I agree that you can look at many posts of people complaining about the liquid metal but in essence that is all it is. Many videos exist and all are people making claims with no understanding of what they are looking at for the reasons I mentioned, that is you cannot remove the heatsink after multiple heat cycles and claim it was done poorly at the factory. If someone could actually show evidence I would accept this to be accurate but until then it's just a false statement.
The alternate explanation is more likely: Liquid metal is perfectly applied at the factory but due to transportation and the CPU die seal being excessively wide, under normal operation the liquid metal is pumping out and being exposed to air due to the large seal over the CPU. It also means if the laptop is dropped, bumped or subject to cargo load / drop shipping where it is exposed to extreme cold temperatures it can impact the liquid metal. This is a problem for liquid metal and one reason why hybrid variants exist but the seal on the CPU is another issue, it needs to be close to the die size to minimise oxidation and spillage / pump out.
People do not factor this when taking their laptops apart or making videos, instead the mess they see is immediately blamed on poor application. I have taken my laptop apart, seen the mess and to me it is clearly the above. Furthermore I have then completely cleaned and reapplied new liquid metal, kept the laptop flat and took it apart 6 months later just to see the impact. The result was almost the same as it was when I got it from ASUS.
This is the ASUS application, laptop was 1 month old at the time.
Here is my application and inspection after 6 months.
Very similar in appearance and the dry spot is also important, this is directly above the P-Cores, so the CPU hotspot is another aspect to consider when looking at how it spread out over time. But the point I make here, I am fairly confident that all talk about liquid metal being poorly applied is a myth and only exists due to people jumping to conclusions. I conducted this investigation / experiment purely to see how it would hold up and to prove / disprove the liquid metal application. (Try for yourself and see if you maybe will change your point of view)
Power throttling is normal behaviour in a laptop, any default CPU will hit the limits almost constantly plus there is a reason why the specifications mention a dynamic power share between the CPU and GPU when both are under load. That is the GPU will take priority so a typical laptop under a gaming load may see the GPU at 175W but the CPU limited to 65/75/85W depending on model. What isn't normal is a laptop that was working, then due to a update or other underlying cause is now lagging and stuttering. If you are someone that had a working laptop, then something went wrong, fair enough but to make a generalised statement without any explanation is not a valid point because all laptops do power throttle and work fine without problems.
