Heat problem with Dell e6420

[juju_beans]

Not sure if this is exactly the right place to put this, but here goes

 

Recently I decided to clean out the inside of my laptop (Dell E6420) and also decided to change the thermal paste. I open it up, cleaned out the dust(very small amount) and took of the cooling unit. maybe want to prepare yourselves for this, the cpu looked like it had gum on it and the thermal paste was all caked up. Gpu and chipset had the same. Wayyy to much thermal paste was put on my dell. So I got it all of with a lint free wipe (don't have any rubbing alcohol with me) and got pretty much all of it off. Also note that on laptop cpu it is not like a full metal plate on top it is just a small square thingy that touches the heatsink. Put on new thermal paste on, and booted it up. Looked up my temps and my cpu was running at about 55c and never going over 68 on load, 10c lower than before. The gpu however was running at like around 70c! I tried to launch csgo and my gpu just instantly overheated. I decided to look into this and found out that literally no contact was being made between the heat sink and the gpu. Looking even further into this I found that the gpu is actually lower then the cpu!! The gpu doesnt even make direct contact with the heat sink, as it is about 3 mm lower. I tried to add some more thermal paste to get a solid connection, and temps went down to around 65c. I tried to launch csgo and it worked this time. However, I was getting really low fps. I usually get around 120 on dm servers and i got around 30. (for those wondering, I did the thermal paste AFTER the big csgo update, so the fps drop is not at all from the new update. Also I ran the same fps after the update before the thermal change.) After a few minutes I looked at temps and the high was an insane 102!!!!!! It was running at around 90 to 100c!! The next day I woke up hoping that maybe it was just some sort of one day glitch. I booted up csgo, and lo and behold, I was getting my usual fps. but to my dismay, it was only for around 30 sec and then it started to drop and I noticed that as the fps dropped, my temps went up. So I came to the conclusion that my gpu was thermal throttling. 

 

So my question is, how do I fix the gap between the gpu and the heatsink? I know for a fact that the gpu is indeed thermal throttling. I read somewhere that you can get a copper shim but I'm afraid of knocking it out and shorting my laptop.

 

Specs: i7 2720 QM (quad core), NVS 4200m

 

Thermal paste was also from a friend, http://www.amazon.com/Aavid-Thermalloy-Thermalcote-Thermal-Compound/dp/B001P7ZMAK

 

Thanks for reading all!

 

 

 

[QueenDemetria]

OP

Hi, the Latitude e6420 uses thermal paste on the CPU and a thermal pad on the GPU. I don't know what the thickness is since I haven't taken mine apart, but I would imagine it being around 1-2mm in thickness. They are relatively cheap on Amazon, but if you have a PC shop nearby they should have some too. 

You can see the pad in this picture:

and in this video:

^At 2:00 

 

In the meantime I recommend not doing anything graphically intensive until you install a thermal pad, and if you want to be on the safer side disable two of the cores in the bios(essentially turning your i7 into a i5).

 

Edit: make sure you use a thermal pad on the chipset too(the little chip that looks like the smaller version of the CPU. )

[juju_beans]

Sorry forgot to include pictures

 

https://imgur.com/a/Kq9pD

 

Last picture shows the difference in level.

 

The chipset (i think) Is on the upper left from cpu and It is also lower then the cpu.

[juju_beans]

 

Thanks for the quick reply! So I can just use any ol thermal pad? And if I do use the pads, will I need to add any more thermal paste?

 

edit: would something like this work? http://www.amazon.com/Generic-15x15x1mm-Conductive-Heatsink-Northbridge/dp/B00EQ23OQA/ref=sr_1_30?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1442631601&sr=1-30&keywords=thermal+pad+2mm Would I stack 2 or 3 ontop of each other if they are too thick?

[QueenDemetria]

Thanks for the quick reply! So I can just use any ol thermal pad? And if I do use the pads, will I need to add any more thermal paste?

You will have to redo the thermal paste on the CPU, but other than that you just use the pads on the chipset and GPU. There are some Arctic Cooling pads on Amazon that you can cut down and fit to your computer. They are only 1mm thick, so you might have to stack a couple pads(which is fine, but looking at the picture above 1mm should be enough).