Summer vs. Laptops

Hi!

After several years of desktop computers, and a couple around watercooling, I've decided to switch to notebooks. I really need the portability, and nowadays they're affordable and game performance is acceptable.

Since my laptop has enough juice for my needs, I never really considered overclocking this thing, actually I want it to run as cool and quiet as possible. BTW, this is an Asus M2N, with a mobile XP2600+, and an Radeon 9600 Pro. Being a recent laptop from a well-known brand, I figured that cooling would be the least of my problems, but I guess I was wrong!

The software provides two basic modes, one downclocks to 800Mhz when idle, and increases clock as the CPU is requested. This keeps the fan off most of the time. The other mode keeps the CPU at the max speed (2GHz) and the fan is always on.

The problem is that either mode, when not using the CPU (completely idle!), puts CPU temps around 50ºC, and in these hotter days it usually goes beyond 58ºC!

Last week I installed Folding@Home and 5 minutes later the CPU was cooking at 66ºC, with an ambient temp. of 19ºC.

I find these values to be completely unacceptable, after all I'm not even pushing this thing to it's limits 24/7.

Thought the problem was with this particular model, but a friend of mine has an Asus laptop with the mobile P4 (2.2) and his CPU's temps have been around 56ºC in the last few days. He uses the laptop basically for programming and browsing, so the CPU usage is very low most of the time.

Last August temperatures inside my room sometimes reached 35ºC (more in some rare occasions), this year (and so far) the max. was 27ºC. I'm starting to think that, if this year's temps reach these values, I won't be able to use my laptop at all!

As I'm new to notebooks I'd appreciate some input on this subject, the summer is arriving and I'm starting to fear that this thing's gonna melt!

Sorry for the long post, and thanks in advance for any info!

Antec and Vantec both make good notebook coolers from what I hear.

http://www.dealtime.com/xPP-System_Cooling--type__mining__laptop_cooler

That link has a few good ones

wow 66c is pretty unbelievable. But I guess the airflow inside those flat things is like zero and cooling solutions with today's superflat notebooks are extremely limited. So as long as you are under warentee and keep everything stock, if it dies it's not your problem

dang...i wouldn't fold on a notebook...i dunno, i never thought a notebook as something u would do that for..hehe, bleh sorry

naw, dun worry about it:

1. you're NOT overclocking, aren't you?

-chip *stable* threshold is ~80 celcius before it starts downclocking, then stops at ~110 celcius

2. have you ever seen the hsf thing in laptops?

-unless its a libermann (go-l.com), its going to have something thats going to resemble a good 1U copper northbridge cooler or something with ducts or heatpipes, both of which are not going to help

3. you've never taken apart ur notebook right?

- doing a fresh layer of as5 for your notebook cpu proally will help by ~10 celcius; the thermal -->glue<-- (NOT grease) used is usually some real bad stuff, would've bet on it to save my prescott if on any day


and besides, i've got me an ibm centrino and it proally touches 60 on any given day much less proally 70 celcius on some realy bad ones and its just about as cool as it'll get, perfectly within specs and everything


so quit worrying about it

it'll be fine

fafnir said:

and besides, i've got me an ibm centrino and it proally touches 60 on any given day much less proally 70 celcius on some realy bad ones and its just about as cool as it'll get, perfectly within specs and everything

Click to expand...

Really? I would assume the centrino would run quite a bit cooler than that.

I know your pain I have used laptops for years. A quick trick I use is to find something to raise the pads on the bottom of the notebook up 1/4" ~ 1/2" I can get a 5C drop in temp from that. 2 other things to do / keep in mind 1) Clean your heat sink, they get filled with dust quick also some AS5 will get you 2-3C and 2) remove the fan grate / grill.

Leviathan41 said:

Really? I would assume the centrino would run quite a bit cooler than that.

Click to expand...

yeah, it would


but you're thinking about sticking a desktop hsf on it



i'll take a picture of whats in my system and you'll understand


resembles something like the passive sinks you find on southbridges and scsi cards, only made out of copper and with a heatpipe between it and the mobility 9600 sitting just next to it


you try sticking that thing on your celeron and see where that takes you

i bet ya i can score the highest C/W here anyone has seen

think in the range of 1.0 C/W somewhere, and no, thats not a a joke

libermann (go-l.com) is a scam...that michael from that stupid michael computers is a charlatan...maxim pc and tomshardware both investigated those....and they're both fake...michaels comp said their comps get less than 11dba and got 17000 in 3dmark 2003

Do you know what the power consumption of the Centrino is compared to the Pentium 4? I believe there is a pretty significant difference, does anyone know exactly what the difference is?

