Go figure...

Windows 8.1 is the for EVGA and MSI. I've still not solved my 880m problem, well, I haven't attempted to benchmark as of yet, since I haven't gotten around to flashing the modified vbios to my GPU again. Anyway, a few days ago, myself and brother Fox were talking about Liquid Ultra. He mentioned something about a plastic shielding located around the Clevo Nvidia GPU's. I took a look around google, and sure enough, the Clevo cards do have this dark green plastic cover on top of the components located around the GPU die. I will be a lot more comfortable pasting with Liquid Ultra if I can locate the material used on the Clevo cards to protect the components around the die. Same applies for my CPU.

Any help given, to locate the material to be purchased within the U.K, will be extremely appreciated brothers.

 

Probably best to contact PCSpecialist or MySN since they're the two major Clevo resellers in the UK. The part # for the GPU shield can be found in the service manuals. (available on Prema's site; just google Prema BIOS and hit the first link, download the P377SM-A service manual and flip to the last few pages)

 

Don't trust that material and just be extra cautious applying the Liquid Ultra.

The reason I say this is that my machine did indeed come with those... and when I removed them, there was a puddle of paste underneath. It wasn't as big as on top but it got into those impossible to clean components and since they're impossible to clean, I have it clean all around them but they're caked.

I would probably suggest doing the CPU before the GPU so you get an idea of how much is necessary. The CPU is going to be easier to clean off if you get some somewhere else and its also far cheaper to replace the processor than the GPU.

 

Unfortunately with Haswell CPUs it's just as risky, since the on-die VRMs are so close to the die.

 

Yeah but it's still cheaper to replace a CPU than an 880M

Sent from my HTC One_M8 using Tapatalk

 

To be honest, I prefer to NOT have to replace either haha. I would like to get something to cover these components, but the only thing that comes to mind is electrical tape, which I know is a very bad idea.

 

Wow, I never had any Liquid Ultra get on anything other than where I placed it. You guys may have used too much. I provided a photo guide and a video on how to apply it. It takes so little, painting on a micro thin layer of Liquid Ultra on both of the mating surfaces of the CPU and GPU dies, that there should be little or no opportunity for any excess to escape because there is no excess to speak of. The part that is exposed to air will harden like solder and seal the liquid in on the space that is not exposed to air.

I did not know those plastic shield were sold by Clevo, so thank you for mentioning this. I am going to have to check that out. I have them on my Clevo 780M cards, but I would like to have some spares on hand as well as a pair to add to the 780M cards in the Alienware 18. I think having them is a good idea no matter what paste you decide to use. It's nice having them protected and makes it easy to clean up ordinary thermal paste. I don't like having to clean the area where those surface mounted components are. I'm always a tiny bit paranoid about them being fragile, so keeping them clean with that shield is a fantastic idea.

 

Hey this was your idea haha. I've been looking on overclockers.co.uk. I can't find anything about this plastic. I took on ebay too, absolutely nothing. It doesn't help that I have no idea what it's called. I've seen those SMC's lift off with just pure alcohol on consoles. I know there most likely more efficiently soldered on the CPU and GPU than consoles. However, I still wouldn't trust putting any old material there. The only thing I'm paranoid of, is the liquid coming seeping over the die and on to those SMC's. That's the only thing putting me off right now. I did watch your video, and to be honest, it was very thin layer you placed on top of the die. Is that really all that's required for this paste?

 

Yup, that's all you need is a micro thin layer... no puddles of liquid anywhere. The key is to apply it to both surfaces and only on the heat sink copper plate surface area large enough to match the size of the die. Then there is no extra to speak of when applied in this manner. The two halves go together wet, but not really enough material to "squish out" on the sides.

I have thought about electrical tape as well. The product is heat resistant mylar plastic. I looked it up where Brother n=1 said. The part number is the same for all Clevo systems. Here it is...



Edit: OK, I just checked with a knowledgeable person in the service department at PowerNotebooks at their HQ in Nevada about buying this part. My thoughts about using electrical tape were right on target. Without me evening mentioning this the guy suggested it, as that is what they use in their extreme overclock testing with liquid metal thermal paste. He found out why I wanted it and recommended using electrical tape instead of that shield. So, that's what I am going to do on my next repaste. Nice guy... I told him I would give him a call when I am ready to buy a P570WM to take my laptop benching beyond the functional limits of my 3920XM.

 

I have never worked with Liquid Ultra Mr. Fox, quite frankly the idea scares the hell out of me. My first time ever even repasting a computer was when I got this Clevo and I've been building them for almost 20 years... always used the stock crap and I did the taboo of pulling off the heatsink and not replacing the paste in my desktops all the time.

Now that I've repasted this thing probably 10 times on each GPU and twice on the CPU, I'd be much more confident in doing it but considering I had a nightmare about Liquid Ultra the other night where I was painting the motherboard and then realized what I did... maybe I should avoid it... although the pretty blue light when the motherboard fired up was a fascinating part of that dream... no idea why I was dreaming about Liquid Ultra but I was haha.

 

haha, I put the part number in google. 680m came up straight away. I'm still looking, but it doesn't seem that easy to get a hold of. Can you just imagine electrical tape at 75c? not good.

