There's a particular strain of the Dunning-Kruger Effect that some modders/tinkerers fall into that I've seen a few examples of over the years. It's a combination of the aforementioned cognitive...
Exemplary
There's a particular strain of the Dunning-Kruger Effect that some modders/tinkerers fall into that I've seen a few examples of over the years. It's a combination of the aforementioned cognitive bias and a vague kind of conspiracy-seeking mentality. They get a piece of hardware and automatically assume that it's been designed specifically to hobble latent performance, and that a few simple modifications are all it would take to unlock this stifled potential.
In mild cases it'll lead decently competent amateur techs to do relatively innocuous things like replace the OEM thermal compound on CPUs with "Antarctic Chill-Xtreme Sigma" compound, presumably with the reasoning that the OEM has volume considerations in mind when choosing which compounds to use for their mass-produced units, so they won't be using the highest quality option for cost considerations. Fair enough. For the most part, that doesn't hurt anything, and if it encourages a feeling of ownership over your tech, more power to you. It's really not likely to squeeze appreciable performance gains from your hardware, but it probably isn't going to hurt anything, if you know what you're doing.
Then there are those who go for more extreme modifications, like the one called out in this piece. The thinking that leads a person to this sort of act is almost totally unmoored from logic. MSI or whoever built your video card really didn't choose the thermal pads and heatsinks purely for cost considerations. They have no real reason to do so. They despise RMAs and know that if they skimp on the primary components like thermal management, they'll see those skyrocket. They've considered using copper for contact thermal conduction surfaces and ruled it out, and not because it'll cost them a few pennies per unit. They intend to charge $800 minimum per unit anyway, and if they need to raise MSRP by $0.05/unit to save $0.10/unit RMA costs, they'll do it, and the actuarial bean-counters will sleep like angels.
I'm really not trying to deride someone if they want to roll up their sleeves and mess around with their tech. It's your gizmo, you may modify with my blessing. My criticism is for the mentality that ignores the fact that a great deal of thought and effort goes into designing these machines, and assumes that "this one simple trick" will turn your GTX 1080 into an RTX 4090 Ti Gigachad Edition. It don't work like that.
I have a couple amusing stories regarding this sort of techy FAFO from my time as a field tech that I'd be happy to share, if anyone is interested. One of them involves a poor kid who put far too much trust in Linus Tech Tips, and is a small part of the reason I disliked that outlet long before the accusations of a toxic work environment and bad journalistic ethics completely destroyed their credibility in my mind.
Right, the LTT kid. Now, I should preface this by acknowledging that I have never sought out the specific video that planted this idea in the kid's head. For all I know, he completely misconstrued...
Exemplary
Right, the LTT kid.
Now, I should preface this by acknowledging that I have never sought out the specific video that planted this idea in the kid's head. For all I know, he completely misconstrued the meaning of everything he saw, and went off on a tangent of his own devising, using materials completely different to whatever Linus and his crew demonstrated.
Don't know, don't care. From the moment I first saw a LTT video, I knew it wasn't for me, despite my professional and personal interest in the stuff they choose to make videos about. I'd have believed the kid if he'd told me Linus swears by sacrificing a goat by the light of a waning moon to wring a few extra degrees cooling from your thermal management.
All that said, here's what transpired:
I got a warranty work order for a Legion laptop that's giving BSoDs. Motherboard replacement was indicated by the Flowchart Almighty, so that's what I was sent with. Mind you, Legions at the time might as well have been purpose-designed to fuck up as many warranty field techs' days as was statistically possible. All the plastic trim and pointless RGB highlights were connected on top of everything that actually mattered, and had to be gingerly disconnected from their flimsy-ass coax and ZIF terminals before you could so much as blow out a fan. I was not enthused to be stuck with this WO.
I get to the house, and this maybe 20-year-old goofus answers the door looking sheepish. We do the customary, and he sits me down in a migrainingly dim room to go to work.
