Video Guide: Changing thermal paste(AS5) on Studio XPS 1645

I would rather guess that you applied to much.. Of course I don't know that but that is usually more common mistake than putting to little.

I did my repasting three times, everytime getting a little better results. So maybe it's worth giving another try (especially if you have some past left - which you should - othrewise you definatelly put too much ).

 

will do all over again then, If the heatsink will not be covered in paste as well = too little, if it will be = too much, right?
Its kinda shocked me that after applying a liquid pro and removing a dust filter I got + 10 degrees to my temps!

 

I don't know this specific paste but some of them have.. not sure how it's called but period of time after which they start to work the way they are suppose to. So temps can be a little higher at the beginning and drop after several hours (usually more that 100).

But +10 degrees would rather suggest that you did something wrong. Maybe it's not pasting that was the problem but putting every parts together after that? (for me it was a difficult part too put this whole cooling system in the right place without moving it)

 

I'd say that maybe you didn't place the heatsink's contact over the CPU/GPU properly. I redid my paste one time, and there was a wire that got in between the heatsink and the motherboard, preventing the crucial contact between the heatsink and the CPU/GPU. My temps were up by about 10C when that happened. I'd say your temps would have probably been higher if you didn't remove the filter, l. So I suggest you redo the paste and make sure there are no wires preventing good contact between the heatsink and the CPU/GPU.

(EDIT] Yea there is also the "cure period" that Andrew9 was talking about, but your temps are too high for that. So just redo it and do it carefully. It can only get better. Good Luck .

 

yes the temps dropped after an hour or so, but still 1-3 degree more than stock paste crap that was all over the place and had a bunch of air pockets, and I have removed the dust filter that supposed to effect as well...

actually the putting back together part was not hard for me, there is not much of the stuff you can misplace..
The only thing I can assume is the amount of liqiud pro I used, maybe next time I need to apply more and even on both CPU and a heatsink.

 

E.D.U. thanks for advice will look into that as well, this evening will by my 2nd attempt
Haven't seen any wires that can go between the whole thing though.

 

I went to the liquid pro website, and they do recommend a 48 hour curing period. I also looked at a few reviews for liquid pro, and they all said that it is the most difficult to correctly apply paste they have ever used, and is very hard to spread properly. It is fully electrically conductive (not just slightly capacitive like AS5). So using even a little too much, and having it get squeezed out over other components, can be disastrous.

It also is corrosive and will eat through aluminum, as warned about on the liquid pro website. The heatsink on the 1645 has copper pads where contact with the CPU/GPU is made, but the rest of it is aluminum. To top it off, most actual reviews of the product say it is about the same, or even 2-3C worse, than regular ol' AS5. I'd highly recommend that you try another paste.

 

seeker_moc Thank you for your advice, I will probably do replace liquid pro with a regular paste, can you advice me also on the top 3-5 pastes I can look for? What paste are you using?

I actually did not heard of a curing period, the little manual that came with it contained only brief applying instructions. Also on the website I found out that it is recommended to apply on both surfaces, I did only one..
Well, looks like I have to redo all over anyway.

Just played a game for an hour or so to see the load: max GPU 81, CPU 84 degrees. But quickly dropped to common ~60 idle, when I quit.

 

Try doing it correctly with the liquid pro first, and see if it gets better. If not, I personally really like shin-etsu g751. I've read a lot of thermal paste reviews/comparisons and it comes consistently on top (one of the very few that consistently beats AS5). It is also non-conductive, non-capacitive, and has no break-in/curing period. Or the good old standard Arctic Silver 5 is still never a bad choice, is cheap, and widely available in physical computer stores instead of just on the internet.

 

Results of my 1st attempt:
CPU and GPU surfaces slightly covered, sink is a shiny copper with a tiny signs of liquid pro on CPU side. My doubts confirmed: not enough paste used.

Did reapply Liquid pro yesterday on both surfaces, used not much but just a bit more of the liquid than the first time and this time on both surfaces.

Results of my 2nd attempt:
Laptop fan started only 5 minutes after OS started, when I opened several firefox windows, explorer windows, etc. Before that it was so nicely quiet!
I expect the temps to drop down more after a curing period, right now they are somewhat the same 50-55 idle for CPU, and 50 for GPU.
Will see how it will work out, maybe I will stick with liquid pro, need to wait for the shin-etsu being shipped anyway.

