XPS 15 Repaste, step-by-step and temps

Lets hope things cool down by the minute!!

 

Good News !!!
Maybe at this point you are the fastest on the XPS 15 assembling/disassembling contest.

We anxiously wait for your findings.

Txs and good luck with your exams !!

Lest keep an eye on the thermal compound IC Diamond 7 Carat it seems that it is better than AS5 and MX-3, it is made by diamond powder.
When I receive my notebook sure I'm going to try it.

 

Surfing the net and listening to iTunes on my desk in a 72 F room after applying Liquid Ultra.

No real world stress tests done and won't be for a couple weeks as I'm leaving town now that finals are done.

 

Just played some Fallout: New Vegas at 1600x900 with everything on high for about 30 minutes.
Monitored temps with AIDA64 on my Logitech G15 LCD while gaming the whole time, max GPU temp was 75 C, and max CPU temp was 74 C, never seen temps this low while 3D gaming.
New Vegas isn't as demanding as new games like BF:BC2 or Black Ops, so I'm not sure where those temps will be, but these temps are encouraging.

Idle temps are about the same as AS5 with the Liquid Ultra, but load temps so far seem lower.

So for now I'm with mrl0ser in recommending Coollabs Liquid Ultra over the other compounds, I paid $19 shipped for it from FrozenCPU, they got it here really quick.

 

The Video on Coollabs website on how to apply Liquid Ultra , is painful to watch ..

Can't find anywhere in canada that sells the stuff ..
To use the lowest shipping available to Canada then it costs from FrozenCPU.. bummer ..

Will prob just go with Arctic Silver.

M

 

You might want to be careful with the ICD 7 though as if you are not VERY careful with it it will scratch the snot out of the die on your CPU/GPU. The one thermal paste that I never read anyone mention that I've used on a lot of systems with AMAZING results is Tuniq TX-4 worth a shot if no one else has tried it. On my XPS 14 I'm running TX-4 and have never broke the 70's even on Furmark.

 

Qestion: does repasting void the warranty?

 

As long as you don't damage anything it doesn't it's a you break it you don't have warranty on it theory. If you don't break anything on these they don't void the warranty and there's no way for them to even check if you did the paste if you do it right.

 

Cool, thanks for the quick reply. I was wondering as I read in another topic that it did.

I'm getting the XPS 17 and plan to do a repaste job as well on it at some point.

 

Thank you I sow scratches caused by ICD7 in other forums as well, it seems that it has its cons, thank you !!!
I'm going to consider arctic mx-3 is the best I can get here in our market.

If your CPU or GPU or system board, fails or is fried for any reason, and it requires the exchange, and the thermal paste applied during the repaste (generally gray, or metallic "liquid ultra") is different than the cheap original white thermal paste, sure is going to be noted by the technician. (people without any skill can notice that).
DaneGRClose what is your thought about this situation?

 

Honestly Dell doesn't pay that close of attention. I've had to do a few system exchanges and gpu/cpu exchanges with all of the Alienware's I've owned and they couldn't care less. Alienware's techs are better than Dell's techs at finding things and I've never once had it mentioned. Now if they open it up and find 3 oz of the stuff and it's in places it shouldn't be you'll have a problem, but as long as it's a good paste job they don't care. I had one of Alienware/Dell's lead engineers openly admit to the fact that the paste they use is pure crap and I was doing a favor to them by applying TX-4 as it would make the part last longer lol. I would say the top 4 would be: OCZ Freeze, MX-4, TX-4, MX-3.

ICD 7 is probably right up there with those 4 but the major con is it can cause a lot of damage due to scratching of the part, most people aren't good enough at pasting to apply a dab and let it spread itself without air pockets so spreading with a card or finger causes scratching. The cost and possible damage factor of ICD 7 makes it a bad choice IMO.

 

Don't forget Liquid Ultra.
I am getting better temps in my XPS 15 with Liquid Ultra than I got with AS5, and another user is getting better temps in his XPS 15 with Liquid Ultra than with his MX-3.

It works great in this system with a very imperfect copper heatsink.

 

Got an XPS 15 (i7 740 with Nvidia 435 GPU)
Are these temps bordering on risky? Taken at room temp (23c, 73.4f) while playing NFS Hot Pursuit for 20mins.

Idle Temps while browsing are CPU - high 50's, GPU - high 40's

Is redoing the cpu and gpu thermal compund the only way to reduce these?

 

Devastator:

Your temperatures were the same as mine before repasting when I played Bad Company 2 or ran Prime95/Furmark. Post repaste with Arctic MX-4 dropped the CPU temperatures to 77C maximum, GPU remained the same (I will attempt a re-paste again today).

 

Devastator yours are similar to what I had before repasting.
I repasted originally with AS5 and the max temps were still high.
After repasting with Liquid Ultra I haven't seen a max temp above 82 or so.

