Any cooling/heatsink mods out there?

I'm looking to see what kind of cooling mods there have been for the M15x. I have been meaning to see if we can replace the aluminium block on the GPU sink with an all copper one. Also if some kind of water cooling is possible

 

I'm working at a copper heatsink, but I'm pretty busy atm and a noob with CAD... lol.
I'll let you know when I make some progress.

 

I am also interested in this. If i was more experienced in this i would install one of those mini water coolers in the M15X if i knew where i could draw the power for the low voltage pump and fan.

I have watercooled my xbox and xbox 360 in the past and its fun and effective.

 

^ What kind of mini water coolker? Link? Never heard of this... Depending on the current and voltage needs it could be very easy, but I somehow doubt that it would be better than the current solution.

 

I have had an idea: has anyone ever tried to file down the knobly bits on the heatsink and stick some copper heat spreaders on them instead? Just a though I mean it seems like a very easy thing to do and may yield good results.

 

I don't think it will make a huge difference. You'd have to fix the copper somehow, and the thermal condictivity coefficient of thermal tape is very poor compared to the aluminium. It would be insulating compared to the alu.
Best would be soldering it to the heatsink, but even solder tin is much less thermally conductive than aluminium.

 

Well considering that the nubbly bits don't look like they do much, I'm tempted to buy a spare sink, file it down and see if some added copper helps. As for thermal tape, the Sekisui stuff is decent and at 0.14mm I don't think the lower heat conductivity matter too much considering how much heat a copper heat spreader may lose.

 

Pretty thin, yeah. May give you some improvement. Some users of the other forums put copper wherever they can and it seems to help up to a certain degree.

Grinding down the little aluminium knobs is very easy, I just tried it, can be easily done with a simple metal file.

 

Sweet. Gonna get me some Enzotech BMR-C1L spreaders on there. BTW how hard is copper to file down? May need to do that afterwards to be able put the cover back on.

 

Copper has almost the same hardness as aluminium. As long as it's not a special alloy it should only be slightly harder I guess. Haven't tried it so far though.

 

wow sounds awesome, I failed so bad when I tried this with a clevo heatsink. water cooled laptop sound fun but i don't think it can happen unless you won't be moving it around. was considering a custom build ac laptop cooler, but would cost too much to make.

i also tried drilling holes in the bottom panel but that actually resulted in higher temps.

 

Yeah i bought 2 of those low profile heatsinks from Cooler master back in the day. Dont know where i can find em today but shouldnt be too hard. They would be perfect in this system. And then i took the pump from a 8800GTX watercooled card. It was wery small. Maybe an inch in diameter or slightly smaller.

 

Looking into water cooling the GPU, do any of you guys know if the space between the x-plate holes is the same as on a desktop GPU PCB? The desktop one looks to be a bit wider. And the same question applies to the CPU.

 

The squares for the heatsink are in a square with 46mm sides and the holes (on the GPU) have a diameter of 3.2mm.

 

Right so after hours of research, I have chased down some parts that will probably fit I am embarking on this epic water-cooling mod. Cooled components will be the CPU and GPU. I will try and fit everything (excluding the radiator, pumps and reservoir) into the space beneath the laptop when propped up by a 9 cell battery.

The CPU heatsink screw holes are 52mm apart horizontally, and 40mm apart vertically. I have found this:
GPU Universal Water Block Roundup
which has adjustable arms/fins. If my measurements are correct, it will be able to fit perfectly. Plus the piping can be attached sideways which save plenty of space.

The GPU is more tricky. I have searched all over the place for a water block that will fit an MXM board with no avail. So I'm splitting this into 3 parts.

Part 1: The holes for the plate are 46mm apart (not diagonal). We need a water block that will take screw arrangements this small so I found one:
GPU Universal Water Block Roundup
I drew a life size image of this and matched it to the holes and it fits fine. This block also take the tubing sideways which is good.

Part 2: The memory chips must also be cooled so why not water cool them too? Using mosfet blocks such as these:
Koolance MVR-40 Motherboard Voltage Regulator Block (No Fittings) - FrozenCPU.com
The adjustable things may even reach the screws from the GPU block if not then we'll just stick them down with Sekisui tape which I have hear great things about both in terms of heat transfer and stickiness.

Part 3: I really don't want to leave the rest of the card uncovered so my solution is to just saw off the die and mem parts of the heatsink (copper and aluminium) and still use it including the fan. If anyone has better ideas please put forward.

The tube routing will probably go: pump->mem1->mem2->gpu-> etc. I'm still a noob so tell me if this is incorrect

I haven't decided whether I'm gonna gather the rest of the parts or just buy a kit for it.

