Laptop Cooling Options

[Koman]

I purchased an Acer Nitro 5 (2018 GTX 1050) as my first laptop a little over a year ago and it has been great. Though, while under heavy load, it gets quite hot, as the cooling setup is not the best, but I have tolerated it for a while, not experiencing too many slow downs in games. Recently, I have started running a Folding@Home Client on it and have noticed it gets up to 97 Celsius. I have noticed that it gets pretty hot while gaming, but not often over 90 Celsius. At one point, I noticed in task manager it reporting a clock of around 1.7 GHz, which having a base clock of 2.3 GHz seems kind of concerning.

So I was wondering if anyone has any recommendations for a laptop cooling solution. It doesn't have to be portable, as although I use this laptop for school, I rarely play games on it there as the battery sucks and the performance drops significantly.

I have seen a lot of suggestions to reapply thermal paste, which is a solid idea, though I do not really have the experience to do so at the moment or someone who could help, as of the whole quarantine thing. I do plan on looking into it in the future, as I will probably be using this laptop for the next year or 2.

I also saw that cleaning the dust will help, which I somehow never thought of and will do. But, I know that the cooling setup on this laptop is not great, so I figured I would invest in something extra.

 

Any suggestions on a cooling pad or some other solution?

Thanks.

[xdeathshot20]

basic things you could do, get a laptop cooling pad but not sure how much they really work, clean out the dust from the vents, make sure the pc is lifted yup a bit when using it to let air flow.  More advanced things would be a re paste.  It is realtivley easy to do.  Watch a video on it with your specific laptop and you shall see how easy it is.

[ChazzerDaMan]

Could be your fans being clogged up with dust. Spray them with small amounts of compressed air - don't overspin them.

[Letgomyleghoe]

Open up the back unscrew the heat sink of the cpu and remove the whole thing, you may have to unplug a fan. blow out dust from fins, blow dust out of fan, remove old thermal paste with alcohol, and apply new thermal paste, screw everything back in till it won’t screw down anymore (you may have to push the screws down to engage them, they’re spring loaded) 

[Koman]

12 minutes ago, scuff gang said:

Open up the back unscrew the heat sink of the cpu and remove the whole thing, you may have to unplug a fan. blow out dust from fins, blow dust out of fan, remove old thermal paste with alcohol, and apply new thermal paste, screw everything back in till it won’t screw down anymore (you may have to push the screws down to engage them, they’re spring loaded) 

Ok, thanks for the help! Any suggestions on a thermal paste?

[Letgomyleghoe]

1 minute ago, Koman said:

Ok, thanks for the help! Any suggestions on a thermal paste?

I would do a tiny little dot, about the size of a grain of rice, if the gpu die is smaller use a little less, if the you die is bigger use more

[Koman]

1 minute ago, scuff gang said:

I would do a tiny little dot, about the size of a grain of rice, if the gpu die is smaller use a little less, if the you die is bigger use more

Alright, any brands you would recommend?

[Letgomyleghoe]

5 minutes ago, Koman said:

Alright, any brands you would recommend?

Arctic Mx 4 or thermal grizzly kryonaut

[Koman]

17 minutes ago, Lord Vile said:

What were you doing on it at 1.7Ghz? Cos the chips do go below base to save power when they’re not doing anything

That was after a few hours of running a Folding@Home Work Unit. I am assuming that it thermal throttled a down to that as once I paused the task and let it cool of for about 20 minutes, it turbo-ed back to around 3.8-3.9 GHz. So, it definitely was not doing nothing. Also, I get they go below base to save power, but the most I have seen it drop while being on it while having maybe a tab open in Firefox is maybe 2.2 GHz. I am sure it drops when completely idle or in sleep mode, but it was at 1.7 GHz at 100% usage.

[Koman]

3 minutes ago, Lord Vile said:

Weird, didn’t think folding used much CPU thought it was all on the GPU.

Nah, there are both GPU and CPU tasks. GPU tasks are worth more points but take about 3 times as long for me.

[Koman]

And sadly what I have noticed is that the GPU heat is transferred onto the CPU. Currently, I am at about 20% CPU usage but around 86 Celsius and the GPU at 75 Celsius at 46% usage. And I remember that the heat pipe layout had both fans on one side and both pipes attached to both the CPU and GPU.

[Koman]

Just now, Lord Vile said:

Lovely world of laptops, my MacBook hits about 90 when I do anything strenuous 

Yeah. I would love to build my own desktop, but am kinda lacking in the funds department and this laptop is good enough for the meantime.