Laptop cooling - need assistance

[Mr. Freeze]

Posted in EE because blogs is too slow and I need advide immediately

I recently upgraded my shitty Dell to a Samsung Series 3 NP350E7C-A01US. So far, I love it..except for its cooling when I run MechWarrior Online. Speccy clocks my mobo and CPU temp at around 60-66 Celsius, which obviously isn't good.

Here's my real problem: finding a cooling pad for this notebook is a bitch. On the underside, the air intake is mounted to the left upper quadrant of the machine. So buying a central cooling pad isn't doing anything- I took home one I bought from Best Buy and it was pretty much useless. Does anyone know of any cooling pads with off-center or detachable fans? Or should I just open up the bottom and put in some arctic silver?

[Maes]

I always doubted the efficacy of such "cooling pads". Laptops have many different hotspots -CPU, RAM modules, GPU etc. while the HD is usually quite cooler, and only a fraction of the generated heat goes throuh the bottom, through layers of air, plastic and rubber. In order for them to be effective in those conditions, they'd have to blow quite a lot of freezing air, or be a giant slab of ice. Placing the laptop on a hard metal or stone surface (e.g. a table) will often work better.

In any case, heat will tend to go upwards, and most designs will have a large chunk of aluminum or copper heatsink "enveloping" all the hot spots in one go. If you do some disassembly, you might replace the -usually shitty and dried-up- thermal pads they use for chip-to-heatsink contact with arctic silver, but this will almost certainly void your warranty.

It does help in the case of old and dirty laptops with dried paste and hairballs all over inside them, but yours is new, so it shouldn't have those issues...unless the heatsink is not installed properly.

[Mr. Freeze]

Maes said:

It does help in the case of old and dirty laptops with dried paste and hairballs all over inside them, but yours is new, so it shouldn't have those issues...unless the heatsink is not installed properly.

I think the issue is that a "high-performance" laptop like this had corners cut from construction to keep it below $1000.

[Catoptromancy]

I held a toothpick on the fan so fan wouldn't wildly spin and used canned air to spray it clean. Though not sure where the dust went, old laptop rarely overheats now. It got brutally hot before the cleaning.

Also when watching long videos I used icepacks. Had a homemade stand for the laptop and could fit an icepack under it, directly under hottest area.

Before the canned air cleaning I needed 2 icepacks I rotated. My cooling pad barely did anything.

[ArmouredBlood]

Open it up and apply some thermal paste/blow out the dust with canned air. I recently did this with my laptop, and though it took around 4-5 hours and a bit of anxiety, it runs a lot better. Costs maybe 15$ for the air, thermal paste, and a pair of screwdrivers. If you need a guide, this might help you. Laptop design sure is easier to open up these days, compared to my HP pavilion dv6000

[Obsidian]

Use your freeze ray?

Sorry, couldn't resist.

[hex11]

Maes said:

It does help in the case of old and dirty laptops with dried paste and hairballs all over inside them, but yours is new, so it shouldn't have those issues...unless the heatsink is not installed properly.

Heh, I once bought a new laptop (in sealed box and everything) from a reputable brick & mortar store, but it had some intermittent overheating problems from day one. The fan would kick in (and rev up to full speed), but eventually it would overheat anyway. I ended up running it with CPU throttled down, and that fixed the problem (I didnt' really care, old games like DOOM ran fast enough). Eventually opened it up and found a thick layer of "stuff" (dust, hair, etc.) that was clogging the vent, but there's no way so much could have accumulated in the time I owned the machine. And after clearing out that blockage, it ran fine at 100% CPU.

That was a long time ago though. These days I only buy used machines, or just use free ones other people no longer have a use for (I don't play modern games, so my needs are modest).

[GreyGhost]

hex11 said:

Eventually opened it up and found a thick layer of "stuff" (dust, hair, etc.) that was clogging the vent

That was pretty much my experience with an overheating laptop I was talked into looking at. A half-inch layer of cat fur clogging the fan's intake filter, the logical result of spending most of its working life on or near the bed with a cat for company.

[Maes]

Sometimes, a firmware upgrade can improve thermal behavior -I have an old Compaq Presario 910EA which overheated badly (Mobile Athlon XP 1400+ CPU, from the infamous overheating/self-destroying generation!), until I applied Compaq's "keyboard heat map firmware upgrade": somehow it made it both quieter and cooler.

[Dragonsbrethren]

Obsidian said:

Use your freeze ray?

Sorry, couldn't resist.

We were all thinking it.