Liquid Nitrogen Container /LN2 Pot -Mounting
What is this guide about? We are going to address the following three points in the article. For more detailed information we would recommend watching our YouTube video about mounting and insulation.
How to actually mount the LN2 Container
Checking the mount quality
Examples of good and bad mounts
Note: We will not cover how to insulate the board in this article. There will be a different article dedicated on insulation. Again we would recommend watching the YouTube video. There you will see how to properly insulate a mainboard.
Applying Thermal paste
This is pobably the most crucial part when it comes to liquid nitrogen overclocking. The main difference between the normal application of thermal paste and the application thermal paste for LN2 overclocking is the amount of paste used.
What you want to do is:
Cover the WHOLE heatspreader
Cover it with a “reasonable thick” layer
What we mean by “reasonable thick” is that the layer should not be so thin that you can nearly see through. From the experience we made in the beginng we can say for sure: What we first thought was to much turned out to be not enough later on. You will see examples of that.
As you can see on the pictures on the left the whole IHS is convered in thermal paste. To spread the paste evenly a spreader is useful. KPx thermal paste comes with a spreader. If you are using any other thermal paste and have no spreader you can use a credit card.
MOuntign the LN2 Container
Now that you have covered the IHS with thermal paste you can gently place your LN2 Container on the the cpu. After you placed the Container on the cpu you can twist it a little bit to see if it makes good contact. If you have the feeling the LN2 Container “swims“ on the cpu it is a good sign. Just make sure there is no paper or something else in the way which ruins your contact.
After that just place the rest ( aluminum extension and mounting bracket) on the LN2 Contaienr. Tightening the screwes is the same as mountign a waterblock. You want to make sure that you tighten the screws corsswise. What we do is five turns on the opposing screwes ans then swichtching to the other ones. We repeat that process until the feathers are nearly completely tightend.
After that you can start with insulation the rest of the LN2 Container.
Checking the quality of the mount
This is one of the most important parts in our opinion. Before you actually start benching with high volts you should first apply a “daily safe” overclock and go into os. In the os you wanna have something like coretemp which shows you the per-core temperature of your cpu. What you want to do is to keep your LN2 Container at about ambient temperature and thenn run a workload like cinebench. During the run you want to keep an eye on the per core termperature. If all cores have about the same temperature everything is good. (Keep in mind that e.g. a 10900k has a smaller per core temperature difference than a 10980Xe)
If you notice that this is not the case and some cores or even the whole cpu gets to hot you should tighten the screws a bit more. If that does not fix the problem you should tear down the system and remount the LN2 Container.
Good- and Bad mounts
After you finished benching you should alsways take a look at the mount. First we are going to cover how to detect whether if you did not use enough thermal paste.
On the right side pictue you see a cpu with a koncave heatspreader. The middle of the IHS is deeper than the the rest of the IHS. In the middle there is enough thermal paste. But you should notice those two black marks on the left and on the right side. As you can see around the black marks there is nearly no thermal paste left. The black marks are an idicator that on this places there was not enogh paste.
But you should also note that because this is a concave cpu you can not do much to prevent that. The pressure is highest on the places with the black marks thus the pase gets squished away. The only option to prvent that is to lap the cpu.
Below you see two mounts on the same cpu, a 10980Xe. On the right picture you can clearly see that the pressur of the LN2 Container was not ditributed evenly across the IHS. On the Top right corner there is still much thermal paste left and in the middle there is close to nothing- you can even read the writing there.
On the other hand the mount on the left was really good. You can see the thinnest layer of thermal paste is in the middle which indicates that the pressure on the middle was highest. Around the middle the the thermal paste is ditributed evenly.
Evenly ditributet tehrmal paste. Good mount.
Uneven distribution of thermal paste. Not a good mount.
Same example on a different cpu
The left one is again a good mount. The thermal paste is thinnest in the middle and evenly spread around the middle. On the picture on the right hand side you can clearly see that the pressure was a bit more on the left side of the cpu. Also note that there is nearly no thermals paste left on the top and bottom of the IHS. This mount was by far not perfect but it was not a bad one. CPU did the same clocks as with the good mount.
How does a perfect mount look like?
The picture on the right shows a perfect mount. As you can clearly see there is nearly no remaining thermal paste on the CPU left. This is because the pressure of the LN2 container was distributet evenly. The thermal paste got squished out to both sides of the IHS due to the pressure of the LN2 pot.