Then he's just hovering. It happens a lot, and I get it. I worked with important devices in people's lives–expensive things that in many cases were the loci of their entire lifestyles. This kid wasn't rich, judging by his domicile, and it was clearly important to him. It was part of my job to put the customer at ease, and I'm pretty decent at putting on a good show that I know what I'm doing. Sometimes I even do.
Because this is a Legion, Lenovo's gaming line of laptops with the infernally apt name, I want to test this thing to see what guff it's giving for myself. Maybe I'll get lucky and not have to tear it to a million bits.
Boot it up, no problem. Have the kid start Fortnite or whatever to see if load causes it to crash, nothing. Spider-Man is flossing effortlessly like God and Epic intended. I booted into my super secret AUTHORIZED TECHS ONLY diagnostic OS and ran quick memory and CPU stress tests, not a hitch. As far as I could tell, this infuriatingly designed machine was running flawlessly.
That doesn't really mean anything, as there are a bajillion things that can cause BSoDs, and a lot of them just happen seemingly at random because Saturn is rising or some shit. It doesn't give me an awful lot to work with, though. So I ask him what it says when he gets errors and what he's doing at the time, and that's when he spills the beans:
He'd seen a Linus Tech Tips video, see, and what they did to improve cooling on a gaming laptop is they removed the heatsink assembly, cleaned off the gunk, and painted the CPU package with nail polish. Lacquered it right up. Then they threw the thing back together and it ran, like, three degrees cooler! I asked if he'd been experiencing overheating issues like instability or dropped frames or anything, and he said no. He'd just wanted to squeeze that little extra from his hot rod. Get them frame gains.
So he'd done this profoundly dumb thing, only right after he put the heatsink back on, he'd gotten cold feet. Thought maybe it wasn't such a great idea after all. When he pried off the heatsink he heard a sickening crunch, and he thought maybe he'd taken some componentry away with it (spoiler: he had).
Then he'd panicked. He realized it was still under warranty for a little while, so he'd bullshitted his way through the support call to India and got them to ship out a new motherboard. How he managed that, I do not know. Those outsourced support call center folks are drilled to be tight-fisted fuckers, but the kid had an Eastern-European accent, so maybe they had communication problems.
Now I was in a spot. I don't want Lenovo knowing how much diagnostic prodding I did with this thing, because they'd rightly assume I was trying to get out of doing a pain-in-the-ass repair. The kid is worried that I'll rat him out and pronounce his warranty null and void with my magic wand, and potentially leave him with a very expensive, state-of-the-art paperweight with RGB accents. Lenovo sure as hell doesn't want me replacing this dingus's $1,000 motherboard.
So I made a compromise: I'd take the thermal assembly apart, clean it, inspect it for glaring damage, re-paste the CPU and GPU, and test that it was still functional. If it was, I'd close the work order "No problem found" and keep what he'd told me between myself and the sweet baby Jesus, and he could open a new service request if the thing went tits-up in the near future. His warranty was up in a couple months anyway, so I figured it could serve as a life lesson if it shuffled off the coil the day after expiration.
The cleaning was a nightmare, but not nearly as bad as tearing the whole thing down would've been, so hooray! He'd clearly lifted off some of those tiny resistor-looking things that ring the CPU package, but that's above my pay grade. It worked just fine from what I could tell. I told the kid as I was leaving that if something did go pear-shaped in the near future, for God's sake, don't tell the tech what he'd done. "It doesn't work, sir. No idea why." I was filling in for my secondary territory at the time, and I never heard from the coworker that worked that area that he did a motherboard replacement on it down the road. I asked after it, too.
I have never had a high opinion of LTT, but even I gotta think they wouldn't go advising people to paint their motherboards in titty-pink Maybelline (it wasn't actually pink). I have no idea how he got the notion, but he pointed at Linus's crack squad, and I'm relating it to you.
Sorry to write a novel on you, but I hope it was at least half as amusing to read as the situation was for me at the time.
I can't think of any LTT video that would recommend that. They do some janky shit from time to time but it's never a "do this" and more a "bored people doing weird shit". If they were lacquering...