That's it for now. Gonna start saving and buy the parts over the course of a few moths

 

Trust me, the holes have a distance of 46mm. It's in the MXM specs and I measured it.

This is going to be interesting, I can't really see how to fit all this in the system, but without the back plate it might be possible.

No need to actually cut the heatsink to get the little copper plate, you can simply desolder it.

Here's a pic:




I have a disassembled heatsink, in case you need the copper plate or the aluminium part let me know. I only need the aluminium part until I'm finished with drawing the part in CAD.

 

Yeah I plan to do this without the back plate. Post edited. 46mm it is and it doesn't make a difference. All parts will still fit...I think. Oh well if worst comes to worst, all the parts will either go into a Desktop build or I'll just flog them away.

 

That's the spirit! Do you know how much voltage/current the pump needs?

 

Wow this sounds totally awesome. Good luck.

 

Dunno, I don't intend to power anything from USB or anything from the laptop itself so it isn't really a big deal.

@svl7 I don't think you understood what I meant by sawing off half of the heat sink. Here is a picture, the red bits are the bits I intend to remove completely.

 

Ok... but you know that you can't simply cut off the heatpipe, right?

 

Yeah that thought did come across my mind. How come I can't just saw it straight off? Is there something special inside it?

 

Yeah, they're hollow and usually have a fluid / gas inside them as well as a finely woven copper grid / braid. Cooling only works so well because they use the enthalpy of vaporization and other physics tricks (check wikipedia for more details), a simple massive copper pipe would never have the same effetct

They also are very hard to bend without destroying them.

 

Ah right ok scrap that idea. Totally remove the fan and heatsink then. What do you suggest? I'm thinking a copper plate on the rest. Held to the card by Sekisui with thermal pads underneath to hold it together and copper heat spreaders on top. Yay oder nay?
Edit: Picture - Orange is copper, blue is thermal pads and red is thermal tape.

 

Those parts aren't cooled at all in my system. I have no experience with thermal tape, your idea is probably not that bad, especially compared to not cooling it at all. And it shouldn't be too hard to do this.

And by the way, I demand that you remove the title "The World's most powerful Alienware M15x" until you beat my benchmarks score, hahahaha

 

Hehehe ok well I was going to remove it anyways as destinymax has one of these too.

 

Lol, but your system seems to have a bit more at running without a shutdown... Hope destinymax will do some nice benchmarks in case he can fix this... I thought he talked about returning the card.

Anyway, this mod sounds really interesting, hope it will work in the end!

 

Interesting. But if i had the money i would watercool the M15X with all the components inside and draw power from the mainboard for pump.

The heatsinks are wery small. And you can find a wery small pump that is sufficient enough. The large spaces that you get when removing the huge heatsink/heatpipes that you dont need anymore can be used for reservoir.

*sigh* my modding beast wants out again

 

Yes, the power can be taken from the mainboard. A very easy possibility would be the jacks of the fans, they deliver about 5V and probably at least up to 0.5A.

There are other possibilities as well, but it would require soldering some cables to some capacitors.

 

Yeah the fan jacks would be nice. They are wery conveniently placed too.

I had a complete watercooling once for my 8800GTX card that was as small as a VHS casette. It had all the watercooling components inside that.. Actually slightly smaller than an VHS casette.

Does anybody know if it would be possible to have a water tank /reserator in the cd drive bay area (totaly removing the cd/dvd player ofc). Would it be possible to have small diameter tubing from there to the gpu/cpu?

 

Right so I'm probably gonna get a XSPC Rasa RSX240 750 pump, reservoir and radiator combo. The fan jacks in my M15x are 5 pin ones, will they be compatible with ordinary case fans?
Edit: Ok so my CPU and GPU run at similar temperatures on idle with the GPU a bit hotter on load. I am debating whether to arrange them serial or parallel. Serial means one component will get hot water as it has passed through on component already, parallel means both components get cold water but they get it slower due to the split and one may get less than the other...hmm...

 

The jacks are smaller than the ones of usual desktop fans, but you can easily hack something to gather to get the power from there. I did this to test a little circuit with some thermostats and NTC thermistors for automatic fan control, you only need to find the correct pins.

There's the 5V, ground, tacho, PWM and the fifth... I don't really know, lol. There are actually only 4 cable attached to the fan itself.


No idea what's the best setup, you'll have to do some testing. I think serial should work, but I have absolutely no experience with watercooling.

