because they are cheaper.
Thanks for this content ❤
Great detail,
cheerz!
I love this channel. So many interesting topics!!
I was wondering how we were going to convert electrical conductivity to thermal conductivity. The Wiedemann-Franz-Law was really neat to learn about . I'm still waiting for super materials to be used in cooling . Some graphene-copper alloy or synthetic diamond - graphene with some serious thermal and electrical conductivity. Thermal paste really makes a difference in all of these materials as well. The gold plating note was excellent . It's to prevent the corrosion as gold is supposed to be inert even to water. Most other materials will rust or breakdown but gold seems to hold up much longer.
Oh, sure. That's exactly what we need right now, exotic materials to make PC components just impossible to buy for the 99% of the people. Thanks for that.
@@JP-xd6fm you and J B are forever jocking my stuff. thank you for never stopping your typing crusade.
@@tobiwonkanogy2975 I really appreciate that. But I was dead serious about it, exotic materials like the silver used on the Aqua computer example are just a perfect excuse to raise prices up for no gain or negligible boost on performance.
I'm pretty sure those exotic materials are being used by NASA for purposes that makes more sense than playing with our gaming pc.
@@JP-xd6fm Marketing would definitely push its advantage even if it was within a range of error . my real want is for copper-graphene. wouldn't take much to figure out how make a batch . potentially just run simulations with known properties or might have make several batches until the right consistency is found . I've seen old space computers but nothing newer . the military and aerospace technology always trickles down to the common folk eventually . microwaves , flight, pc's etc etc all was mythological at one time.
Great presentation !!! keep up the good work...
This was such an interesting video, thank you Roman.
Thank you, this was very educational! Plus, I simply like your channel!!
Would love to see some actual benchmarks in a custom loop on those 2 "Aqua computer" heatsinks, copper vs silver.
Loved the outtakes.
I’m going to use this video in my resume for my next job. I’m now qualified to use this machine. 😁
Excellent video as always. This is something I have been struggling to wrap my head around, and wish I knew more about when creating my GPU copper modding videos. All I knew was adding copper greatly reduced the temperature of components, but the in-depth reason for WHY has been cloudy in my head. Love all of your videos and Thermal Grizzly products, you are truly the king of PC hardware engineering!
Great video, learned a lot. Thanks for that.
That out take was rather amusing :D
Sir you are the best Ifo vloger to educate people of needed Computer sciences thank you.
Nice to see sheik gracing us with her presence, even if it was very breifly. thank you for giving the people what they really want..
Great and very underrated video.
Great video! How do you calculate thermal conductivity on non conductive thermal paste?
thanks for the video, and the cut in the end
Results with silver was very interesting, thanks!
very informative.... so that slightly thicker Nickel plating on the AMD will work well with a ThermalGrizzly Kryonaut Liquid Metal Paste in protecting the IHS... and you gave me a good part to look into for a cpu waterblock....
Amazing video, very informational.
This is awesome, I love these types of videos.
I see why DerBauer name is so big in the community, this young man is engineer material and I see why people listen to him.
Good job and keep it up.
thank you!
Hi Roman, what your toughts about tilted cases in the terms of wearing out fans and hard disks considering the giroscope effect?
Appreciate the content . It keeps my brain hunger in check
Hey Roman, what is the interaction between silver and gallium based liquid metal? Is silver immune to the gallium? If so I think that would be a big upsell. As you showed the nickel plating on the copper greatly affects the performance, so if the silver is safe for permanent use unlike the copper then the value might be there.
From the limited testing we did with silver it seemed like it was actually worse than copper. But we only tried it on few IHS and limited time
@@der8auer-en Ah ok. So a nickel plated copper contact surface is still the best. Nice to know you guys already tested it. 👍
@@der8auer-en Gallium is corrosive to all metals except tungsten and tantalum, copper is no more resistance than silver, that said when we talking about a heat spreader on a CPU there is no real world difference. there is less then 1% difference in the thermal conductivity of materials on heat spreader that size at the working temperatures(not counting Effusive/Diffusivity) .