I can't think of any LTT video that would recommend that. They do some janky shit from time to time but it's never a "do this" and more a "bored people doing weird shit". If they were lacquering then it was probably one of the countless times they sub zero cooled a laptop. Mind you, it never looks like something someone should actually do. Half the time the videos show the damn things are leaking like crazy.
Sounds like the kid watched a video, took away 5% of it, and starting breaking things.
Absolutely. As @teaearlgraycold pointed out, you'd do something very much like this if you were retrofitting a laptop to use liquid metal TIM in place of Shin-Etzu putty or something, though I've...
Absolutely. As @teaearlgraycold pointed out, you'd do something very much like this if you were retrofitting a laptop to use liquid metal TIM in place of Shin-Etzu putty or something, though I've done many gallium TIM re-pastings using the acetate CPU barriers provided by the OEMs, so I don't see the point of lacquering. I've never seen that liquid metal cooling interfaces do jack for you anyway. Seems about as useful as inflating your all-weather tires with pure nitrogen, but what do I know.
The upshot is that the kid knew just enough to get himself in trouble, but not enough to know that what he was trying was kind of pointless and ran the risk of destroying his beloved machine. No bueno. I don't really blame LTT, but I don't love them for it either.
I've noticed LTT hasn't done much with liquid metal recently. They've really started to push their phase change material that they sell but the results do appear to be quite good for a pretty...
I've noticed LTT hasn't done much with liquid metal recently. They've really started to push their phase change material that they sell but the results do appear to be quite good for a pretty simple interface material.
PCMs are certainly interesting, and have great potential for all sorts of neat applications. To my knowledge–which is admittedly slim–they have a problem for static applications like this though:...
PCMs are certainly interesting, and have great potential for all sorts of neat applications. To my knowledge–which is admittedly slim–they have a problem for static applications like this though: the component materials in the compounds tend to separate without repeated agitation, which reduces the number of freeze-thaw cycles they can undergo and the thermal capacitance of the media. I have no doubt that great strides are soon to be made in stabilization in the near future though, but I don't know that we've gotten there yet.
(It's worth noting as an aside that the gallium-based TIM with which I'm most familiar is itself kind of a phase change material, in that gallium metal has a melting point slightly lower than normal human body temperature. It literally freezes and thaws every time the processor it's conducting heat from cools and warms up. The thermal properties of gallium TIM has to do with the liquid metal's thermal conductivity rather than capacitance though, so it doesn't act as a true PCM in that application. I have just always thought it neat how it melts and freezes during the course of normal operation, so I thought I'd mention it.)
As for LTT, they have a reputation problem with me that I'm really not interested in re-litigating yet again. I've had too many frustrating conversations with fans that go nowhere. Suffice it to say that their product recommendations hold no weight with me due to their previous behavior wrt sponsors. If you follow them, you likely have some idea about what I'm thinking of.
I think I've done this mod myself. You apply some kind of quick-drying non-conductive liquid around the CPU and GPU to shield from any leaked liquid metal that goes between the silicon and...
I think I've done this mod myself. You apply some kind of quick-drying non-conductive liquid around the CPU and GPU to shield from any leaked liquid metal that goes between the silicon and heatsink. The first two times I did this it worked fine. The third time I managed to short something - ended up killing the built-in trackpad but otherwise things worked fine.
Sure, except the kid hadn't used gallium compound. His little elective surgery hadn't done fuck-all except stress him out and give me an amusing anecdote.
Sure, except the kid hadn't used gallium compound. His little elective surgery hadn't done fuck-all except stress him out and give me an amusing anecdote.
I tried to find the video but couldn't. LTT has done a LOT of thermal paste videos. I don't doubt (at all!) that LTT did a video where they swapped thermal paste for nail polish. I would...
I have never had a high opinion of LTT, but even I gotta think they wouldn't go advising people to paint their motherboards in titty-pink Maybelline (it wasn't actually pink). I have no idea how he got the notion, but he pointed at Linus's crack squad, and I'm relating it to you.
