Clevo P150SM Cooling Mods to handle overclocked 980m

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I originally bought my Clevo P150SM in January of 2014 as a PC I could take with me to university which was hour and a half away from my home. It originally came with a GTX 770M, i7-4700MQ 2.4 GHz which is overclocked  to 3.6 GHz (all 4 cores set to 3.6GHz boost clock 100% of the time with custom BIOS), 8GB of RAM, and a 1TB HDD and I have used it every day since I purchased it, I like it so much it has actually replaced my desktop with a liquid cooled 5 GHz AMD FX8350, crossfire AMD HD 7970's, and an eyefinity setup. After owning it for about a year I sold my desktop setup and decided to upgrade my laptop. I installed 24 GB of RAM, an 8GB GTX 980M which is now overclocked to 1.44 GHz, 2x 1TB Samsung 840 EVO mSATA SSDs, and 2x Samsung 2.5inch 2TB HDD's.

After upgrading to a GTX 980M my temps were not good enough to allow me to really overclock at all, I needed to prop up the back of my laptop to let more air into the fans and the GPU was always around to 80c when gaming. This is normal for laptops but I needed to find a practical way to cool my laptop better without carrying one of those awful huge cooling pads around with me everywhere.

 

Here is a list of mods I ended up doing:

 

1. Modified case with better intake vents
2. Added an extra fan to the case under the GPU
3. Made a 3 stage fan controller for the extra fan
4. Modified 2 GPU heatsinks in to one larger heatsink
5. Modified the GPU fan to make room for larger GPU heatsink
6. Lapped (flattened and polished) the GPU and CPU heatsinks
7. Removed stock rubber feet and added taller ones to clear the new fan
8. Made an integrated 2 port USB hub for added USB ports.
9. Wrapped whole notebook in matte black vinyl
10. Stripped and painted speaker grill matte black
11. Replaced blue LED's with Razer green ones
12. Added an external 4 pin desktop style fan header. (to cool me) (not shown)
13. Made a nice carrying strap
14. I was working on a custom Keyboard driver. It was functional although a bit slow, but I cant develop it any longer. It allowed for things like macros and turning off the LED backlight after a certain amount of inactivity.
15. I cache my RAID 0 SSD array with 8 GB of RAM so much of my repeated tasks have 26ish GBps of storage throughput. (some games like Skyrim, Fallout, COD BO2 etc almost don't even have loading screens at this point) Most of the reason for the crazy storage config is because I run a lot of VMs for development purposes. Building Linux OSes, developing server software etc. 

(I no longer own with notebook, I had to sell it for financial/medical reasons)

 

Full Build Log Here

 

 

 

[Kyuubixchidori]

thats awesome! couldnt imagine tearing up something so expesnive, but thats really freaking impressive performance from a laptop. 

[Anthony10]

damn nice, probably hurts battery life tho

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Thanks actually it doesn't impact battery at all due to GPU boost down-clocking the GPU to 600MHz when on battery, plus the 980m turns off and uses the Intel HD integrated GPU when not doing GPU intensive work/games.

 

Edit: Battery Boost not GPU Boost 

[Kinda Bottlenecked]

The people who said that laptop overclocks are stupid when nvidia locked overclocking for laptops have to see this.

Damn 77 degrees is impressive! 

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Yes   laptops with sufficient cooling and beefy enough power supplies have great overclocking potential, in my experience you see larger clock speed increases than the equivalent desktop parts due to mobile GPUs usually being clocked slower in the first place. I decided to go ahead and add the little IBM Thinkpad fan over my GPU anyways, 77c is great but cooler is better for those hot/compact rooms/LANs. Idle temps have decreased from 37c to 30c flat but I have yet to stress test my 980m to see load temps. Not sure if it will help load temps at all, either way it looks cool 

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I've updated this post with a link to the complete build log and pics of mods I've done since I first posted!

[badiyee]

May I ask... how would you rate this mod of yours in terms of difficulty?

 

I had a brand new P150SM-A, which I bought in December 2014, this is my score

 

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/6886244?

 

 

Then I see yours, and i'm literally wide-eyed.

 

I mean, you have almost doubled the score of mine, despite our machines having similar specs.

 

I'm interested in overclocking just to get the performance like yours, but I'm not so sure if I have the physical dexterity as well as the ability to do overclocking like yours.

 

 

But I must insist to say, this is an inspiration to me. 

[null_]

May I ask... how would you rate this mod of yours in terms of difficulty?

 

I had a brand new P150SM-A, which I bought in December 2014, this is my score

 

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/6886244?

 

 

Then I see yours, and i'm literally wide-eyed.

 

I mean, you have almost doubled the score of mine, despite our machines having similar specs.

 

I'm interested in overclocking just to get the performance like yours, but I'm not so sure if I have the physical dexterity as well as the ability to do overclocking like yours.

 

 

But I must insist to say, this is an inspiration to me. 

Sorry I dont check back here often. The first thing I would do is download a custom vBIOS from Prema Mod. Even at stock speeds you should see a performance improvment with that modified overclocking BIOS. This was the fist time I've attempted a harware mod like this so I would say it isn't very hard to do the physical mods, if you've soldered and used any sort of power tool before you should be fine as long as you are careful when dissasebleing the notebook.

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I ended up having to sell this laptop awhile ago for financial reasons but I decided to update this thread a final time with all the mods I have made over the course of its life. I hope someone will find it helpful