Inexpensive way to cool down your laptop.

[homested]

Well, about a week ago someone gave me a dell Inspiron 600m. Since then Ive tried everything to over clock it. If anyone has any ideas please message me. Its a 2 ghz Dothan on an 855 PM chipset in other words no pinmod. Probably no pinmod even if i had a 915 chipset without some insane voltmod. I have been unable to find the PLL on it through trial and error so I decided to take it apart. Well when i took the processor cooler off there was next to nothing as far as thermal paste. So not thinking about it when i put it back together I naturaly put thermal paste back on it. Started it up said to myself hey I wonder if that changed the temps any. No, i don't have an idle temp for it, I work my computers they all crunch seti unless Im benchmarking.

But Its load temp went down from 78 (this is at the low end, if you were blocking the air vent with anything you'd see over 80 easily)

It didn't go down a little, it went down to 53 C. 25 cents worth of thermal paste lowered the temperature of my processor 25 C. Dell you cheap ********. I'd have to say im quite impressed with the pentium M. I'd like to get some more of these and start crutching away. They're low power, this one is only slightly slower then one processor in my opteron 185. AND IT RUNS COOLER, well now. BTW. no i didn't clean aything out of the heatsink or fan grill or anything, when i got it i blew air back through it to flush the crap out because i thought it was hot.

Anyway, the most important thing to take away from this is. If you want a computer BUILD IT YOURSELF. Cause when you do it you know your not going to cut corners and when your done you'll know how far you can push your system. Actually intel does, and I'm sure that processor would be long dead before 103 C. Keep in mind, you hard boil eggs at 100C!!!!!

I'm unsure what the actual thermal limits of this processor are but dell has the shutdown temp preset in the bios at 103C and i'd feel a whole lot better about cranking this one up to 2.5 or 2.6 ghz now. Just need to find a way.

 

[freakdiablo]

Well, I do believe a lot of mobile CPUs (Pentium Ms atleast) can handle up to 100c. I wouldn't let them get above 75c, but they are designed with the idea that someone will have it running full load on top of something that blocks airflow, like a bed sheet or something.

But yeah, many companies put the bare minimum cooling in laptops in order to keep costs down. I'm going to open this laptop up to see if it's a swappable cpu, and I'll ad a dab of thermal paste when I do.

 

[curtis1552]

I had an laptop, and I took it apart, there also was no thermal paste. I have yet ot put it back together because the LCD was cracked and new laptops are cheaper and faster for the price of repairing the laptop.
I figure someday I'll put a LCD in my coffee table and set my RF wireless keyboard/mouse on it and the laptop in one of the drawers. Right now I have a bunch of PCBs.

 

[Dusnoetos]

As long as I perodicly clean out the dust that collects in my laptops heat sink it rarly gets ubove 60c.

I have a an IBM Thinkpad T30. It actuly has a rather decent all copper heatsink (no heatpipe...YET - i have a small one from a nother dead laptop that i keep thinking about trying to find away to mount on the GPU.) Sorry for the fragmenting thought - my first child (born 25days ago has me very sleep deprived)
I should try to go back to sleep.......

 

[Leonardo]

Quality TIM can make a HUGE cooling improvement with laptops. I used a Gateway POS laptop for a while. The heatsink was stamped tin, or very low-grade steel. It was really pathetic.

have a an IBM Thinkpad T30.

One of the best quality and sturdiest laptops on the planet.

 

[Tserrof]

I think it's also worth noting that the quality of TIM application can vary greatly from laptop to laptop even when they are of the same model and brand. The XPS in my sig had a decent TIM application job while a friend of mine with the same system had a cpu with barely any on it.

We decided to crack open both systems to look when we noticed that while playing CS:S over a lan, his system was much louder than mine despite both of us having an identical hardware configuration (with the exception of wifi card and HDD).

A new TIM application has brought fan noise down significantly, to the point in which our systems now have roughly the same decibel level.

 

[toomnymods]

i just recently purchased a Sony Vaio which is down below in my signature, and while crunching sti the temps on the 2 cores are between 65-68c (148f-154f) using the cpuid hardware monitor.. is this about right? how can i lower temps even more? do those aircoolers that go under the laptop really work?

 

[homested]

Take the heatsink off the laptop and see if they did a decent job with the thermal paste. Because its a newer laptop It's probably dosn't have a lot of dust in the heatsink yet. I've shared my laptop experience already.....

 

[@crilicM@n]

Well, ive not monitored my laptop temperature, but i'm shure it has problems with temperature, couse it's hard to use it in your legs at full PM 2,0ghz speed... ANd after some time of high power use, it starts to caouse trouble and lockups... If i then turn it on again, it works a litle bit and lockups again... If I try to play Need for speed on it for some 20-30 minutes, it locks up... A notebook under cooler solved the problem, but when i'm on the run it still bother's me I'm thinking about opening it and checking the cooling solution used onto... But I've just mounted desktops twice... Never opened a laptop... Already dismantled and remounted my tungsten T2 palmtop once.... Could anyone point me a link of good resources about laptop "care"... How to repair, open etc...

 

[Ashura]

I'm not sure what made the biggest difference but my Gateway's 1.8GHz T5550 ran 60c idle, 85c load. I swapped it out with a 2.5GHz T9300 and used TIM Consultants' T-C Grease 0098 and temps went down to 32c idle, 62c load.

 

[@crilicM@n]

I'm not sure what made the biggest difference but my Gateway's 1.8GHz T5550 ran 60c idle, 85c load. I swapped it out with a 2.5GHz T9300 and used TIM Consultants' T-C Grease 0098 and temps went down to 32c idle, 62c load.

Undoubtedly, the way you assembled it, carefully, with correct amount of thermal paste, I presume...

 

[Ashura]

Erm, I meant I wasn't sure if it was mostly because of the new 45nm chip vs the old 65nm or mostly because of the paste, but I'll take your answer too.

 

[@crilicM@n]

Erm, I meant I wasn't sure if it was mostly because of the new 45nm chip vs the old 65nm or mostly because of the paste, but I'll take your answer too.

Oh!!! I wasn't shure about the 9300 45nm core size! That have helped too!!! I wonder if is it possible to upgrade my cpu, after i resolve the heat problem, or make a litle fsb oc (5-10% would be ok) It's currently a sigle cored Pentium M2,0ghz with 2mb L2... It's a fast cpu...

Thanks

 

[dbp_inSOMNiak]

Erm, I meant I wasn't sure if it was mostly because of the new 45nm chip vs the old 65nm or mostly because of the paste, but I'll take your answer too.

Probably the paste. Whenever I have to crack open a laptop for repair, I spend a few extra moments to correctly apply paste, cause oems tend to do a terrible job. I've seen drops of 5C all the way up to 25-30C!

 

[@crilicM@n]

Really want to open my laptop... Any link about "how to"... Or should I just open... (Never opened the lap...) ?

 

[zbo]

Have a look on the manufatures website, they might have a repair guide. I opened my Laptop recently, its not very scary its just like a Pc with smaller parts.

 

[Lusankya]

Just be careful about opening it.. you will most likely instantly void your warranty if you do so.

 

[aaaaaaaaaa]

If you are traveling and at a hotel, they often have floor level A/C units with the cold air being vented out on the top.

I placed my laptop (sig) on top of them and my CPU at load went down to 10* C