 

Thanks for the info. Dunno if 5v is enough for cooling the radiator though. I know I can get AC to molex adapters for the pump but do you know if I get ones that include molex and 3/4pin 12v jacks?

 

hahah my cooling mod is a big fan next to the vents.... it doesnt really do anything lol

 

I'm not sure what you mean, but the fan jacks on the M15x mobo aren't molex standard afaik, they're much smaller. For the connector on the pump, no idea, but that shouldn't be a big problem, fixing the cables there.

If 5V isn't enough you'll have to search for a point with a higher (or lower) electrial potential. E.g. if you can get -7V from somewhere and use it together with the +5V you'll have 12V, but the problem is you can't just draw too much power from a random point on the mobo.
The capacitors near the SSD should work, but I'm afraid they're +5V as well.
Another option would be to use the 19.5V from the DC jack and use a voltage divider.


@ettehbrute: lol.

 

Yeah I may look for some fans that have decent CFM @5v other wise I'd have to look for some way of getting 12v externally.
Edit: Uploaded proof of concept tubing arrangement. Pretty self explanatory. It is in parallel with the cool water coming in from tubes located at the vents on the right.

 

i thought i remember someone trying this with an r2 but can't seem to find the post.

can't wait to see the final product.

i found this, hopefully it can help some. too bad the project was a bust.

http://www.overclock.net/water-cooling/483111-project-terminated-m17-water-cooled-laptop.html

 

Gonna take a looooooooong time. This is gonna run me up to about $500 for all the parts so I'll save up slowly.

 

Those Coolance waterblocks are exactly the ones i used in my Xbox 360. They have wery good performance and are low profile.

 

Awesome. Gonna put this project on a 'work in progress' hold and ad to it bit by bit.

 

Hey guys, search for "asus HD 3850 X3 Trinity". Don't ask, just google it...

 

I just saw the link to this thread in your sig
Very nice/subscribed
+1 Rep

BEAST!!

Also if i can add my 0.2c:
I think it'll be a better idea(if your hunting for numbers in benchmarks ) not to draw the power for the pump from your system, it'll add up to the PSU and making it trip faster (not by a lot but still).

You could power the pump with an external charger(12V 1A are pretty small) and make some sort of a plug on the M15x. I know it sounds messy but your PSU will power the necessary for your numbers.

For daily use i think it's better to get it powered by your system thus keeping the portable form and power the pump externally for benches

Another idea would be to dissmantle a 12V charger, recover the little board and solder 2 wires (instead of the plug pins)on the board, that will lead to a plug(i.e. female) you can make on the system(you choose where) and in that plug you can externally connect a power cord(110V or 220V) just like the M15x itself but without the charger since it's inside

What do you think?

 

I just plan to keep it simple and get a 12 Molex Adapter. This thing will be a quick remove thing hopefully so If I ever want to take the M15x on the road, remove water blocks and put heatsinks back. Boom done. Hopefully by Christmas I'll have another laptop and this will become a permanent desk jobby so I may install the water cooling etc. Shame that Koolance turned down my sponsorship request, indefinitely though. Maybe I'll ask Swiftech, as they aren't really that big in the UK, to help with the Rad/Res/Pump combo.

 

I highly recommend you buy a Clevo p150hm heatsink from ichime here on these forums. They're really well priced, the heatpipes will probably be very easy to desolder, and it is 2 piece for the core & the vRAM.

You should probably try to eyeball first whether it will fit in your chassis.

On filing copper, its not too difficult with a dremel. But copper shavings and dust get everywhere. So you'll want to do finishing with a wire brush as not to short your motherboard.

Oh and I know about the trinity if only they were put into production, then we could probably fit the entire thing into a laptop chassis with a mini-ITX board

If you want to get DC voltage from your adapter without soldering directly onto your jack (and also while retaining some voltage on battery) use the lines to the LCD backlight inverter. Of course it will be more than 12v.

Good luck with this, thats all I can say!

 

any updates on the liquid cooling solution yet widezu69?

 

No, this is on hold, gonna cost me a bit too much at the moment. I haven't forgotten about this though!. Plus I'm in the UK and some parts that I need are hard to find this side of the pond.

 

What kind of parts do you need? I might be able to get a quote in my place

 

I have an idea..... do you guys think hooking up a vacuum to the exhaust vent would do anything? You would have to take out the fan so you don't damage it but I think it will work. Instead of pushing air through the 'radiator?' with the fans, the vacuum would pull much more air through it.

 

Would that not be extremely loud?

Maybe making an improved cooling mat would be better than a vacuum, I think.

 

It would be strictly for benching. Definitely not for every day use.