Notebook-overheat maybe redoing heatsink and thermal paste

Have a friend with a laptop that could be experiencing heat problems. It's a Tiny laptop and every now and again (twice in past week) it turns off, not a nice shuts itself down but a straight and complete off, sometimes it manages a beepy scream but this all happens in a split second.

old post of mine http://technologyvault.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,1215.0.html

Anyway all fans are ok and fluff free as far as i can see, not sure what motherboard is being used, i know it doesn't have any temp sensors so can't check that (tried hwmonitor, speedfan, motherboard monitor) i can get a hd temp - ideling at 33 most so far is 45.

Can't think of much else to do apart from maybe check the cpu/thermal grease/heatsink combo. Maybe the thermal grease hasn't been applied very well (have you seen those pics of apple notebooks with compound everywhere but the cpu die !!) or perhaps it was done with a not very efficient compound. I have some arctic silver 5 so i thought it might be an idea to redo the compound.
Anyway being the sort of guy who likes all the info at hand before he begins - i've done desktop cpus loads of times but never a laptop. The manual for the laptop gives vague info about this so i was wondering if anybody had any info or links that may be of help. I realise that all laptop manufacturers have different implementations of thermal management but hopefully there may be something similar out there. From memory the setup looked something like this

http://www.intel.com/support/processors/mobile/pentium4/sb/cs-007489.htm

Um...any help appeciated...if i'm not 100% sure that i won'y go ahead but i can't think of anything else apart from heating issues and will all fans working ok and being fluff free i can't think of anything else that can be checked.
The hard drive doesn't seem to be overheating, but maybe the memory or graphics card ? Would the graphics card have some sort of heatsink/pipe thing going on ? One that could be checked ?

Heres a hardware report on the lappy if it's any help

http://www.geocities.com/jjbtnc/laptop.txt

One thing i wanted to be clear on is what type of cpu the laptop has - from the report it's a p4 not a pentiumM - would that be the same pentium4 you get in a desktop or can you get a 'mobile pentium4' ? is it possible to tell from the hardware info text file ? does the cpu type make any difference to the method of re-applying the thermal compound/heastsink ? Also got this from an intel identification utility

Intel(R) Processor Identification Utility
Version: 2.8.20060328
Time Stamp: 2006/06/03 11:27:15
Number of processors in system: 1
Current processor: #1
Processor Name: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00E GHz
Type: 0
Family: F
Model: 4
Stepping: 1
Revision: 9
L1 Trace Cache: 12 Kµops
L1 Data Cache: 16 KB
L2 Cache: 1 MB
Packaging: FC-PGA2
Platform Compatibility Guide: 04A
EIST: No
MMX(TM): Yes
SIMD: Yes
SIMD2: Yes
SIMD3: Yes
Enhanced Halt State: No
Execute Disable Bit: No
Hyper-Threading Technology: Yes
Intel(R) Extended Memory 64 Technology: No
Intel(R) Virtualization Technology: No
Expected Processor Frequency: 3.0 GHz
Reported Processor Frequency: 3.0 GHz
Expected System Bus Frequency: 800 MHz
Reported System Bus Frequency: 800 MHz
*************************************************************

Anyway thanks for any help

p.s. i might try and get a couple of photos of the cpu heatsink stuff up if that might help

 

Bit of an update - been googling and found references (although i don't believe everything i read!!) about thermal throttling on p4 cpus and how if it was getting activated then you could be having overheating issues - here's one page i found

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/104/1 need to look at both pages.

and a few choice quotes from that page

" Average users won't know if the Thermal Throttling is activated or not in their computers. If this feature is activated in your PC, it will run slower and also this means that you have an overheating problem in your computer, which has to be solved. "
" Under normal condition, the "Throt" collumn has to be always showing zero. If it happens to be a number different from zero there, this means that the Thermal Throttling feature was activate and your processor has overheating problems. "

So it seems possible that in the abscence of motherboard temp readouts you could check this throttling feature and it could indicate that you have a heating problem. I tried the 2 programs that were mentioned and here are the readouts

http://www.geocities.com/jjbtnc/Throttle.jpg

and

http://www.geocities.com/jjbtnc/journal.txt

the throttling started after aprox 1 1/2 mins and was constantly on after about 2 mins and to seemingly quite high levels. This would indicate that there heating issues going on but then again maybe it's impossible to design a laptop with a p4 cpu, that even when all heat management elements are working at 100% , will not need some throttling - i don't know

any opinions on this ?