I tried to find the video but couldn't. LTT has done a LOT of thermal paste videos. I don't doubt (at all!) that LTT did a video where they swapped thermal paste for nail polish. I would reconsider blaming a YouTube channel for this person's youth/inexperience/poor judgement. It's great that you were nice to this person and helped them out. Hopefully they learned their lesson.
I think I've seen LTT video about trying home everyday items ast a thermal paste including toothpaste. It worked until it dried (which is like 10 seconds after turning the PC on). I can see how...
I think I've seen LTT video about trying home everyday items ast a thermal paste including toothpaste. It worked until it dried (which is like 10 seconds after turning the PC on). I can see how someone gets bad ideas from such videos, but it's on them. I believe that every video has conclusion where they say this kind of stuff was just testing and you shouldn't out it in practice. Or say that there may be situations like this one:
I was once in a situation when I neede thermal paste right now and had none. I needed to run older PC just for a few minutes. I ended up putting it down so the motherboard was parallel to desk and used a drop of sunflower oil on the CPU. It worked actually quite well. Wouldn't use it for any prolonged use.
As I said elsewhere, I don't really blame LTT for this, but I don't love them for it either. My disinterest in LTT was initially more a difference in philosophy than anything. I'm of the "if it...
As I said elsewhere, I don't really blame LTT for this, but I don't love them for it either.
My disinterest in LTT was initially more a difference in philosophy than anything. I'm of the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" school of thought, which is antithetical to the kind of stuff they often do.
Also, Linus himself kinda strikes me as a smug little prick, but that's just me being a curmudgeon. I'm sure he's a delightful human being.
I don’t watch their content so much these days for multiple reasons. But from afar Linus seems like he’s an arrogant dick at times (not just from vibes, he gets out of hand on screen for The WAN...
I don’t watch their content so much these days for multiple reasons. But from afar Linus seems like he’s an arrogant dick at times (not just from vibes, he gets out of hand on screen for The WAN Show and in writing elsewhere), but generally is an interesting person and a better than average boss.
Happy to oblige. The other story I had in mind is more difficult to explain, involves a corporate customer I'm not 100% comfortable talking about, and was likely the result of a man's mental...
Happy to oblige.
The other story I had in mind is more difficult to explain, involves a corporate customer I'm not 100% comfortable talking about, and was likely the result of a man's mental health crisis, so that one I'll reserve. If I ever figure a way to frame it that doesn't make me feel icky for the telling, I'll let you know.
They do that for gaming? That's just crazy, all for an imperceptible increase in performance in maybe 1 or 2 games. I can see how it'd be worth it for a miner since it sounds like it cause bad...
They do that for gaming? That's just crazy, all for an imperceptible increase in performance in maybe 1 or 2 games. I can see how it'd be worth it for a miner since it sounds like it cause bad heating issues, just not gaming.
I suppose I don't even like adding the heatsink to a CPU. I have whatever it is for electronics that's equivalent to a black thumb in gardening. Every electronic I've opened, excluding computer's to add major components, never worked again or had issues later on. My crowning achievement was a monitor in which I replaced a cap that worked perfectly for a month and didn't even try to burn my house down when the cap exploded again. So that might be clouding my judgement a bit. 😅
Random thought, could you add resin to the contacts to better prevent contact with the copper? 🤔
There's a particular strain of the Dunning-Kruger Effect that some modders/tinkerers fall into that I've seen a few examples of over the years. It's a combination of the aforementioned cognitive bias and a vague kind of conspiracy-seeking mentality. They get a piece of hardware and automatically assume that it's been designed specifically to hobble latent performance, and that a few simple modifications are all it would take to unlock this stifled potential.
In mild cases it'll lead decently competent amateur techs to do relatively innocuous things like replace the OEM thermal compound on CPUs with "Antarctic Chill-Xtreme Sigma" compound, presumably with the reasoning that the OEM has volume considerations in mind when choosing which compounds to use for their mass-produced units, so they won't be using the highest quality option for cost considerations. Fair enough. For the most part, that doesn't hurt anything, and if it encourages a feeling of ownership over your tech, more power to you. It's really not likely to squeeze appreciable performance gains from your hardware, but it probably isn't going to hurt anything, if you know what you're doing.
