Quest for a better Laptop Pad

tand86 · May 14, 2020

I made some updates to my laptop cooler for my Razer Blade 15 this week and I've always wanted to share it since its first iteration, but have never really had time. With the world on lock-down, I guess now there's no better time.

The basic idea I'm sure has been done before. Use the metal chassis of the laptop to transfer heat to something with a lot more thermal mass, in this case a huge chunk of aluminum. Inside the laptop, thermal pads connect the internal heat sync to the chassis (what I replaced most recently with better quality pads). When I'm not using the cooling pad, the chassis doesn't seem to get any hotter under load than without the pads so I haven't noticed any ill effects. On the stand side, there is just a massive .5mm thermal pad that covers the entire contact area. The included pictures are just of the aluminum stand itself only because I've been through countless iterations of fan set ups. For the most part as long as it has active airflow over the main sync under the cpu and gpu, most configs seem to yield the same results. Right now I have the stand elevated off my desk with fans blowing straight up on the fins.

So far I think this "experiment" was well worth the effort, I obviously love tinkering with stuff like this, but the numbers speak for themselves. For testing I run the laptop in "gaming" mode for the full 45 watt cpu power limit along with a 200 Mhz Core / 600 Mhz Memory overclock on the 1070 with the internal fans at full speed. I then put the CPU and GPU under full load using FAHControl (because why not do some good at the same time you're torturing your PC). I make sure I do all testing on the same work unit for both stand and no stand tests as actual utilization can vary between work units. All temps are degrees Celsius. Note that with no stand the laptop throttles almost immediately and drops its CPU power to 35 watts. With the stand, no throttling, power stays at max, and its 7 degrees cooler over ambient on the CPU.

	Amb	CPU Freq	Pkg Pwr	Core 1	Core 2	Core 3	Core 4	Core 5	Core 6	Pkg Avg.	Delta Amb. CPU	GPU Freq	Pwr	Core	Delta Amb. GPU
With stand, Full Fans	26	3.45	44.9	78	79	82	79	80	79	79.5	53.5	1.66	78.5	74	48
No Stand, Rear elevated 1"	24	3.01	34.9	83	84	88	84	85	84	84.7	60.7	1.63	78	83	59