Some pics of the heat sink assembly - sorry a bit blurry

http://www.geocities.com/jjbtnc/IMGP0371.JPG

http://www.geocities.com/jjbtnc/IMGP0370.JPG

http://www.geocities.com/jjbtnc/IMGP0369.JPG

i suppose it's just a matter of unscrewing, would be nice to know what it looks like underneath. Going to look around at various manufacturers to see if something similar. The Dell manuals are pretty amazing when it cones to detail.


So really looking for info on whether the throttle info indicates overheating and any tips and guides on removing the heat sink - plus a bit of cpu info would be handy.

Thanks for any help

 

Hi jjbtnc,

Throttling may be connected to heat dissipation. But again I have seen many P3 and P4 that throttle down for no obvious reason. I would check the temp if it is possible with some of the temp programs.

Check my sig, there is link to my notebook. I opened it and there are some pictures of the CPU, heatsink, GPU etc... I used to have a small airpocket in the thermal paste on GPU and it would go up to 120 C in games, but after repairing it it is now around 80. But what also can be true is that if you apply a new Artic Silver or some other paste, you can end up in a worse situatuion. It seems silly but there was actually one guy on this forum having that issue. Heatsink was taking too much heat from the CPU and GPU and that caused lockups because fan or some sensor couldn't handle it. Strange.

Anyway, on my laptop it is very easy to get to the CPU and GPU. Applying thermal paste is also easy. I guess that may make a difference.

So if you continue and do some work, please post, and if you have any experiences with component failures, please check this:
http://www.sail.hr/fmea/fmea.asp - you will see some of the common failures in notebook components that have some nasty effects. I would appreciate your input.

Cheers,

Ivan

 

Cheers for the reply - checking the heatsink and thermal paste is all i can think to do really. The notebook has no temperature monitors so the throttling and occaisional turning off is all i have to go by. Plus does not have any bios options of any note. Tiny (aka Time computers) sometimes have a reputation for skimping on quality so i thought they might have skimped on a quality thermal paste or put it together badly. As you mentioned am a bit worried it could end up worse. I'll post back and give some input when i've given it ago. The removal of the haetsink seems quite straightfoward but i have no idea where the gpu cooling is going to come into play - the manual isn't that detailed.

On the throttling front, with cpu load at full, throtle watch reports throttling starting at about 1 min. After running it for 5 mins the average throtle is 20% with occasional peaks to 75% - seems a lot of throttling starting pretty soon.

Thanks again

 

Also had a lok at the pic http://www.thegamebooks.com/download.php?id=18

I see the cpu has thermal paste but the gpu looks clean - do you only put thermal compound on the cpu and nothing else ?
Also i see the cpu-bottom right, gpu-mid left , but what is the chip mid right surrouned by a black square ?

One other thing - the screws that attach the heatsinks down - they have to be done in the correct order but is it easy to overtighten them or will they only go in/tighten to a set amount ?

 

GPU has something like thermal patch, not paste - like some kind of purple clay. It has also some kind of fibers inside.

heatsink covers both GPU and CPU - I don't know what is the case with your comp.

that chip is the motherboard i915 chipset (north or south bridge) - with a plastic square foil around it and is actually just below the fan, so it is dusty on that pic.

screws can be overtighten, so be careful. CPU screws usually have a small spring around them that makes tightening safer. Be sure that you put ALL screws first and tighten them only a bit, so you are sure that all of them are in their holes, once everything is in place, tighten them all (try opposing screws first) to the end.

Cheers,

Ivan

 

I just finished doing the heatsink cleaning ritual on my Dell D600, a bi-annual process. This time I filmed the procedure for anyone interested:

http://geekswithblogs.net/lorint/archive/2006/06/12/81623.aspx

Hope it helps.