HP Spectre X360 Cooling Mod with Results

[bANONYMOUS]

This is less of a mod and more of preventative maintenance than anything, but here we go. I have an HP Spectre X360 I use for work, mostly just taking notes, and …..watching youtube videos. Okay so this laptop spends more than 50% of it's life watching youtube videos. Don't judge me..

 

I noticed during it's very heavy workload of streaming youtube.. for.. business.. the fan pipes up, and gets pretty warm, but nothing crazy, I just wanted to see if I could improve on the efficiency and spoiler alert, huge difference.

 

First off I'm going to say this is not a guide, rather just results, the disassembly of the laptop itself wasn't hard, just tedious, there's a lot of different screws and you gotta remember how much you unplugged inside so you can plug everything back in.

 

I ran an AIDA64 stress test before touching anything, this is straight stock, never pushed this laptop so it should be very comparible to right out of the box, however the first thing I did when I got this was a fresh install directly from the Microsoft website so this is just Windows without any HP bloat, all this has ever done is just notes for work and super official clearly for business youtube video watching.

 

CPU
Idle 47.2
Load 71.2
Peak 96.6
Throttling 28%

GPU
Idle 47
Load 71
Peak 94
Throttling 29%

 

Here is the stock thermal compound, not to bad, doesn't seem like too much as I've seen many times before from OEMs, just a cheapo compound is my guess.

 

Cleaned with generic 99% rubbing alcohol, ready for repaste

 

Not the most graceful application in the world, but I just wanted to make sure all of the dye was covered, I know there's a lot of debate for covering the IHS or just a blob in the middle, but when it comes down to most laptops, they don't use an IHS so covering the entire dye is actually really important, it makes a huge difference if you leave area's exposed without making a decent contact to the heatsink.

 

And finally, the results after all of this, I figured when I started, it couldn't be worse than it was, but I was not at all expecting such a huge improvement, so much infact that I'm making this thread to recommend people with ultrabook or 2 in 1's like this to do, because it's a huge difference, I've almost noticed the fan has yet to turn on during normal use, normally it would kick on every time I'm full screen on youtube, not loud, but I would notice it, so far the fan appears to not exist with this new thermal compound, keeps it cool enough that the default HP temperature curve they have set for this isn't enabling it because it's not reaching a high enough temperature, I've also noticed that the battery is lasting longer, I normally charge this thing over night, bring it to work, I around 6ish hour of full use before it tells me it's dying, charge it up, and then another 5ish hours of use before I'm off work, however, today, I noticed that by the time I was off, the battery was around 55% when normally it's around 35%, so not sure if just random behaviour, maybe I wasn't using it as much as normal, but as of the first day using this with the new compound, I gained 20% battery life and the fans no longer ramp up under normal use. There's also no thermal throttling and idle temps are down as well.

 

The only thing to point out with these results is that the Load temperature is higher with the Arctic Silver 5 compound, but my guess is because the fans were running at a much lower RPM, I would assume that if I left the stress test for longer, it would heat up enough to the point the fans would ramp up to the same RPM as they did before Arctic Silver 5 and the load temps would be lower. So they're mildly higher (within margin of error) but the fans were running a lot quieter causing a 2.6c increase.

 

CPU
Idle 31.2
Load 73.8
Peak 93.4
Throttling 0%

GPU
Idle 32
Load 75
Peak 93
Throttling 0%

 

Differences:

CPU

Idle 16c Cooler
Load 2.6c Hotter
Peak 3.2c Cooler
Throttling 28% Less

GPU
Idle 15c Cooler
Load 4c Hotter
Peak 1c Cooler
Throttling 29% Less

[Fasauceome]

8 minutes ago, bANONYMOUS said:

I've also noticed that the battery is lasting longer, I normally charge this thing over night, bring it to work, I around 6ish hour of full use before it tells me it's dying, charge it up, and then another 5ish hours of use before I'm off work, however, today, I noticed that by the time I was off, the battery was around 55% when normally it's around 35%, so not sure if just random behaviour, maybe I wasn't using it as much as normal, but as of the first day using this with the new compound, I gained 20% battery life and the fans no longer ramp up under normal use

Less heat = less resistance = more efficiency

[genexis_x]

Would it be better if you can include the clock speed of CPU and GPU too

 

Stock paste in laptops is bad in general