In Praise of Noctua NT-H2 (No, I'm not a paid shill) - Saved a WCG Laptop Compute Node

Per the title -

I have an ancient, 2011-vintage Toshiba Satellite L755-S5258 laptop (intel HM65 chipset) that I bought new back in May of 2011. It came with a decent Sandy Bridge i5-2410M dual core/4 thread CPU (35W TDP), 4GB of slow CL11 DDR3-1333 RAM, and a very sluggish HGST 5400 500GB HDD spinning rust drive. Windows 7 x64 Home. No discrete gfx, just the intel HD3000 IGP. 65W AC adapter.

About 5 months ago I upgraded this laptop with a killer Sandy Bridge i7-2760QM quad core/8 thread CPU (45W TDP), along with 16GB of CL9 DDR3-1600 RAM, and a Western Digital WD Blue 3-D Nand 500 GB SATA3 SSD. I replaced the OEM CPU paste with Arctic Silver 5 paste (using thin line across the middle of the long side of the die), and went with a new 180W universal AC charger. I got the i7-2760QM CPU off eBay for $72 USD.

The laptop runs with these upgrades perfectly, almost like OEM factory configuration, except - as expected - the TDP/temps are right at a razor thin margin (35W TDP design, but with a 45W TDP CPU).

OS is Ubuntu 20.04 LTS generic x86_64.

Temps under heavy load with the BOINC World Community Grid (WCG) Cancer genome project (running 24/7) always hovered around 80°C - 88°C across all cores. I wasn't comfortable with that, so after doing some research, I bought some Noctua NT-H2 CPU thermal paste off Amazon and applied it (same thin line application).


Now under the full WCG load, after 72 hours straight, the max temps across all 4 cores/8threads has never gone above 72° - 80°C. That is a full 8° drop - huge.

Flawless. Victory.

WCG is allocated with 100% cores, at 100% duty cycle, 24/7/365.

I realize that laptops were not designed for this kind of severe abuse, but somehow this system seems to thrive on it.

Here's how this system performs under Geekbench 5:

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/1985137

That score places my i7-2760QM CPU in this laptop in direct competition with 3rd Gen Ivy Bridge i7-3630QM CPUs and even the 4th Gen Haswell i7-4712HQ CPUs.

By the way, the 6 month old application of Arctic Silver 5 paste came off the CPU all gunked up, dry and gummy.

Anyway, put me down as a full-on Noctua NT-H2 fanboi. Again, I need to stress that I'm not getting paid a red cent from Noctua or its parent companies or affiliates.

- Trev