So use copper its the best at transferring the heat at the price, unless we can make the heat spreader out of Graphite or Diamond.
silver 92.5% is very prone to oxidation and gallium eat away the passivated coating
@@Thundra74 why would you use 925? that like using 92% copper both are very poor metals.
Do you have any of those graphene thermal pad sheets? I would be really interested to see what reading those give you.
Great video!
5:40 Looking at the graph, one important think about copper thermal connectivity is that it crashes by ~10% before reaching 100 deg C. You are doing the measurements at room temperature, but I think you should also test at ~70 to ~80 deg C (if the head of the measurement instruments permits that, I don't want to kill it).
I think you are misinterpreting the chart. From 200 Kelvin (-73°C) to 400 Kelvin (127°C) the conductivity drops by about 15 W/m*K which is not even 5%. So From the room temperature at which I measured to about 70 or 80°C it would change by about 1-2%. Not worth measuring
@@der8auer-en I agree. Yet the engineer in me screams: I want to test it and see it ;)
thank you for letting people know the truth about gold plating! it's very important on the fingers of plugs that are frequently removed/inserted because right before the pins touch each other there will be a small electrical arc which would be damaging if not for the gold!
Learning PC Hardware also learning about metallurgy. Nice info as always 👍👍
I would love to see this video with liquid metal vs stock cpu. Thats the only thing i missed in this video.
I got about 20 C° difference with my old 4770k so it would be interesting to see your numbers
Great video! I have a question though... You said alloys thermal performance increase with temperature, could the silver mixed with copper perform better at higher temperatures? The block would be higher than 20° for sure, I'm not sure if you can measure that with your tool though, if it can be used at a higher temp maybe put it in series with another block on the CPU? Probably not if they aren't claiming any marketable performance lift but I'm curious anyway XD
Superinformative. Thanks
The upshot I get is there is not a whole lot of point to lapping+liquid metal; other than a boat load of trouble down the road as everything corrodes. Plus points for an interesting physics lesson! 👍
Great video, very good explanation in complex and simple. And the Silver water block will feel like it works better because of the wallet factor...
Roman, can you take another step and solve thermal diffusion equation? I'm asking because you are missing two variables in your comparisons: thermal capacity and density. These enter into the equation as well.
Hey Roman, I have the silver Aquacomputer block in the adjustable version with the 4 pins that can warp the profile of the block while mounted because the silver alloy they use is still softer than copper, so it makes it much less work to make it conform to unlapped blocks.
Not that I need it anymore since I swapped to a Der8auer Edition 8086k - lapped copper version, not the fancy silver IHS one - but I also have no reason to get a new block, because as you said the temperature difference is only half a degree purely based on materials.
Could you make video on how much more efficient cooling gets when the temperature ran as high as possible? (E.g. with lower fan speed)
very interesting stuff thanks!
great job great video !
I like that your cat likes to help you.
Would it be possible to make an alloy of copper and silver that has better thermal conductivity than either element in their pure forms, especially at higher temperatures? Since you say that thermal conductivity generally decreases with temperature for pure elements, but rises for alloys.
Cool bloopers 😄 and nice master class
ive been oC'ing anything from athlon xp (which i burn't) from q6600, didnty felt assleep, loved the cat and loved the video. keep making good footages please ;)
Another reason for the gold on contact points isn't just corrosion - it reduces the contact resistance as well.
Very interesting!
Thanks for the video
I LOVE VIDEO LIKE THIS!! So good for arguing with ignorant people!!
Hey, im answering for rockitcool here since I know the answer, he changed the design of the IHS to make it work with a thermal grizzly contact frame!
Would the gold or nickel be able to hold a build up of lower temps within, & be used better during heat spikes?