 

Could you post your HWMonitor screen after 20-30mins of gameplay.
How difficult is it to change the thermal compound for a novice?

Any risks or things to watch out for with using Liquid Ultra?
Would you definately recommend it rather than using AS5? (bearing in mind novice status)

 

Read the whole thread and you can answer for yourself if it is within your capacity to do it without damaging your computer.

There are some screenshots somewhere in there with temps as well.
Liquid Ultra is much better on the XPS 15 than AS5.

 

Makes me wonder, why don't laptop manufactures just use the good paste to begin with?

 

Saves them money in the long run considering the bulk they buy it in and the average computer buyer doesn't care or know any better. Let alone know what thermal paste is or even does.

- Dan

 

I paid like $13 for 1.5cc of Liquid Ultra. Stuff is expensive with its mostly metal components, vs cheap white paste that probably costs next to nothing to manufacture.

 

More fun screenshots:
Applied the Liquid Ultra over a week ago, and today my parents got me a Targus 17" Chillmat cooler for the laptop.
I took the 9-cell out of the laptop while on it (otherwise it is at a ridiculous 45 degree angle), so the XPS 15 is flush with the Chillmat surface.
Ambient temp is 72 F during all of this.

Idle temps with fans on:


After playing Civilization V for about 45 minutes on the Chillmat with fans on, max temp on i7 is 76 and 435m is 77, not bad. This is actually amazing, considering max GPU temp before applying Liquid Ultra and adding the Chillmat was 96 C before fan kicked in on high, and during gaming it hovered in high 80s with fan on high. These two interventions gave me a max temp drop of 19 C!


30 minutes of encoding video with Handbrake with Chillmat fans on:

 

Hey sprtnbsblplya, can you confirm that after re-pasting with AS5 the GPU max temperature hits 96C?

I am wondering what the temperatures are with the Liquid Ultra without the cooling pad on BF-BC2...after two re-pastes with MX-4 the GPU continues to sit at 96C. I also have a suspicion it throttles itself to prevent it from exceeding 96C...

 

Honestly that sounds like a bad paste job drofpwnology, did you also replace the tim/pads on the vram or just the core? If you end up with one miniscule bubble in that paste it will cause your temps to be 10+ degrees higher than what they could be. And I don't know if Dell decided to put pads or anything on the vram in the 15, but you need to stick some high quality pads or paste on the vram(pads or paste depends on what it responds best to) in order to get ideal temps as well.

 

Yes, the GPU did hit 96 C max temps with AS5, theres screenshots buried in here.
After repasting with Liquid Ultra I haven't gone above low 80s.

 

Thanks for the pads suggestion. I don't think it was a bad-repaste as I did it twice. On the second time, I confirmed the application was sound. I will purchase some thermal pads and do it again a third time...this is probably what is causing high temperatures.

Any suggestions for good thermal pads for delivery to Vancouver, Canada? D:

 

frozencpu.com may deliver to you as they are in New York, one question for you did you have any pads or paste of any kind on your vram from the factory?

 

The XPS 15 comes with thermal pads for the vRAM already, you shouldn't have removed them.
If you don't recall removing them, then they are still on there.
I have no complaints with the stock RAM thermal pads, the paste is where the problem lies.

 

That's good to hear, the XPS 14 I have had no pads whatsoever and the heatsink doesn't even fully cover the one bank of VRAM. Stock pads should be alright so long as you don't touch them, mess them up, or do very heavy clocks on the vram. I still couldn't believe it when I had absolutely nothing on the VRAM in mine

 

on a similar note to the repaste, has anyone removed the stupid middle fan grille on their XPS15?

its got a tiny little inlet to begin with and then beyond the chassis slots it has that tiny grille restricting flow even more.. I wonder if we could lower temps without the hassle of repasting?

 

Quick Question.. How exactly do you remove the palm rest lol.. I took the battery, the one screw, and undid the hooks but when i flip it back over, do i just pull from the power button... or is there an additional latch somewhere else?

The separation at the top is barely there...

 

You have to really punch the tabs. Once the screw is taken out and the tabs have been punched the top of the palm rest will come open a bit, the first two times I had to do it were a bit hard as I had to get the tabs pressed pretty hard to get some seperation.

 

Thanks for the guide, I followed it when I was doing my repaste and installed my SSD. Could you update the link to the service manual as the one you have doesn't work.

The one at the top of this guide works fine though:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/dell-xps-studio-xps/538471-change-thermal-paste-xps-15-a.html

 

Just ran some gaming tests on the 435m OC'ed at 760 core & 920 memory (up from 650 core & 800 memory at stock clocks).
Played Fallout New Vegas for hours this afternoon on these settings.
Max GPU temp is 81 C, max CPU temp is 80 C. Ambient temps were 72 F. Most of the time GPU temps hovered around 74-76 C, and CPU temps hovered around 70-72 C.
I monitor the temps & frequencies in-game on my Logitech G15 game panel with AIDA64 app running on the game panel.

