Replacing the TIM on your laptop

[MG2R]

I'm not sure if this is the right section, if it's not, please move this.

 

 

 

Here's a tip for you all: take apart your laptop and replace the thermal interface material between the CPU (GPU) and the cooling solution. It will make your mobile life way better.

 

The right palm area of my Dell Vostro 3350 gets very hot, even when idling. When I checked my temps, I noticed that at idle the CPU sat at 50+ degrees celcius. I decided to fire up Prime95 and noticed that my CPU went to 100degrees before doing what seemed to be throttling. I fired up Aida64 and ran an FPU stress test. Sure enough: the CPU went to 100 degrees and then throttled 23% to save itself from going up in smoke.

 

Not happy with these temps, I decided to try to replace the thermal paste on my CPU. Because I have a Dell notebook, I was able to use Dell's service manual to take the thing apart without breaking it.

 

This is what I cam here for: motherboard and cooling solution...

 

When I took a look at the TIM in place right now I noticed two thing:

1. The TIM on the CPU was of low quality and had hardened to a complete solid. There was also waaaaaay too much of it on the CPU
2. The TIM on the graphics solution consisted of thermal pads on the GPU and the VRAM. The thermal pad on the GPU was too thick and had actually hardened and was full of cracks (see image)

 

I decided to change everything to the thermal paste and pads that came with my EK GTX670 water block. First thing to do was cleaning the surface of CPU, GPU and cooling solution.

 

When I cleaned of the cooling solution, I noticed how brutally low the quality of the blocks was:

 

Finally, I applied new thermal paste and pads:

 

After that, I screwed the whole thing back together and ran the Aida64 FPU test again. Now, the max (peak) temps I can get are 81degrees Celcius. That means that a simple change of the standard TIM, I was able to achieve a temperature difference of OVER 20 DEGREES CELCIUS (yes, all caps!). This 'mod' didn't cost me a thing, except for two hours of time, which were will worth it!

 

Not only the max temps were lower, In idle the CPU runs about 3-5 degrees cooler than before, with the fan turning on a LOT less than before. Not only that, the palm rest feels quite a bit cooler as well (that might be partially subjective, though).

 

Overall, I can recommend this to everyone not afraid of opening up their notebooks.

 

[everything count to life]

thats what i did to my laptop i swap thermal paste i used ic diamond and temps were amazing

[Glenwing]

Yup :P Dropped 10C when I re-pasted by old IBM laptop a few months ago with MX-4 :D

[Emperor_Piehead]

I would do this but for the life of me I can't get two of the screws out of the laptop

[MG2R]

It seems that I may have shouted too early... I stress tessted my GPU today and it became so hot the laptop shut down itself... Thinking the thermal pads are too thin. Will keep you guys posted!

[Morfy]

Don't use pads on the GPU core, only on the mem, on the core put thermal paste  and see the results.

[MG2R]

Don't use pads on the GPU core, only on the mem, on the core put thermal paste  and see the results.

I used a pad, because there was a pad originally... I thought about using paste for the GPU as well, but there is quite a big gap between GPU and cooler, that's why I didn't dare to use paste. Replaced the pad with paste just now, awaiting results.

[Morfy]

Ok, keep us posted.

[Lycr]

I replaced the thermal pads on my Dell Inspiron 1545, put arctic silver 5 on there, yet to load a proper OS on there (running KALI Linux), will be sure to do so and check the temps.

[MG2R]

Just repasted and have gotten good results!

 

The max CPU temp dropped by a couple degrees to 77 degrees Celsius, probably due to a better mount this time.

The max GPU temp sits at 95 degrees Celsius with FurMark running.

 

I noticed something strange, though. When I run Aida64 AND FurMark at the same time, my GPU temp skyrockets to 99 degrees (to be expected). When it hits that temperature, the pc throttles down the CPU to 800 MHz in order to give the GPU more headroom. I'm quite sure this is done by design, because the CPU only throttles back up when I stop loading the GPU.

 

I think it's very cheap of Dell advertising this laptop with a "powerful" GPU, when the cooling solution can't cope with the heat load it produces -_-

 

Anyways, I'm sort of happy with the temperature results in stress tests... I'm now going to run a game on the machine to check how hot the thing gets in real life situations.

 

PS: keep in mind that I actually don't ever use the AMD GPU. It's disabled 99.9% of the time