Nvidia Liquid Metal Has Higher Heat Dissipation Efficiency
Nvidia’s latest Blackwell architecture graphics card has been unveiled at CES 2025. Among them, the flagship GPU GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition is thinner than its predecessor.
According to the latest news, in order to make it thinner and lighter, Nvidia has redesigned its printed circuit board (PCB) and cooling system, adopting a three piece PCB and dual flow cooling system design.
The significant feature of the new cooler is that it uses liquid metal thermal interface material (TIM) instead of traditional silicone grease to control the thermal design power consumption of 575W TGP, which is an innovation for Founders Edition graphics cards.
GPU generates a large amount of heat during high load operation. In order to prevent GPU overheating, Nvidia has adopted various cooling technologies, including advanced heat sink design, efficient cooling fans, and liquid metal thermal interface materials.
Advantages of liquid metal compared to silicone grease materials
Liquid metal is usually made of gallium alloy, which has higher thermal conductivity and can significantly improve heat dissipation efficiency. It can more effectively transfer the heat generated by the GPU to the heat sink, allowing the graphics card to operate stably at a high power consumption of 575W
Higher thermal conductivity: The thermal conductivity of liquid metal is usually around 73W/m • K, while the thermal conductivity of silicone grease can only reach up to 11W/m • K.
Better filling effect: Liquid metal has good fluidity and can penetrate into the tiny gaps between the CPU and the heat sink, providing tighter contact and better thermal conductivity.
Stronger durability: Liquid metal is less volatile and has a longer service life, while silicone grease may solidify or dissipate after prolonged use, leading to a decrease in heat dissipation efficiency.
However, liquid metals also have potential risks such as conductivity and corrosiveness (the material is conductive, and improper handling may cause short circuits, and some liquid metals may corrode aluminum heat sinks, requiring the use of specific heat sinks or additional protective measures). In addition, the application and replacement process of liquid metals is relatively complex, requiring high manufacturing processes and installation maintenance requirements.
This has resulted in liquid metal not being widely adopted in the GPU heat dissipation field. Currently, only Asus widely uses liquid metal in high-performance laptops and graphics cards, while other PC manufacturers tend to be cautious. Some systems of Acer and Alienware also use liquid metal. The most commonly used application of liquid metal may be Sony’s PS 5 gaming console, which is used between its customized AMD processor and heat sink.