Koolance used to sell water blocks that they claimed were gold plated. I have a complete Exxos kit from forever ago and it certainly looks like gold.
Amazingly informative video. Also, about the silver, would that be enough to act as a biocide?
No, it wouldn't leak ions the same way a kill coil does. Stirling silver is much more stable than the silver used in a coil.
@@FirmB1ade thanks! That answers another question I ask below about copper ions being enough of a biocide.
Please use after market inter coolers for your GTR or heat exchanges etc on pc equipment
If the silver goes all the way through and is used as the interface with the water in the loop - I understand why there is a silver version - silver is antibacterial, so the silver block will inhibit algae growth in the cooler liquid, and algae will clog up the microstructures inside the block; so although it might have slightly lower cooling capacity when new, it will maintain that over a much longer time than the pure copper/nickel plated copper.
Learned a lot from this. I had always thought gold was better, because NFS mentioned that the McLaren F1 had gold heatshields. Now I wonder why that was.
Fantastic tool, I want one. Maybe I can persuade my professor to buy us one. XD These thermal and electrical conductivity problems are very common my field of research (applied superconductivity). The Wiedemann-Franz law especially is a sonofab*ch, when making current leads for experiments in liquid helium.
Liquid helium is interesting indeed cause of the temps it can achieve and what it can do to metal at those temperatures.
Pero que maravilla de vídeo. Saludos desde Argentina. Gracias.
great video thanks
nice video and thorough theory behind the measurement.
and still there is people who svallow a salesman salespoints than this facts. bear in mind that salesmen often don’t have other education than salesschool.
What does liquid metal do to copper? I know that it fuses with it but does it damage it? What if you've got a vapor chamber heatsink touching liquid metal? Does it enter the chamber and ruin it?
You would think that what would be spoken about is resistance vs conductivity. Same thing I realize, but thermistors seem easier to talk about and resistance and temp track positively in pure metals.
I learned a lot from this video.
At 7:01, it says Gold (Ag) and Silver (Au). The chemical symbols ought to be flipped.
Thank you very much. This stuff is boring, but you are doing a wonderful service by your careful methods.
Just a question from my ignorance:
Since alloys may behave differently than pure metals when temperature raises, could the silver-copper alloy bring better conductivity on higher temps than pure copper, which is when you most need it? Would corrosion bring something to the table as well?
waves with snaps quick flashes and a fan cooling conductive to insure it can take the extra away
Thanks!
I'd say there's some chance that Aquacomputer offer silver as a cosmetic option, since the perforrmance should be essentially identical.
I would like you to go into a little more detail. If you have an ihs with a thermal conductivity of 390 and a copper heatsink cooler with a thermal conductivity of 390 how much of an effect does putting a layer of thermal paste with a thermal conductivity of only 12 in between the two have. I am guessing thickness and of the layer and microscopic air pockets play a role. Another question is in regards to gpu's I have replaced some thermal pads to more efficient ones with a thermal conductivity of 20 and have seen a significant temperature reduction. How much of an effect does having 1mm thermal pads vs 3mm thermal pads have. It seems to me that the best would be to have the copper plate as smooth as possible directly mated to the silicon which is the source of the heat. Why is this not done? It seems that having a silicon/heat source with a layer of thermal paste + ihs + thermal paste + heatsink is less efficient. I guess that is why two phase direct to die liquid cooling is so much better, but then you have the problem of pressure and sealing.
Great video with high quality of technical details, as usual!
So I'm lapping my 5950X now! That's the only thing that really matters! 🤣
Roman, silver is used to destroy bacteria and something like that in a liquid system, that's why some people use it, but also didn't expect that has worse thermal conductivity than copper 🤯
not going to do it. because i will completely fudge it.
but i have the katana 1070 with the all copper heatsink (vapor chamber and fine fins) .
My curiosity is if i could remove an area of the copper fins and solder a copper water block to it (upto 1x4x8cm wb). And how would it conduct heat .
Cheers from shaun.