e4300 heat source

I opened the laptop and run it for a while, it appears that the part in the central of this pic (on top right corner of the system fan) is the hot area in the machine. anything I can do about it? thanks.

 

How hot is your E4300 running? (Use HWmonitor to check the temperatures). The CPU cores in my E4300 can reach over 80C under sustained full load but the computer itself stays relatively cool.

If you think that your E4300 is running too hot then you have two options (i) ask Dell to fix it; or (ii) follow the undervolting guide I've got the SP9400 in my E4300 running at 1.05V maximum.

John

 

thanks for the advice, i just start using hwmonitor at it now shows cpu at 50C (121F) to 54C.. is that normal? should i try get a fix?

 

What CPU usage is giving those temperatures (Task Manager will reveal)?

I would expect an idle (CPU usage <5%) temperature nearer to 40C.

John

 

I let it be idle for around 20 minutes, cpu temp down to 46-47..thanks~

 

I think the area you are referring to may be the back of the CPU. 121F isn't too bad, although ideally it should be around 100F. If the heatsink is free of dust, I would recommend replacing the thermal grease with Arctic Silver 5. The E4300 does require quite a bit of work to access the heatsink, so you will need to do a fair amount of disassembling.

 

Have you got ny further with this?

I can't remeber if it was the e4300 which is close the M4400 but if it is, mine's the same as yours.

The heat does come from the same area you have pointed out - that and directly below so the lap gets very hot!

I have done the arctic silver 5 "fix" but that only cooled it a bit.

IF it is the same, I personally don't think there is another way around this. I found some fluff near the fan - cleared that out but no difference either.

To turns thing round, with that undervolt thread, I monitored the temp yesterday and noticed that the CPU is not actually that hot - it was running around 38 idle, 43c on use. The arctic silver has helped here I think. The GPU also is running fairly cool around 45celcius. ACPI was nearer to the CPU temp.

So in terms of components - it's fine but I think inside, the heat just circulates and warms up the plastics

 

+1 (I need 10 characters in my post)

 

I contacted the dell service and wait to see if they can do anything about it.. well. it's not that unacceptable but right now I have two desktops at office and home, best time to send it for repair now.

 

The spot you're talking about is the backside of the CPU socket, it should be fairly warm/hot to be honest. If it's "excessively" hot then perhaps you've got something blocking the airflow through the heatpipe radiator fins, a common issue on laptops at least a few months old.

Even if you can't see the dirt/dust/gunk/hairs/etc inside the fins, believe me, they're in there and are the most common reason that a laptop runs warmer than "normal". I'm not completely sure how easy the E4300 would be to disassemble it just enough to get to the heatsink radiator fins and clear it off but if the laptop has been in use for a few months, it might be something to consider.

The metal bracket surrounding the resistors/caps/chips is the clue in that pic: the actual CPU socket is on the other side of the mobo in that exact spot.

The suggestion for undervolting is a seriously valuable one as it not only helps keep the machine running much cooler under load but it also has the bonus of extending battery life to some degree as well - couple the undervolting with nice clean heatsink radiator fins and a clean fan assembly and that's about the best you're going to manage (you can reseat the CPU heatsink and put some Arctic Silver 5 on it as well for even lower temps, actually).

I played with an E4300 just yesterday for a few hours, put it through some rather intensive benchmarks and diagnostics (found one at a pawn shop for $200 with a dead battery but aside from the battery it's in perfect working condition so it's on layaway now) and I never noticed it getting "hot" at all, barely warm on the keyboard surface/palm rest areas.