Thermal Padding Laptop Chassis

[Jingtian Wang]

I have an Acer swift 5 laptop which I daily drive. If know anything about the older swift 5s is that they are notoriously bad in thermals, which is fine for me for the most part. As my work load makes me stick to word and chrome anyways, and I bought it for the weight and silent passive operations. The problem is that the fan likes to periodically run especially when charging, and it annoys me alot, I've been looking at ways to decrease it's idle temps.

I've considered repasting it, but finding reasonably priced isopropyl alcohol is fairly hard during this time. And I'm not all that confident about repasting a 1k$ machine only one year into its operation - don't want to take the risk even if it's small. I also think the effect on fanless operation would be low, since better thermal interface would allow more heat to be transferred into the heat pipe and into the fins. Air flow would then be required to blow the heat out.

Then I realized that  the chassis is basically it's own passive heatsink, since it's metal. All have to do in this case would be to better connect it. I'm considering getting a thermal pad (GPU style) to stick it on the heat pipe and connect it the the chassis. Has anyone done this? 

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

1 minute ago, Jingtian Wang said:

-snip-

The stock thermal paste on OEMs machines are decent and replacing it would give you a maybe 1-2 degrees difference at best. Also using your chassis as part of the thermal solution isn't as effective is it may seem. MacBooks are all aluminum and we know how hot those things can still get. 

[5x5]

9 minutes ago, BlueChinchillaEatingDorito said:

The stock thermal paste on OEMs machines are decent and replacing it would give you a maybe 1-2 degrees difference at best. Also using your chassis as part of the thermal solution isn't as effective is it may seem. MacBooks are all aluminum and we know how hot those things can still get. 

Exactly. Using the metal chassis can actually have an adverse effect as if you heat that up then the air that gets sucked in by the fan is pre-heated and thus you end up with thermal runaway situations.

[ShadySocks]

The thermal paste on laptops can be terrible! The only risk (with non conductive thermal paste) is that you forget which screw goes where and put one too big into the wrong hole, which could cause a bump in the chassis. Re pasting is probably your best bet for reducing fan speed, as the temperature sensors regulating fan speed are usually on the CPU, not the heatsink. You don't even need alcohol, just rubbing the cpu with your shirt can remove 99% of the old thermal paste.