Acer 8204 - Strange temperature problem

Hi,
I'm having weird temperature problems with my Acer 8204 WLMi. All of a sudden idle temps rose from about 54-55 to about 70 degrees C. I clean the fan and heatsink regularly, and there is no dust of any kind. Now idle temps have risen to about 80 degrees C, and the air coming from the fan is actually cool. Before it was hot, so now the cooling unit must be faulty in some way. Anyone else had this problem? The day before it was all normal, now idle temps are 25 degrees higher and the fan is going on high constantly.

I also tried to run the computer a little bit with the lid open, the copper heatsink was too hot to touch so the contact between the CPU and heatsink should be OK. I put on a fresh thin layer of arctic silver 5, but it didn't help. Could the bios report wrong temps?

Thanks for any input.

 

sounds like a failed heatpipe. will need a new thermal module.

 

techiediva, thanks for your reply. So the heatpipe can just fail like that? I thought it was just a piece of hollow copper. It sounds reasonable though, because everything else works like it should and the air coming from the exhaust is actually cool.

Do you know any good sources for a new one?
Thanks again.

 

Before changing heatpipe check if all part of the heat pipe are well physically connected...

 

I checked the heatsink several times, and I just can't find anything defective. Yesterday, I opened up my computer to remove dirt from the fan. After that, temps rose to about 70. I didn't touch the heatsink at all, only the fan. After not being able to get temps down to the normal 55'ish, I opened the computer again, this time removing the heatsink, cleaning the cpu and re-applying thermal paste. Now temps rose to around 80. I've done this several times before, my comp usually runs 5 degrees cooler than before after a good cleaning and new thermal paste on the cpu. I just can't figure this out. It's an Intel T7600 CPU by the way, and I'm running it at 0.95V.

 

heat pipe contains liquid to transfer heat. if liquid escapes(small cracks), it does not work like it should.

Heat pipe - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Good to know, thanks. Looks like the solution is to order myself a new heatpipe. Does anyone know where I can get a new one?
Thanks again.

 

I'll add a thought here.

I'm just speculating as I have not yet had my thermal unit off of my own 8204, I have to replace it soon, fan is starting to go.

From what I have read and heard the 8204 had quite a lot of space between the heatsink and CPU and used one of those thick thermal pads to transfer heat to the heatsink, across that, what may be thought of a larger thermal gap. These machines did not originally use Arctic Silver or any other thermal compound but these thermal pads alone. At least as far as I know on earlier builds, which mine is.

If you have removed the pad and just put on Arctic Silver, a very thin film of Arctic silver would not fill that gap and hence the higher temps when you applied it.

Did yours have this thermal pad when you initially took it apart, or did it only have a thermal compound? If it had the thermal pad, you should have just replaced the it first before trying Arctic Silver (you can't use them both together either.) It's possible that over time this pad would harden and lost it's thermal conductive properties.

 

Thanks for your reply, Yellow11. I'm not sure how the earlier models are, but on mine there isn't, and never has been, a thermal pad on the CPU. It's in direct contact with the heatsink, and it was like that from the factory. Only some transistors are cooled by the heatsink with thermal pads in between. By changing the thermal compound with Arctic Silver 5 when new, my Acer ran 2-3 degrees C cooler if my memory serves me right.
I managed to track down a thermal module down in Denmark, it should be on its way as we speak. Hopefully that'll solve my problems.

 

Hey Humbo.. Where are you located? If in North America, did you have to go all the way to Denmark for the thermal unit? I'm going to need one soon.

 

Oh, yeah, also what kind of price did you find?

 

Well, (unfortunately) I'm located in Norway. I tried finding one all over the place, Acer just doesn't have them in stock anywhere any more. So my only chance was to find a repair shop or webshop that had one in stock.

 

I had to pay through my nose to get it, they normally don't ship outside Denmark. So they charged me double for it, about 120 USD including shipping I believe. Still better than scrapping a perfectly fine laptop only because of a faulty heatpipe.