Amid the laptop performance landscape, effective heat management is pivotal, especially for high-power processors. Excessive heat can trigger throttling, capping processing speed to prevent overheating and limiting overall performance potential. Enter Asus’ innovation: liquid metal mitigations, a countermeasure to ensure sustained peak performance over extended usage periods.
Asus has recently launched the AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX3D processor for laptops. This processor is unique due to its incorporation of innovative liquid metal mitigations.
Liquid metal has long been hailed for its exceptional thermal conductivity properties, which allow for efficient heat dissipation in high-performance computing environments. With the inclusion of liquid metal mitigations, the Asus AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX3D processor aims to address heat management problems. However, it’s important to note that this approach does come with certain limitations.
In desktop processors that use liquid metal as a thermal material, applying and keeping the metallic substance in the right place can be tricky. But this challenge can be eased by using a barrier that has a consistent shape. This helps prevent the liquid metal from spreading to places where it shouldn’t be.
However, the red protective layer (or a similar type of tough coating) is a good way to reduce the chance of having unsafe liquid metal around. This protective layer is called solder mask, and it’s been used in electronics for a long time. It appears that this protective layer is only used to keep the X3D APU safe from the liquid metal that’s used on the GPU. It seems like the AMD APU touches the big cooler through something called a thermal pad.
Asus has been using liquid metal on powerful laptop processors for several generations now. Before using it in laptops that were sold to customers in 2019, Asus spent two years testing how to apply the messy but conductive liquid on the production line. To prevent any accidental spreading, Asus added a small, soft barrier that’s just 0.1mm tall around the CPU socket. However, this method seems to have changed with the X3D mobile processor.
If Asus used liquid metal on the AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX3D, it would be the first time they deal with the challenges of a multi-tile processor. However, industry observers and users are eagerly awaiting benchmarks and real-world tests to validate the claims of improved performance and thermal management.
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