M14x R2 A04 Bios out.

What are you planning HansTee?

I am about to repaste mine and add a quad. I was wondering if there is anything I can do to the fan shroud to allow more air in.

 

Im planning heatsink additions of copper parts and replacement of the very crap factory thermal pads with high quality 7w/mk ones.

Also a repaste with liquid metal and more pads / tape for all voltage converters and chips on the board.

Im already using a very efficient dust filter so that i never need to clean my fan.
The backside of my laptop is lifted by a black rubber ball half so the airflow works 5 C better than without.

My mod will only be a passive cooling mod which i do for 3 reasons:

1) to expand the lifetime of my M14x
2) to have more stable OC ability
3) to lower the temps generally but since its a passive mod specially in idle

 

Thanks for that mate. I am planning to use mx4 to repaste but I also want to look at a way of allowing more air into the intake to hopefully allow the fan to run at a lower speed. I am not so much bothered by low temps as actually stopping the fan running at 5k (which makes it sound like a jet engine!
I find <3300rpm is great 3300-4000rpm tolerable but anything over is painful!

Going to strip mine down this weekend.

 

Not so sure that cutting a bigger hole will make the fan quiet. The disturbing noise comes mainly from the backfins where the hot air dissipates i guess.

If you want to lower the fan noise you can only lower the temps under load by doing an active cooling mod in my opinion. But an active cooling mod needs to modify the fan casing so air can be soaked inside the Chassis where f.e. additional heatsinks get cooled by that. But the negative aspect would be that we dont know for sure if this would not lower the airflow to the backside fins and therfor has no better cooling effect than the original design.

Since this would need an experiment where you cant restore the casing after modifying it im only doing the passive mod by myself.

 

IMO there should not be any need to do more than a repaste. Propping the backside up also helps increase airflow. If I knew that my r2 had the best TIM already applied, then I would just let it ride. But it's annoying knowing that my high-performance notebook is running hotter than necessary due to dumb default TIM application.

 

IF this laptop http://forum.notebookreview.com/other-manufacturers/681789-gigabyte-u2442n-review.html can have a twin fan design and is half the thickness of the m14x im sure with nearly double the height of the m14x you should be able to fit 2 quieter fans to replace the 1 TURBO fan, the throttling issue is the worst though cause it actually makes gaming impossible which is what this laptop is ment to be i will honestly never buy an alienware again, poor design bulky and crap screen which scratch and have so much glare.

 

wow what a difference a repaste makes! I only used mx-3 as I couldnt find any mx-4 and it has dropped my cpu temps by a good 8-10c on load playing BF3. I have 1 core 6c hotter than the rest so my repaste wasn't the best. I will get hold of some mx-4 and repaste later.

I now run my 3720qm without TB and my 650m at 1100/2500 and set my fans to 3800 (the loudest level I am comfortable with) and never break 65c on cpu or 60c on gpu. Laptop is elevated but not on a cooling stand. before I would throttle at 4000rpm with the same settings

 

Nice. The key is keeping the GPU under 65 it seems. Looks like I'll be doing a repaste. I've got some IC Diamond 7 somewhere.

 

I have some IC Diamond on the way :] Very annoyed that I need to optimize a so-called elite notebook, but I do love electronics. So I guess I will get to know my m14x more intimately very soon...

Is there anything else that can be improved while it is disassembled? I'm still wondering about adding a fan inside each (useless) light on the front edge. I'm curious if the LED power connections could drive tiny fans?

 

The fan idea i had myself but the front LEDs having only room for very small and weak fans so not enough air could reach the CPU / GPU which are located at the backside of the M14x.

The only 3-pin connection i know of which is left for additional fans is next to the fan casing on the opposite side where the only fan is connected to.

Theoretically you could put a very (5mm) thin fan on top of the CPU Heatpipe but i couldnt find any small fans that thin anywhere.

The only idea for additional cooling but with pads / copper parts and paste would be an additional flexible heatpipe that would need to be connected to the CPU Heatsink and goes out of the RAM covering to an extern cooler such as aluminium block or radiator based cooler.

Im only waiting for some copper heatsinks from China (can take some time) then ill post a tutorial how to mod it yourself what i will do.

 

Very interesting - Thanks! I'm going to post the results of my repaste operation whenever that happens. I don't think I hit temps as high as the hardcore gamers, but it does get pushed hard when I have 4-5 720p video clips playing with effects applied + particle generators, etc..