X220 extra cooling ideas?

8tg · January 2, 2021

I have a thinkpad X220 I’ve been trying to keep cool, so far I have ram heatsinks, m.2 heatsinks, freshly applied noctua thermal paste, I removed the fan mesh, and temporarily replaced the chipset thermal pad with thermal paste, but there’s too much gap so I ordered a pad

What else could I try here? It’s less about a specific temperature goal ( it’s arguably substantially cooler than any stock x220 already), moreso just seeing how much I can improve the cooling.

one idea I’ve had is to use the thermal pads I ordered to connect the heat pipes to the chassis, to dump some heat into the chassis, and to try and attach lots of tiny heatsinks along various components

another idea was to thermal glue an entire extra heat pipe and large copper heat plate somewhere along the chassis

pics:

for right now I’m sitting at 84c on both the chipset and cpu under max synthetic load, and around 75c with 85% cpu speed, and 65c with 75% cpu speed and “maximum battery life” gpu performance limitations

panzersharkcat · January 2, 2021

Outside of what linuxfur said about a custom heatpipe setup or liquid metal for the CPU, I think that's the best you can do. This guy got his X230, which I believe uses the same heat sink as the X220, to drop from 88C to 68C with liquid metal under full load. However, that was only 6C lower than what he got with Prolimatech PK1, which I've never heard of. I got similar results with my T430, which dropped from 92C to 72C in Intel XTU after applying Thermal Grizzly Kyronaut. I may try again once I get a dGPU heat sink with more heat pipes just to see the results before I swap in an i7-3740QM or something.

16 hours ago, linuxfur said:

Interesting setup you got though. When I do buy a new ThinkPad X230 I might try something like this.

xueyao of xyte.ch is going to be doing a custom motherboard "X330" this year with the option of a 16:10 display, though picking that results in losing the webcam. (I don't mind since I think the webcam shutter I use partly blocks off the ThinkLight. I'd get a better image with an external one anyway.) I believe it will be either Tiger Lake or Renoir. He did that before with an X201, which he outfitted with Coffee Lake and later Comet Lake.

panzersharkcat · January 3, 2021

2 hours ago, linuxfur said:

I've always wanted to make a Frankenpad, but I don't know where to go on about it tbh. Having a very classic ThinkPad with a lot better specs sounds amazing to me.

You can just buy it from him. At most, you'll have to put in the battery, RAM, SSD, and CMOS battery yourself if you don't want to buy that from him. Only issue is it's a bit pricey for older hardware, which is why I'm waiting for the custom motherboard version. As cool as it is to be able to solder off the duo-core CPU and solder on a quad-core, if I'm going to be spending $1000+ after everything, I want something with a fairly new CPU. One with an i7-3612QE, 16 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD, and CMOS battery would have run me close to $1000.