Then there are those who go for more extreme modifications, like the one called out in this piece. The thinking that leads a person to this sort of act is almost totally unmoored from logic. MSI or whoever built your video card really didn't choose the thermal pads and heatsinks purely for cost considerations. They have no real reason to do so. They despise RMAs and know that if they skimp on the primary components like thermal management, they'll see those skyrocket. They've considered using copper for contact thermal conduction surfaces and ruled it out, and not because it'll cost them a few pennies per unit. They intend to charge $800 minimum per unit anyway, and if they need to raise MSRP by $0.05/unit to save $0.10/unit RMA costs, they'll do it, and the actuarial bean-counters will sleep like angels.
I'm really not trying to deride someone if they want to roll up their sleeves and mess around with their tech. It's your gizmo, you may modify with my blessing. My criticism is for the mentality that ignores the fact that a great deal of thought and effort goes into designing these machines, and assumes that "this one simple trick" will turn your GTX 1080 into an RTX 4090 Ti Gigachad Edition. It don't work like that.
I have a couple amusing stories regarding this sort of techy FAFO from my time as a field tech that I'd be happy to share, if anyone is interested. One of them involves a poor kid who put far too much trust in Linus Tech Tips, and is a small part of the reason I disliked that outlet long before the accusations of a toxic work environment and bad journalistic ethics completely destroyed their credibility in my mind.
C'mon. You can't throw that kind of bait out without following through: how did ltt ruin this hapless persons computer?
Right, the LTT kid.
Now, I should preface this by acknowledging that I have never sought out the specific video that planted this idea in the kid's head. For all I know, he completely misconstrued the meaning of everything he saw, and went off on a tangent of his own devising, using materials completely different to whatever Linus and his crew demonstrated.
Don't know, don't care. From the moment I first saw a LTT video, I knew it wasn't for me, despite my professional and personal interest in the stuff they choose to make videos about. I'd have believed the kid if he'd told me Linus swears by sacrificing a goat by the light of a waning moon to wring a few extra degrees cooling from your thermal management.
All that said, here's what transpired:
I got a warranty work order for a Legion laptop that's giving BSoDs. Motherboard replacement was indicated by the Flowchart Almighty, so that's what I was sent with. Mind you, Legions at the time might as well have been purpose-designed to fuck up as many warranty field techs' days as was statistically possible. All the plastic trim and pointless RGB highlights were connected on top of everything that actually mattered, and had to be gingerly disconnected from their flimsy-ass coax and ZIF terminals before you could so much as blow out a fan. I was not enthused to be stuck with this WO.
I get to the house, and this maybe 20-year-old goofus answers the door looking sheepish. We do the customary, and he sits me down in a migrainingly dim room to go to work.
Then he's just hovering. It happens a lot, and I get it. I worked with important devices in people's lives–expensive things that in many cases were the loci of their entire lifestyles. This kid wasn't rich, judging by his domicile, and it was clearly important to him. It was part of my job to put the customer at ease, and I'm pretty decent at putting on a good show that I know what I'm doing. Sometimes I even do.
Because this is a Legion, Lenovo's gaming line of laptops with the infernally apt name, I want to test this thing to see what guff it's giving for myself. Maybe I'll get lucky and not have to tear it to a million bits.
Boot it up, no problem. Have the kid start Fortnite or whatever to see if load causes it to crash, nothing. Spider-Man is flossing effortlessly like God and Epic intended. I booted into my super secret AUTHORIZED TECHS ONLY diagnostic OS and ran quick memory and CPU stress tests, not a hitch. As far as I could tell, this infuriatingly designed machine was running flawlessly.
That doesn't really mean anything, as there are a bajillion things that can cause BSoDs, and a lot of them just happen seemingly at random because Saturn is rising or some shit. It doesn't give me an awful lot to work with, though. So I ask him what it says when he gets errors and what he's doing at the time, and that's when he spills the beans:
He'd seen a Linus Tech Tips video, see, and what they did to improve cooling on a gaming laptop is they removed the heatsink assembly, cleaned off the gunk, and painted the CPU package with nail polish. Lacquered it right up. Then they threw the thing back together and it ran, like, three degrees cooler! I asked if he'd been experiencing overheating issues like instability or dropped frames or anything, and he said no. He'd just wanted to squeeze that little extra from his hot rod. Get them frame gains.