HawainPanda said:

libermann (go-l.com) is a scam...that michael from that stupid michael computers is a charlatan...maxim pc and tomshardware both investigated those....and they're both fake...michaels comp said their comps get less than 11dba and got 17000 in 3dmark 2003

Click to expand...

Prescott in a Laptop!?! ]


That thing would go nuclear in seconds.

First of all let me thank you for your replies

My friend's P4 2.2 is actually one of those thin, flat laptops, with little airflow, at least compared to mine.

My laptop already comes with raised pads at the rear, and the cooler takes up half the total width! Air is sucked in from the bottom (a fairly large area), and exits at the rear. The cooler is 100% copper, but the CPU is at the middle and there are 2 heat pipes connecting it to this cooler.

Apparently the cooler is large, copper, and flow is not an issue, so I believe that those laptop coolers (placing additional fans at the bottom) won't help much in this case.

When I leave it on the no-fan mode, and especially if the screen is closed, when I open it the keyboard is HOT, as well as the area around the hard disk. But with the fan always on the laptop feels cool on the outside panels, it's just the CPU temperature that's too high.

If fafnir is correct, I'm probably whining for nothing, and I admit that this laptop's cooling solution is not the worst I've seen (although I also admit I haven't seen that many notebooks in detail), the real problem is only with the CPU's temperature. I'll probably investigate on the thermal glue/pad to see if I can improve this a little bit. Cleaning is also an important issue, but after only a month it's still quite clean.

As I'm writing this I have nothing running in background, and ambient temp is 25ºC; Asus Probe tells me the CPU temp. is 58ºC.

PS - it's not the folding issue that concerns me, I have a lot more PC's on this so I'm not about to melt my computer by forcing folding 24/7 (at least it won't be using 100% of CPU's clock), it's just that after playing a game the temperatures sometimes get close to those folding temp. values (62-63ºC), with ambient temps around 20-22ºC. And yes, I sometimes like to spend some time playing games

Rofl, 150 watts of heat can be dissipated? My ***.


Many desktop comps have a hard time dissipating 80 watts safely and quietly. I think if this technology was available we would have it by now at least, or probably a few years ago.

p.s. there IS a REAL prescott based latop w/150 watt hsf's in there

and all the other libermann specs minus the impossible "solid state" hard drives (three of them)

look up the dell inspiron xps or 9100

you'll see what i mean


the dell has what resembles an improved 1U hsf on EACH of the heat generating componets, and some kinda airflow channeling


its just doing that in 1 inch or 1.5 inches is the hard part, and the impossible part about the libermann's


and ice k16v, try disabling your laptop's thermal fan throttling and see if it helps, e.g. run the fans always at max

should help quite a bit assuming you've got the option

That is not entirely out of line for a laptop. You can't take what you know as far as temps in desktops and apply it directly to laptops. They DO run hot, there just isn't room for better cooling. The main impact on temps is going to be the processor itself. My laptop has a 3.4ghz P4 desktop chip in it. Needless to say my hands and wrists feel like they are burnt after a day of resting them on my laptop.

If your laptop is running hot enough that you feel that much heat off of your keyboard (just like I feel coming off of mine) I would not suggest folding on it. I was running F@H on my laptop last year and ended up frying out one of my memory modules. The CPU was cooled sufficiently, but there was not enough air over that memory, which was also loaded heavily by F@H.

i had a rpessy 3.2 in my insprion 9100 and i would fold and i hit almost 70C - i opened the laptop, and put some AS5 on the heatsink - dell had used HARDLY any thermal paste and it was some cheap plasticy craps.

that helped, but then i switched and put a norhtwood 3ghz in and fan rearely goes up.


laptop heatsinks are not made for overclocking - they "just "barely are good enough, but if i were you i would take it aprt and apply some AS5 on the cpu.

ice k16v, I wouldn't get too excited about those temps if it were me. Sure, that's fairly hot, but the mobile AXP procs are specc'ed for 100 C, so you still have quite a bit of temp headroom left actually. That's one reason why mobile AXP procs were so good for overclocking; because they were cherry picked cores noted for their stability at high temps and also for being able to run at their rated speed at lower vcore than their desktop equivalents.