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    The heatsinks

    Discussion in 'Alienware M15x' started by widezu69, Apr 2, 2011.

  1. widezu69

    widezu69 Goodbye Alienware

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    Hey just a question to users out there, I know the orange bits are copper I was wondering what material the white/silvery bits are? I want to test out Coollaboratory and don't want it to corrode if it is aluminium.
     
  2. drkfire07

    drkfire07 Notebook Consultant

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    Usually aluminum.
     
  3. svl7

    svl7 T|I

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    Yeah, most probably aluminium. It's cheap and has a great heat conductivity. Can't be magnesium, it's more expensive and less heat conductive, wouldn't make sense. Can't think of another material. Aluminium or an aluminium alloy I'd say.
     
  4. widezu69

    widezu69 Goodbye Alienware

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    Just hoping someone can verify this :)
     
  5. inap

    inap .........................

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    i'm pretty sure its aluminum or an aluminum alloy. its super soft, pretty easy to bend and break it.
     
  6. widezu69

    widezu69 Goodbye Alienware

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    Dang ok. No coollaboratory for me then.
     
  7. svl7

    svl7 T|I

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    Now I wanna hear the background story of this... :D
     
  8. inap

    inap .........................

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    hahah this is when i tried to mod the M15x heatsink with an clevo heatsink, so i had to take apart the aluminum part of the heat sink. so long story short, i failed big time and ended up with some pretty expensive paper weight, hehehe also it wasn't magnetic either. and the heatsink was $70 from dell :(
     
  9. widezu69

    widezu69 Goodbye Alienware

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    Oh wow unlucky. Would love a proper all copper heat sink. Hey by the way what kind of temps do you guys get with your XM processors? I get around 85C with using 21x with a constant 70-85% usage for about an hour (one of the realtime video processing scripts I'm developing does this) is this normal? I get <45C idle and around 55C browsing. Repasted with MX-4.
     
  10. svl7

    svl7 T|I

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    Oh well... I have a spare heatsink laying around (40 bucks ebay) and want to try something similar... maybe milling a slightly improved heatsink with a CNC machine, but there would still be the problem about properly attaching the heatpipes...

    @widezu69: Atm my temps are at about 43°C... I'm not sure about the temps after an hour 70-85% load at 21x, but 85°C seems reasonable, though I think it could be a bit lower. However this will really depend on your ambient temps too.
     
  11. 015734

    015734 Notebook Guru

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    Those temps are fine, the idling / browsing ones are inline with what I'm seeing. Under load I can't say for sure, however, that sounds reasonable as compared to what my temps were with wprime 1024m. It never hurts to blow out the heatsinks, however, I don't think the temps you mention will cause issues