So he'd done this profoundly dumb thing, only right after he put the heatsink back on, he'd gotten cold feet. Thought maybe it wasn't such a great idea after all. When he pried off the heatsink he heard a sickening crunch, and he thought maybe he'd taken some componentry away with it (spoiler: he had).
Then he'd panicked. He realized it was still under warranty for a little while, so he'd bullshitted his way through the support call to India and got them to ship out a new motherboard. How he managed that, I do not know. Those outsourced support call center folks are drilled to be tight-fisted fuckers, but the kid had an Eastern-European accent, so maybe they had communication problems.
Now I was in a spot. I don't want Lenovo knowing how much diagnostic prodding I did with this thing, because they'd rightly assume I was trying to get out of doing a pain-in-the-ass repair. The kid is worried that I'll rat him out and pronounce his warranty null and void with my magic wand, and potentially leave him with a very expensive, state-of-the-art paperweight with RGB accents. Lenovo sure as hell doesn't want me replacing this dingus's $1,000 motherboard.
So I made a compromise: I'd take the thermal assembly apart, clean it, inspect it for glaring damage, re-paste the CPU and GPU, and test that it was still functional. If it was, I'd close the work order "No problem found" and keep what he'd told me between myself and the sweet baby Jesus, and he could open a new service request if the thing went tits-up in the near future. His warranty was up in a couple months anyway, so I figured it could serve as a life lesson if it shuffled off the coil the day after expiration.
The cleaning was a nightmare, but not nearly as bad as tearing the whole thing down would've been, so hooray! He'd clearly lifted off some of those tiny resistor-looking things that ring the CPU package, but that's above my pay grade. It worked just fine from what I could tell. I told the kid as I was leaving that if something did go pear-shaped in the near future, for God's sake, don't tell the tech what he'd done. "It doesn't work, sir. No idea why." I was filling in for my secondary territory at the time, and I never heard from the coworker that worked that area that he did a motherboard replacement on it down the road. I asked after it, too.
I have never had a high opinion of LTT, but even I gotta think they wouldn't go advising people to paint their motherboards in titty-pink Maybelline (it wasn't actually pink). I have no idea how he got the notion, but he pointed at Linus's crack squad, and I'm relating it to you.
Sorry to write a novel on you, but I hope it was at least half as amusing to read as the situation was for me at the time.
I can't think of any LTT video that would recommend that. They do some janky shit from time to time but it's never a "do this" and more a "bored people doing weird shit". If they were lacquering then it was probably one of the countless times they sub zero cooled a laptop. Mind you, it never looks like something someone should actually do. Half the time the videos show the damn things are leaking like crazy.
Sounds like the kid watched a video, took away 5% of it, and starting breaking things.
Absolutely. As @teaearlgraycold pointed out, you'd do something very much like this if you were retrofitting a laptop to use liquid metal TIM in place of Shin-Etzu putty or something, though I've done many gallium TIM re-pastings using the acetate CPU barriers provided by the OEMs, so I don't see the point of lacquering. I've never seen that liquid metal cooling interfaces do jack for you anyway. Seems about as useful as inflating your all-weather tires with pure nitrogen, but what do I know.
The upshot is that the kid knew just enough to get himself in trouble, but not enough to know that what he was trying was kind of pointless and ran the risk of destroying his beloved machine. No bueno. I don't really blame LTT, but I don't love them for it either.
I've noticed LTT hasn't done much with liquid metal recently. They've really started to push their phase change material that they sell but the results do appear to be quite good for a pretty simple interface material.
PCMs are certainly interesting, and have great potential for all sorts of neat applications. To my knowledge–which is admittedly slim–they have a problem for static applications like this though: the component materials in the compounds tend to separate without repeated agitation, which reduces the number of freeze-thaw cycles they can undergo and the thermal capacitance of the media. I have no doubt that great strides are soon to be made in stabilization in the near future though, but I don't know that we've gotten there yet.
