HP ZBook 17 G1/G2 quick and dirty heatsink mod

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DL_X8WRdmVMtsV_tTVfw9xlrGGZCpNw8/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DCpv08T_zWnjUAacLIDMvjzavteJe37x/view?usp=sharing

So I've got a ZBook 17 G1 with a rather hot 4810mq (my upgrade, the laptop had a 4700mq when I bought it). The heatsink handles the stock 48W... barely, in typical HP fashion. At stock voltage the processor will sit around 92-94 degrees under full load. Not great, not terrible.

This 4810mq isn't too undervolt friendly, -76mV is all I could get out of it, but I did manage to increase the TDP to 51W.

Undervolted at 51W it was working at around 88-90 degrees under full load (TSBench 16 threads) but it would climb to 96-98 and even throttle with prime95, sadly.

The ZBook 17 G2 has a better dual pipe heatsink for quad core processors - I guess HP wisened up (or many people complained ). I really need to buy one, but you know, we're all drunk on Corona these days.

So, the mod itself is simple: I just added a piece of copper to connect the CPU heatsink to the fan enclosure, which is made out of metal and has the GPU heatpipes soldered to it - that means it's directly cooled by the GPU heatsink54.

The GPU, by the way, never goes above 65 degrees, which is impressive. Sadly it cannot be overclocked beyond 135 MHz - HP at it again with their ridiculous vBIOS setup (it's stored inside the system BIOS and cannot be modified to allow for more overclocking).

So, I thought why not bridge the CPU heatsink to the fan enclosure, it should draw away extra heat.

And it does - the mod works wonderfully. Took me 3 hours to make, it looks sort of dodgy but it works fine

At my undervolt and 51W TDP, the temperature now never goes above 82 degrees, so that's a 6 degrees drop in max temperature.

I raised the TDP to 55W for more performance and it still sits nicely at 86 degrees under the TSBench 16 threads test (I ran 3x Realbench benchmarks, 15 minutes of prime95 to heat it up).

See the pictures, it's pretty self-explanatory. The hardest part is drilling the hole so the screw can get through and bending it because the CPU heatsink sits a bit lower. I polished the underside with abrasive paper, got it to an almost mirror finish. The top side doesn't matter so I left it as it was. The sheet of copper I had was some leftover scrap, so I had to hammer it straight :/

I also added a few trash thermal pads on top so the keyboard pushes it down, and a few pads between the top cover and the CPU heatsink so it has better contact with the die.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DL_X8WRdmVMtsV_tTVfw9xlrGGZCpNw8/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DCpv08T_zWnjUAacLIDMvjzavteJe37x/view?usp=sharing

I can't figure out how to upload pictures here (writing this on my phone) so here's the Google links.