 

One more quick question, guys:
What are the average temps for a stable lead under gaming for example (what are you getting)?
I am getting about 80-82 on my CPU and up to 81 on GPU after repasting with liquid pro after a few hours of mid-settings gaming.
What temps are considered to be low enough/high/too high for a i7 xps under a load? Thanks

 

Hi all, just a assessment by you people to confirm if its gpu throttling.

Model: 1645 i7-720
Age of laptop: 1 year
CPU idle temp: 70c +-
GPU idle temp: 68c +-
GPU & CPU temp when on mid-setting NFS Hot Pursuit: 80c-87c
Adapter: 130w

CPU NOT throttled after doing some tests on the multiplier monitoring. It was on x15-x17 when playing the game

Here's where I'm not quite sure. Since day one, my computer crashes randomly with fuzzy screen and diff colors. I have to restart and it says that it suffered from a fatal error. It has been a year. Doesnt crash when doing graphic intensive stuff. Only normal stuff such as watching videos and stuff.

I reformatted the whole PC (including deleting the recovery partition) yesterday. So far, it has crash BUT when I was starting up Hot Pursuit just now, my whole PC shut itself down. This has happened numerous times BEFORE I did the reformat too.

When I'm in a race in NFS, my fps drops significantly and stuttering. This, is where I suspect, like everyone else here, is a GPU throttling issue.

What I'm unsure of is whether or not my crashing and BSODs previously is related to this GPU heat issue, or something more? This is because whenever they crashed, i wasnt doing anything graphic intensive. Just playing videos etc.

Nevertheless, I'm buying a AS5 to change the thermal paste to end at LEAST half of the problem with my XPS.

Your kind opinions are very much appreciated.

orenzai

UPDATE: I just downgraded my BIOS from A013 to A09 and true enough, my GPU throttling was gone. When I fire up NFS now, my GPU temp hit 90c +- and it doesnt get THAT laggy at 1920x1080. Turned on Fraps and managed to clock a 15fps constant. That, to me is still not good enough. :S Is this still GPU throttling?

 

orenzai
Looks like your PC shut down after the temps reached certain extremely high values. I strongly recommend you to do something, in case you want to keep your laptop alive for a while, imo.
I think that ~84 C is a red line before throttling comes in, temps above are more likely to be critical for a laptop hardware.
My suggestions: repaste, clean the fans (heatsink), remove dust filters, buy a laptop cooling pad.

 

Also your idle temps are VERY high, maybe the fan/heatsink are too dirty to draw the heat off.

 

OK I just replaced my thermal paste with MX-4 for my GPU and CPU. Indeed, Dell did a very sloppy job in applying them. There were tonnes of excess thermal paste overflowing from the chip. I also cleaned the very dirty heat sink.

Yes, I've noticed an improvement in temperature. Approx 5-10c decrease during idle and also a 5c decrease during load.

Here are my stats of when I'm playing NFS:HP. It's fps improved by approx. 5fps after changing the thermal paste. What I was wondering is that is my 1645 supposed to only get 20+fps while playing a 1 year old game? It seems to be under-performing.

Please have a look to see if its normal. Thanks very much for helping.

 

don't know about the game, depending on the video settings you have set (try other 3d games). I suggest you to disable any anisotropic filtering and AA settings. Also things like dynamic shadows (which you won't generally notice while gamplay), etc.

Temps are better, but still kinda high.
Reapply the paste again, do it right now, apply as little as possible (as on the video) and make sure to clean the heatsink well (use 99% alcohol and a brush). Removing the dust filter will also do a good job in temp drop.

 

Ok I'll reapply the paste to see if I can yeild better results. By the way, the fps log on my previous post is with all details settings OFF incuding antistropic. Only thing is that it's running on 1920x1080. I'm currently finding for Black Ops to do a benchmark on that game as suggested.

If all goes well, what range of temps should I be getting for my CPU and GPU? Also, now that I've downgraded it to A09, the GPU managed to go beyond 84c (suggesting that throttling is absent), should I upgrade it back to A13? Or just let it go hotter w/o throttling?