 

Hmm, temps seem to be getting higher than I originally noticed



Do you think it's worth repasting at those temps? 79 seems high for an i5 in 3dmark06

I've noticed a couple of you are using Liquid Ultra. Are you not concerned about the inability to easily remove the paste?

 

That is entirely up to you. I did the paste job and enjoyed it as I like to tinker. If it were my machine I would do it and see what happens with superior compounds and see how low I could get it, but thats just me, I can't leave good enough alone.
79 C isn't a low temp, but its not high either, if you're unfamiliar with computer guts it probably isnt worth it. But if you know your way around and have some experience, why not?

Not concerned at all about being able to remove it. Liquid Ultra rocks, gives me great temps.

 

Why does my nvidia control panel looks so simple compared to yours?! You seem to have more options!

 

nVidia System Tools
You need this bit of software from nVidia to OC.

 

Hello there, noob here!

I just got my lappy and was intrigued by this thread. Can I OC my base i5 and nvidia card? And will I benefit in any way with this repaste?

 

Your Nvidia card can be OC'd but unless someone finds a way to get them to work with SetFSB the i5 can't be changed. If done right a repaste almost always gets you lower temps, it all depends on your know how with repasting.

 

Hmm, interesting. So what will OC'ing my nvidia card do to performance? I intend using this pc for premiere cs5...

 

I can't say for sure, I know that CS5 is supposed to take advantage of the CUDA cores but I don't know for sure if OCing benefits that in any way. Now in GPU intensive games it will definitely boost the performance.

 

I can confirm that there is little to no performance gain from overclocking GF108 architecture (GeForce GT 415M - 435M). In fact, the card provides very little hardware acceleration in CS5 and especially in all Autodesk products.

 

So after using the new repasted XPS 15 I can confirm that the excess fan noise has something to do with Flash. For some reason when surfing the Internet my fans go to medium or fast. This doesn't happen when I'm not using the Internet. Right now Firefox works best as I'm able to cancel the flash plugin container and my fans go back to basics instantly. Damn you Adobe.

 

hello. most interesting discussion and i will definitely try it out in my xps 15 / i7 very soon.

one question: did anyone of you try to use "Arctic Silver Ceramique" instead of AS5?

There is an interesting thread in another forum about the differences:
Overclockers Forums - View Single Post - Artic Ceramique, 6C less under load?

-) maybe with the rough surface of the xps15-heatsink the ceramique paste would perform better.
-) and as noted in the article, as5 is delivering top performance after 200 hours "break-in" phase. so even with 12h/day you had to use it for 16 days until reaching top cooling performance with as5

maybe i'll give ceramique a try in the next weeks...

edit:
after digging in some more recent reviews i found that arctic silver is no longer the leading paste and decided to order "gelid extreme"
http://www.gelidsolutions.com/products/index.php?lid=2&cid=16&id=41

ordering means that i'll do it so will take temperatures before and after the tries... wish me luck lol

br

 

I just recently got the XPS 15 and decided to do the re-pasting. I took it into a shop, because I didn't think I could do it myself. They called and said it was all done, but they said they also removed the thermal pads and used the Liquid Ultra on the chips they were covering. Should I be worried or it should be ok? Thanks.

 

hey great guide but before i start my repasting job, i just have one question.
exactly where are the screws located on the optical drive?
thanks in advance

 

So do we have a response on which paste is the most efficient for the XPS 15? It's ofcourse hard to measure properly as alot of variables factor in when comparing between systems (even similar), but a rough measure?

In the forums I've seen:
- Arctic Silver
- Liquid Ultra thermal compound (which sprtnbsblplya prefered over Arctic)
- G751 Shin-Etsu Thermal Paste

Im asking because im planning to repaste when I get my system (if necessary, but usually is).

Link to benchmark of +40 thermal compounds (from 2009)
http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.p...k=view&id=150&Itemid=62&limit=1&limitstart=12

 

Also wondering the same as you, lindstroem. If no one can confirm anything I will go for the Liquid Ultra.

 

Go for Liquid Ultra, you won't regret it.
Back when I had time to game on it temps rarely went over 80 C on stuff like New Vegas and Civilization V.
Prior to Liquid Ultra temps went over 90 C.

Also, having either the extended battery to lift up the rear of the lappy or a cooling pad is also crucial to give the best possible airflow.

 

Decided, Ill start looking for a company selling the liquid ultra in Sweden.

As for airflow, I use half a rubber (about 0,7cm high) on each side of the back of the computer to increase airflow I have a Zalman 2000 but I don't like how raised the computer gets.