(It's worth noting as an aside that the gallium-based TIM with which I'm most familiar is itself kind of a phase change material, in that gallium metal has a melting point slightly lower than normal human body temperature. It literally freezes and thaws every time the processor it's conducting heat from cools and warms up. The thermal properties of gallium TIM has to do with the liquid metal's thermal conductivity rather than capacitance though, so it doesn't act as a true PCM in that application. I have just always thought it neat how it melts and freezes during the course of normal operation, so I thought I'd mention it.)
As for LTT, they have a reputation problem with me that I'm really not interested in re-litigating yet again. I've had too many frustrating conversations with fans that go nowhere. Suffice it to say that their product recommendations hold no weight with me due to their previous behavior wrt sponsors. If you follow them, you likely have some idea about what I'm thinking of.
I think I've done this mod myself. You apply some kind of quick-drying non-conductive liquid around the CPU and GPU to shield from any leaked liquid metal that goes between the silicon and heatsink. The first two times I did this it worked fine. The third time I managed to short something - ended up killing the built-in trackpad but otherwise things worked fine.
Sure, except the kid hadn't used gallium compound. His little elective surgery hadn't done fuck-all except stress him out and give me an amusing anecdote.
I tried to find the video but couldn't. LTT has done a LOT of thermal paste videos. I don't doubt (at all!) that LTT did a video where they swapped thermal paste for nail polish. I would reconsider blaming a YouTube channel for this person's youth/inexperience/poor judgement. It's great that you were nice to this person and helped them out. Hopefully they learned their lesson.
I think I've seen LTT video about trying home everyday items ast a thermal paste including toothpaste. It worked until it dried (which is like 10 seconds after turning the PC on). I can see how someone gets bad ideas from such videos, but it's on them. I believe that every video has conclusion where they say this kind of stuff was just testing and you shouldn't out it in practice. Or say that there may be situations like this one:
I was once in a situation when I neede thermal paste right now and had none. I needed to run older PC just for a few minutes. I ended up putting it down so the motherboard was parallel to desk and used a drop of sunflower oil on the CPU. It worked actually quite well. Wouldn't use it for any prolonged use.
As I said elsewhere, I don't really blame LTT for this, but I don't love them for it either.
My disinterest in LTT was initially more a difference in philosophy than anything. I'm of the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" school of thought, which is antithetical to the kind of stuff they often do.
Also, Linus himself kinda strikes me as a smug little prick, but that's just me being a curmudgeon. I'm sure he's a delightful human being.
I don’t watch their content so much these days for multiple reasons. But from afar Linus seems like he’s an arrogant dick at times (not just from vibes, he gets out of hand on screen for The WAN Show and in writing elsewhere), but generally is an interesting person and a better than average boss.
Thanks for the story and the laugh! :)
Happy to oblige.
The other story I had in mind is more difficult to explain, involves a corporate customer I'm not 100% comfortable talking about, and was likely the result of a man's mental health crisis, so that one I'll reserve. If I ever figure a way to frame it that doesn't make me feel icky for the telling, I'll let you know.
My money is on Liquid Metal TIM.
Ha. I haven't read the story yet (just about to) but this feels like a solid bet.
EDIT: HA, not liquid metal, but it was thermal interface material.
They do that for gaming? That's just crazy, all for an imperceptible increase in performance in maybe 1 or 2 games. I can see how it'd be worth it for a miner since it sounds like it cause bad heating issues, just not gaming.
I suppose I don't even like adding the heatsink to a CPU. I have whatever it is for electronics that's equivalent to a black thumb in gardening. Every electronic I've opened, excluding computer's to add major components, never worked again or had issues later on. My crowning achievement was a monitor in which I replaced a cap that worked perfectly for a month and didn't even try to burn my house down when the cap exploded again. So that might be clouding my judgement a bit. 😅
Random thought, could you add resin to the contacts to better prevent contact with the copper? 🤔