GogolMogol, we can contact through email if I'm kinda spamming this thread. I just wanna solve the problems and play a decent game

Thanks
Orenzai

 

orenzai
You can find email address in my profile, I think this is not off the topic, some users might find this helpful.

I am on A13 right now.

That is weird with NFS, I don't have it, can you install a game based on a HL2 source engine: half-life 2 series, team fortress 2, left4dead 1-2, portal 1-2, cs:source, etc. Team fortress 2 is a free game on steam btw. Install it and we will be able to compare performance Team Fortress 2 on Steam
My laptop can run any source engine game on 1080p max settings, max shaders with x4 samples AA and anisotropic filtering. The fps are 40+ without any overclocking. There is a video stress test feature in any source engine game.

Also I played resident evil 5, far cry 2 - 1080p and every settings on max (without AA), amnesia on 1080p everything max and + filtering.

 

Wow, I'm pretty sure there IS something wrong with my system. I just reapplied the paste. Re-run NFS and got temps of about 77 and below during full load. My idle is still hovering around 50-55. FPS was 25 and even on 1280x720, I only manage to get about 33FPS.

I installed COD Black Ops. At full res w/o filters, I only got 20FPS++ this will be fine except for the fact that the FPS drops to 5 whenever it changes scenes and when I run. I remember seeing my friend play on his studio 16 without any noticable lag.

Oh and I upgraded it back to A13. I suppose that because GPU throttling starts at 84c, now that thermal paste is changed and temps don go beyond 80+ so its ok.

What could be the problem Bear in mind that this a fresh install too.

Thanks

 

And did you test it in 3DMark 2006?

Maybe it's not the best benchmark but with simmilar configuration it can be good to compare the results.


And about the dust filters - is it possible to put them back after removing? (I'm asking because I'm thinking about changing XPS 1645 for L702x in future).

 

With a little glue and some careful hands, it should be possible. Don't lose the filters though, otherwise as you know, putting them back would be impossible. .

 

Congratulations with successful repaste!
If you mean the problem with FPS - i don't know, try any other game that I can compare my results with.

 

Hi,

I'm thinking about reapplying the paste on my XPS 1645.
What paste would you guys recommend?
I can't use my laptop now in summer as it gets SO hot it shuts itself down to prevent damage (105c+ GPU).

I've already removed the dust filter and cleaned the fan from dust to no avail

 

I think I would just use warranty in that case. Let DELL worry about this, especially that changing the past can make it harder to compain later.

New series - L502x/702x - altough still not perfect in terms of cooling and temperatures, seem to be noticable better in these areas. Maybe they would offer you exchange for new model?

 

I only had 1 year warranty... it's 1.5 years old now :

 

So... I took the plunge and did a repaste today. It was only a matter of time before I had to do it, because not knowing better I unscrewed the heatsink a while back to clean out the bottom of the fan.

It was actually a lot easier than I expected... the only hard part for me was making the paste come out from the tube in a nice line. I actually had to do mine twice because on my first application I didn't put enough paste on the right side of the die, which was causing my 4th core to be ~6 degrees hotter than the others.

So far... idle temps are around 3-5 lower and load temps about 4-5 lower. I'll see how it goes after the break-in period.

 

Ok since my GPU is hitting 108c i need to really need to do this.
I have 2 questions:
1) Is 3.5grams of AS5 enough for both CPU & GPU?
2) Do you recommend also changing the chip-paste (like mentioned before)

Thanks

 

Thats a very high temperature!
1) will be much more than enough
2) both cpu and gpu (heatsink covers them both)
Also remove the dust filter and get a laptop cooling pad if you game a lot

 

Thanks

I meant this
http://forum.notebookreview.com/7300118-post131.html

 

That's not part of my 1645 with i7 720QM and 4670.

 

Hmkay..
Anyway my local PC shop only has coolermaster paste. Should I go for it or order arctic silver 5?

 

I've ordered coollaboratory liquid pro online and do not regret it. Try also looking for a shin-etsu paste also a very efficient one.