 

Yep that's the part alright. Not sure if you can just buy it separately though. The good thing (or bad thing, depending on your perspective) about Clevo is that because they basically reuse their designs year after year, you can usually swap components from different generations around and they will all fit and work just fine.

 

I was paranoid at first, too. Just the idea of using it is intimidating. Now that I am using it, I cannot even consider using something less for my beast machines. There is absolutely no comparison. Using it on the 3920XM and especially the 4930MX completely changed the experience in a positive way. The 4930MX is ludicrously hot, almost to the point of being unusable (as you have discovered). It was not nearly that asinine with the 3920XM, but I do things with both machines using nothing but the stock fans that absolutely required AC cooling before. Even AC cooling was sometimes inadequate for the 4930MX, but not any more.

For my ordinary laptops I still use IC Diamond, which is an excellent product that has served me well for many years. It just does not have the same capacity for thermal conduction that metal does, which is totally understandable.

It should be fine, just don't use the crappy, gooey, stick kind. Use the good stuff and it should not get all slimy. I'm going to use it. It also works fine on de-lidded desktop CPUs according to the guy that mentioned it.

Indeed, that is a nice thing about not changing system chassis designs. The fact that hardly anything changed with the M18xR1/R2 makes parts relatively easy to come by and more affordable. I have looked a couple of times online for used Clevo parts and they seem kind of scarce. I have not looked for specific vendors to see if anyone specializes in selling Clevo service parts.

 

Well I have my desktop sitting right next to me with a 4770k @ 4.4GHz if I need to get something done that the laptop won't do. I am not amused with the CPU temps but at least this machine doesn't offload the CPU temps to the slave GPU unlike some other Clevo designs. The way that it goes right now, I can have the CPU pushing 87C and my GPUs will stay around 38C when they're idle. When the entire system is idle, the GPUs drop to 35C so the cooling system is adequate enough to throw the fire out of the back of the laptop without impacting everything else.

If I decide to push the overclock further, I'm going to have to get a converter box and they are 70 bucks. Kind of a hard sell when I just have to lean over and press the switch to fire up the desktop 8.1/OS X dual boot rig

 

Well the shared heatpipe thing was doable in the older generation because 680M didn't run as hot as the 780M. And it certainly helps with "CPU-only" benchmarks as the CPU is effectively cooled by 2 fans. But you DO NOT want to game with that setup using the 780M.

 

Shared heatpipe is just laziness in engineering.

Its not entirely Clevo's fault though... From what I've seen, all of their designs keep the temperatures within the specifications that the hardware manufacturers put out there... Its just that those temperatures aren't always acceptable to us. Haswell is rated for 90C and doesn't even start to throttle until 95C. I just personally don't like letting my CPU run that high.

 

Ivy Bridge is 105°C and with an unlocked Alienware M18x BIOS and the right setting selections it almost never throttles. It still shuts down at 105°C like any Ivy Bridge does, but runs full blast until that happens. I really like that. I wish it was like that for all machines.

 

Well more of a shared fan than a heatpipe tbh, check out my thread to see what I mean.

I think the backstory was that Clevo was concerned about the die shrink in Ivy Bridge running hotter than Sandy Bridge, so they tacked on a third heatpipe and had it shared the slave GPU's fan. Like I said this setup (in combination with Liquid Ultra) is about as good as it'll get (without external AC) if you're benching only the CPU. Particularly useful for Haswell since it runs so ridiculously hot.

 

Yeah my Sandy Bridge 2450M was quite a little fireball too...

For me though, the fan noise is absolutely unbearable when it gets up there so I like to keep it lower regardless of manufacturer spec. I don't mind the 80s on this machine but I marvel at my desktop with an H100i that isn't even installed properly (I didn't line the mount up correctly so two cores run about 8C hotter than the other two until I fix it) on silent mode keeping my 4770k under 50C with an average workload. If I could get that on this machine, it would be incredible.

One reason I haven't explored Liquid Ultra for this CPU also is that it isn't stable past 4.2GHz anyway. I messed with all of the settings in the world, it will not stabilize at 4.2GHz on 4 cores, only 2 and 1 core goes to 4.5GHz with HT disabled. There isn't much more room (sometimes it will decide to run 3.9GHz on all 4, sometimes it will refuse to budge past 3.79GHz on the same settings) so while the temps would be nice, the risk of toasting my 1k CPU isn't worth 8 degrees less heat when I can't push the chip up any more really anyway.

 

Yeah I saw that thread, pretty cool mod actually but my usage tends to be more intensive on the GPU than the CPU so it wouldn't make any sense to have that kind of configuration for myself.

 

RJTech does a side business of selling Clevo parts, although in general there's a 10-20% markup compared to buying it direct from a reseller. The markup is worth it if you need fast service, otherwise you can take the long route of contacting Sager (main distributor) and hope they respond within 48 hours with an uncanned response LOL.

 

RJTech is a trusted vendor, too. I knew they were a reseller, but did not know they would sell odd parts like that. Good to know... thanks. I have heard good things about them, including they are a good place to buy GPU upgrade parts for Alienware and Clevo.

 

Eurocom is a great source for parts too... They're the ones with all the Clevo parts on eBay. I actually got my replacement screws from them, not knowing it was them (seller is upgradeyourlaptop), and they even included two free X brackets since I bought 3 sets of screws.

I don't think the parts are all that hard to find from my brief search, you just need to know what you're looking for.