XPS 13 9343 CPU repaste

Hey guys,
maybe some of you are interested in my repasting procedure. Even though I was having zero issues with fan behavior, I decided to do it anyway.

Everyhting I needed was a small torx and philips screwdriver, some pry tools (still had those from a cheap smartphone repair kit i bought off ebay for about 5 bucks), an arcticlean cleaning kit and arctic mx-4 which I chose because of its durability, viscosity and good thermal conductivity.

Unscrew all the torx screws around the bottom and the philips head screw behind the bottom door.

Here's how the bottom cover is clipped onto the chassis. First time removing it is pretty hard, take care of the speakers when you cut around the sides with your prying tool. When you open it the second time its much easier. Dont panic if you break a clip, which is actually very easy to do, but it will hold perfectly tight if you lose one clip or two. My technician who initially changed my screen broke off 3 of them.





Bottom cover removed. Unscrew the heat sink which is held by 4 philips head screws. You have to pull on the heatsink a bit because its stuck to the old thermal grease/cement

Factory paste job by dell. Yuck!



Now the cleaning solution. Be careful not to put too much of it on the CPU because the chip is very small and the solution might drip onto you motherboard.

Now shiny.



This is too much paste! Even though it looks like a lot, it really isnt, its just the chip which is very tiny. Havent seen a 14 nm chip before. But its too much anyway. With this amount my temperatures were worse than with the factory job. I didnt took a picture when I did it a second time but took an example of the perfect amount which you can find at the end of my post.

Press it down and screw the screws handtight. Put the backplate on again and redo all your screws. Done



Now heres my example of the perfect amount of thermal grease. Push out a tiny bit of paste.

.. then just put a dot on every chip like this. Rice grain method won't work because it will be too much.


I really didnt measure my temps before and after but all I can say is that temps didnt really decreased (tested with prime95). Just the fan dropped from 100 to about 80 percent after a while under full load. It will manage the fan speed to keep the temperatures at about 90 degrees.

Hope you liked, feel free to ask questions

Eric

 

Was the heatsink connected to the fan in any way or di you just unscrew the four screws and lift it off?

 

No, you just lift it off by grabbing the sides of the plate that lays on the CPU, NOT the pipes.