 

The shin-etsu is hardly available in my country.. I can get cooler master right in my street or wait 1 day and order arctic silver 5..

edit: should I get the arctic clean or will cleaning alcohol suffice? I can get arctic silver for 8 euro including shipment or silver+ arcticleaner set for 19 euro..... can't decide

 

So.. since my XPS 1645 was overheating so much it would easily hit 108c+ if it didn't downclock the GPU, I decided to buy some AS5.
I received the AS5 today and started immediately.

Opening the laptop and removing the WLAN cable and FAN cable was pretty straight forward and within 10 minutes I had uncovered my CPU and GPU. I was pretty shocked.

Both the GPU and CPU hardly had any paste on them as most of it was pushed outwards and the whole area around the chip was covered with crappy paste:




Also, the cooling-fins had collected MAYOR amounts of dust. I could almost use it to make a pair of socks.



Well, it was pretty clear why my laptop had no difficulty in reaching 100c+ temperatures withing minutes.

Anyway, cleaned the chips using arctic cleaner and arctic purifier (only €6)



Much better! Then applied AS5 using the spread-method. I used a credit card to try get the paste all over the chip but this took some practice. At first my credit card would just make small cuts in the paste rather than smearing it. I needed to use some more paste to get it done. Reattaching all the stuff was easy too. In 5min my XPS was ready again.

After reading about the 200 hour break-in period and being not sure about my spreading skills I didn't expect much.. but all I can say is WOW!!!!
I'll just show you the difference, made some nice graphs for you . (blue is before, other is after AS5)
First, idle temps. Didn't expect it to change since I heard AS5 will really make the difference under load. Well:




I then tried Team Fortress 2. Before, I needed to play on low settings because my GPU would reach 100c otherwise.




Finally, Portal 2. The reason I decided to get AS5. It would play fine for 1min, but then my GPU would hit 101c and force itself to 0.9v and 300/550 mhz causing unplayable FPS (as you can see in the GPU-graph). I even tried to find a middle-way by downclocking to 500/650 mhz but because it went back to default voltage (1.2v) it would reach 108c and force-shutdown.




A whopping 30c less on the CPU and 35c on the GPU!!
I know it was also because of the dust, but still.

Overall, very satisfied and definitely worth the money/effort . I'm just afraid that the cooling-fins will clog up with dust again soon. Any tips?

 

Well, looking at your notebook before (espiecially dust and amount of previous past) I'm amazed it didn't burned

 

It would have if the XPS didn't have a insta-shut-down-protection at 108c

I'm curious whether temps will drop even more after the break-in period

 

Whoohoo I can even play games with the screen UP!

 

Do a maintenance every 2 or 3 months to clean the dust

 

Enjoy it...that dust clod was insane! Never seen so much dust come out of laptop. Were you building a monument to "dust" inside your laptop or something? Haha. That alone could have contributed to most of your overheating issues. I do like the graphs showing the before and after. Oh and by the way your laptop says "Thank You" .

 

After almost one year of using the laptop (XPS 1645) I can barely see any dust in mine after I open it. I wonder in what condition this one (from previous posts) was used to get so dusty.

 

Problem is I can't reach the between the fan and cooling-fins without removing the heatsink again . I'm now trying to NOT put my XPS on my bed or couch without something under it

I don't know it's not like I live in a basement or something. I think it's because it let it suck dust from my bed for some months (watched TVshows etc)

 

hey guys, i have a studio xps 1647, it was actually a replacement to a xps17 which after having 3 motherboard replacements from dell and sening a stroppy email to the dell boarrd of directors they agreed to replace it with my studio machine.

the last few weeks my laptops fans have been on overdrive , constant blueescreening and running really really hot, fanspeed reports gpu and cpu running at over 70 degrees and im not comfortable with whats happening. i called dell support today who gave the usual we need to replace the motherboard rubbish they were giving with my old machine which i dont think is the solution.

this is more just sanity checking as i am pretty certain this is the fix for it but can somebody just confirm this for me or if somebody had the same problem as me and this fixed it. i know i hammer the laptop when using it and it getting a time when its turned off is like it having a holiday to disney world lol.

any input to this much apreciated

steve

 

Well..how hot does it actually get? 70c idle is on the hot side, but no reason for it to BSOD. My 1645 does 100c easy without BSODing.

I'd try to remove dust first (open it up)